The research project investigates the extent to which mothers and fathers show different parenting behaviours towards boys and girls and the influence of these differences on disruptive behaviour in early childhood. Research to date has focused on differences between families with boys and families with girls.

However, the disadvantage of this approach is that any differences that are identified are not necessarily due to child gender, because these two groups of families may also differ on a host of other characteristics. To solve this problem, Mesman’s ERC-project focuses on differences in parenting towards brothers and sisters within the same families. In addition, these families are compared to families with two same-gender siblings.