Gender-specific toys, clothes, behaviour and music

[ailbhe]

Many of you are familiar with my long-standing rants about the British and how they need to colour-code their babies so that they can tell which sex they are. And how much I dislike pink, too.

I have recently begun to wonder (or possibly to realise) whether Linnea gets away with "worse" behaviour because she looks like a boy. The specific example I'm thinking about is from when we were out in a restaurant with some friends and their daughter, who was wearing a dress and tights - Linnea was wearing something Linnea-ish, which usually means gender-neutral trousers or dungarees. And gender-neutral means "boy" to most people. Anyway, the friends' toddler and Linnea were both running around between courses. Our friends were asked or told to pick their baby up and keep her in her seat - and we were not. Possibly the other baby was behaving more badly than Linnea, but I couldn't see it, myself - they were both running around the pathways at the edge of the restaurant, like a few other children during the course of the evening, and neither of them were yelling (though the one who was incarcerated in a higchair started yelling fairly quickly). The only difference we could see was that Baby A looked like a girl and Linnea looked like a boy.

Similarly, in playgrounds, people admire "his" speed, strength and agility, while cautioning their own daughters not to run or climb.

We wondered about Barbies and toy guns before she was born; I decided (unilaterally, like most decisions about Linnea - they seem to be filed in Rob's brain as "mummy's jobs" along with working out when clothes no longer fit and the weather is cool enough for another layer) that she can have guns and Barbies as gifts from other people if she asks for them. She won't be getting them from us. If she wants guns she can make 'em from bits of stick, and if she wants Barbies she can learn to make her own rib-cracking corsets and file her nipples off with emery boards, but I'm not paying.

(Ask us again in 6 years time - no parenting plan survives contact with the enemy).

I have a nasty suspicion that if she was a boy I'd buy her a Barbie less reluctantly. I am also pretty sure that if she was a boy I'd be less reluctant to dress her in pink. But she does have a pink coat! So I overcame that particular prejudice when confronted with 50 pence-worth of charity-shop washable warmness.

Boys don't sing the same nursery rhymes as girls. I have yet to perform a proper study of which ones the parents of boys sing, but I have heard a mother say that "that's a girl's book" about a book with a nursery rhyme in it. I don't know which rhyme it was though.

Comments

[lovingboth]

Yeah, I had hopes of concealing the existance of the colour pink from Jo Anna for a few years. It didn't work and it is her favourite colour. Her pink raincoat has been fabulous though - it cost about 50p over two years ago and still fits (just not down below her knees any more!)

Someone's gave her a B-toy for her birthday last month. Urgh. She's not getting any from us.

[(Anonymous)]

As a mother of five boys and grandmother of four (soon to be five) girls, I can tell you that whatever you try to do, there IS a difference! The girls WILL want B**bie, not cars and guns! (Although youngest son had a Cabbage Patch doll and proudly pushed 'her' through the streets in the dolls pram bought for him by his eldest brother! We did get some 'looks', but youngest son is Edmund - you remember him? ;-) - so the looks never bothered him!)

In my experience girls will play happily with dolls OR cars and guns, but at the end of the day, they want their dollies, and the boys generally want the guns and cars, whatever you do :-(

And I've come across many people (including daughters in law) who are quite prepared to put their girls in blue, whatever the comments, but would baulk at dressing a boy in pink!

Elaine

[kiya]

Heh. I'm not a girl again. :}

[micheinnz.livejournal.com]

Me neither.

/me waves my antennas at you

[kiya]

I used to have tremendous rows with my brother about who was the legitimate owner of the gold Matchbox car.

Cars, yes. Blocks and construction sets of various sorts, oh hell yes. Stuffed animals, oh yes, and my father wants me to take them out of his house. String, which my parents objected me to tying the furniture up with. I had a doll's house, which was mostly interesting because my mother had a really cool one with designs and building the furniture and everything. When I was young, my-little-ponies. Barbies were given to me by someone or other; they only ever got played with with a friend who actually liked the silly things. Transformers, specifically the ones that were *dinosaurs*. . .

