 In addition to fostering essentialist beliefs, generics are also often used to communicate normative statements about social groups, e.g., “boys don’t cry”, “a woman puts family before career”, “friends don’t let friends drive drunk” (see also section 3.2 above). Generics such as these are not intended as descriptions of the facts on the ground, but rather carry a particular normative force; “friends don’t let friends drive drunk” was not introduced as a banal observation about what is in fact the case, but rather was introduced precisely to address the fact that, all too often, people were allowing their friends to drive under the influence. In the context of gender, these normative generics can serve as a concise (and child-friendly) means of communicating and sustaining problematic social norms. Moreover, recent empirical work reflects that very young children may interpret generics as having prescriptive force, even if those generics seems to adults to be only descriptive generalizations (Roberts, Ho and Gelman 2017).