Parents are the first source of exposure of societal stereotypes that kids receive, starting from color of their room to toys they play with, what to do and what not to do. Expectations for children's future adult lives, like financial success or future care giving, may lead parents to encourage certain behaviors in children.However, most parental behaviors remain uninfluenced by the gender of the child, including speaking to, playing, teaching, and caretaking.

Family dynamics can especially influence gender specialization. Parents of sons are more likely to express conservative gender role views than parents of daughters, with fathers emphasizing the paternal breadwinning role for males. The effects of parental expectations of gender roles can especially be seen in the role children play in household duties. Girls generally do more housework than boys and the type of housework assigned to children largely depends on gender. Thus, household dynamics further advance gender role expectations on children.

Children's toy preferences are significantly related to parental sex-typing, such as girls playing with dolls and boys participating in sports.While both fathers and mothers encourage traditional gender roles in their children, fathers tend to encourage these roles more frequently than mothers.Parents choose activities that they believe their children will enjoy and value. By choosing their children's activities, parents are directly influencing their gender role views and preferences onto their children and shaping expectations.

The way that parents communicate with their children are different based on children's gender, parents are more willing to express their emotion and use emotional words more frequently toward girls than to boys. Also, when both children have encountered difficulty, girls are encouraged to solve problems based on focusing on internal emotion expression and adjustment while boys are encouraged to deal with external entity problems.

For boys whose father discloses emotions more than the others, boys show a similar level of disclosing emotions with girls,and for the parent who is both emotional expressive, their son will view emotions disclosure as a normal practice rather than attributed it as a female way of acting.