[ailbhe]

Our dolls' house was made by my mother. I got ballet-dancing Sindy, because she had all moving joints so it would be a lot easier for her to climb the hot-water-heater, and it was years before I realised that most of them don't come with jeans, a lumberjack shirt, and a jumper/sweater - she'd handmade them and stitched them to the inside of the box with plastic thread to make them look "real".

Gods I love my mother.

[hobbitbabe.livejournal.com]

My experience differs and is not so clear-cut.

[glitzfrau.livejournal.com]

My experience isn't as clearcut, either. I'm not a mother, and only have experiences from my childhood, but as I recall, I wanted gendered and branded toys - My Little Ponies, Sindys and the like - because of peer pressure from school. At home I played with dolls and climbed trees more or less indifferently.

Ailbhe's description of how society provides clues to even very young children as to what is gender-appropriate behaviour rings very true with me. If parents baulk at dressing a boy in pink, is it any wonder that those boys refuse to associate with pink toys, given that they risk their parents' disapproval for doing so, as well as that of their peers? Children are not born with a "natural" desire for Barbies or guns; they are conditioned to like them in a number of very sophisticated ways through social and television pressure, quite apart from any personal preferencees they might have for one toy or another. (Thinking of one very, very ball-obsessed small boy I know...)

[(Anonymous)]

I have to add that, as well as my personal family experiences, I speak from having spent 20+ years in pre-school education. And as one of the Bra-burning, Equal Rights Generation, I can guarantee we did everything we could to ensure equality of opportunity for the girls and boys in our care. I really wanted the children I taught to lose any so-called 'gender-appropriate' conditioning 'Society' - or their parents! - might be attempting to impose on them. I think we succeeded quite well, witness the fact that two of my sons are their children's Primary Carers while their wives are the main wage-earners, but I still say that I have observed that there are major gender differences which you cannot ignore!

It is now MHO that we should not be trying to do away with those differences; we should be celebrating them, but also fighting as hard as we ever did for the different qualities of each gender to be equally valued!

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

i'm a lot more in favour of valuing the different qualities of each individual regardless of gender.

and i'm with glitzfrau on this -- IMO it's impossible to determine whether there are innate gender differences as long as society works so hard to create them from the time children are born. none of us is an island, and we're influenced by the people around us. even if one pre-school teacher tries zir best to interact with kids without fixed notions of appropriate gender roles, all the other people in society, and of course the kids' parents, will have a strong effect.

[pariyal.livejournal.com]

My girls never wanted Barbies. Normal dolls, and cars, and water pistols, and Legos and more Legos (and still more Legos; they play intricate role-playing games with them, even now that they're ten and almost twelve). As for pink, it doesn't suit N because she's a redhead, and it doesn't suit R because she's sallow, and it does suit M who is a paleish ash-blonde but she doesn't like it; so no. It was R's favourite colour for a while, but she went back to dark blue (which I also dressed her in as a toddler because it looks so good on her) and fire-engine red. M prefers white, N black (but that's probably the early-adolescent gothy phase).

[brooksmoses]

"Even now that they're ten and almost twelve"? I think my brother and I played with Legos until I stopped having time for them due to schoolwork, which was probably around when I was 15 or so. And it was as much a case of not having time, as it was no longer being interested.

Another entertaining thing about Legos was that, when I was talking to the graduate admissions office in MIT's mechanical engineering department, one of the people there made an offhand comment about "and please don't go on in your application essay about how you want to be an engineer because of playing with Legos as a kid; we get so many of those essays."

[kiya]

thastygliax recently posted an essay about use of legos as a gaming tool. I can dig up the URL for you if you fancy.

[brooksmoses]

I would, indeed, be interested. Thanks!

[sierra-le-oli.livejournal.com]

There's no doubt in my mind that society in general allows Linnea to be more active because they think she's a boy. Maybe someone can point to the studies that show girls are encouraged to be much more sedentary than boys from a very young age.

By coincidence, Wingnut and me were discussing how active Linnea was a couple of days ago (this was sparked off by a sexist toy catalogue). We wondered what would happen if she went to school instead of being home educated, if she would become less active or if the early training would hold.

By the way, I heard a lot of very positive comments about Linnea from other party guests, all remarking on how lively and active she was!

