Investigated parents' reactions to a child's voice as a function of sex of parent, and sex of child. Using as a stimulus a child's voice that was ambiguous with respect to sex, 1 group of parents was told they were hearing a boy's voice, another that they were hearing a girl's voice. A pattern of results emerged with fathers showing generally greater permissiveness toward girls than boys for both dependency and aggression, and with mothers showing greater permissiveness toward boys than girls. Parents' sex-role differentiation scores as measured by a questionnaire were also found to relate to their responses to the child's voice, but the expectation that high-differentiation parents would show a stronger tendency to promote stereotyped sex-role behavior in the child was not upheld. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)