[ailbhe]

No doubt at all, eh? I'm still trying to have doubts because it's such a nasty idea. Grr.

Party guests - Aww, *blush*. I was very pleased that they all seemed happy to accept a child at a grown-up party as a human being and not a 'sgusting nuisance. It made for a very comfortable experience, sudden lunges for orange juice and peanuts notwithstanding. And that was an excellent salad. And we've decided what to get you for a housewarming gift now and would like to deliver it this weekend if possible.

I do occasionally think wistfully of a diet of junk food and television, to slow her down. I don't think it would work though.

[pauamma]

Tranks guns. Try them, you'll love them. (Just be sure to shoot yourself, not her. :-) )

[sierra-le-oli.livejournal.com]

It is nasty, isn't it. But there are so many studies showing how boys and girls are treated that it's impossible to ignore: girls being more likely to be praised for being quiet, discrepancies in marking between the sexes, etc. Despite the participating adults swearing up and down that they don't treat boys and girls differently, there it is. And that's one of the most awful things about sexism, it turns us into our own worst enemies.

I'd like to think that I do my best to be impartial w.r.t. children but can I trust myself? Without running myself through some of those tests like the marking one, I'd honestly have to say no.

Rest of the stuff in e-mail. :-)

[ailbhe]

I don't think we can trust ourselves - for example, I would be *more* willing to dress a boy in pink than a girl, which just proves I'm not impartial, even though I would like to be. I don't know how to be impartial without some kind of positive discrimination for traditionally-opposite-sex traits. I compensate by occasionally dressing Linnea in dresses (especially in summer), and I do encourage quiet play, which mostly means reading books or having tea-parties. She's getting a train for Christmas because Rob and I want one.

This world is broken. Partly I want her to be able to deal with it and get whatever she wants anyway, and partly I want her not to have to.

I'm very grateful that my mother raised us to think that girls can do anything they like. She only got two girlie girls out of it, too, and both of those can hike a mountain or wire a plug or hang wallpaper when they need to.

[webhill.livejournal.com]

Well, I don't know Linnea IRL, but I can't imagine she's more active/energetic than my little girl N (age 3). N started going to "school" a couple of months after her 2nd birthday, and is currently attending 3 days a week, plus doing some organized classes (music, gymnastics) on the other two days. Her teachers tell me she is quite active and "advanced" physically, on the playground. She has excellent gross and fine motor skills (she could write her name before her 3rd birthday; she can climb play structures that my 5 yr old has problems with). She was recently taken into the after-school "sports" class one day (I had an appointment and could not pick her up, the teacher felt bad and let her join in to the class even though she wasn't signed up for it) and the teacher told me that she "kicked ass" and was "better" at the skills used in the class than the 4 and 5 yr olds who had been taking the class for the past three months. No one was remotely discouraging, and they basically insisted I sign her up for the class because she loved it that much.

No one has ever suggested that I keep my girls quiet and let the boy run around. As a child, all I heard was "go outside and play, stop sitting on your butt" while my brother was told "go to your room and study." :)

I guess I am coming from a very different place...

[(Anonymous)]

Thinking again about what I wrote, and re-reading what you wrote, I wonder what you mean about the nursery rhymes. I am not aware of having sung different nursery rhymes to my sons (and my one grandson and my Humanist guide-son) from the ones I now sing to my granddaughters! And as far as I am aware, my sons are now singing the nursery rhymes I sang to them to their daughters! (BTW, two of them are 'house-husbands' - yeuch! Excuse the expression! - and Primary Carers for their daughters.)

But I really have to agree that, as you say, "no parenting plan survives contact with the enemy"! ;-D

Elaine

[flybabydizzy.livejournal.com]

I had a boy first, then a girl three years later.
I dressed him in neutral or 'boy' colours, but let his hair grow, as he had such beautiful long blond ringlets. he was mistaken for a girl SO much, no matter what we dressed him in! My daughter was dressed in all sorts of stuff, at first, then refused to wear dresses, but took to pink in a big way for a few years - now wears black, until they invent a darker colour. I tried not to have anything to do with things not being boy/girl. I banned guns totally - first one to come in the house was a cap gun bought as a 6th birthday gift by a new school friend. One Christmas dd was given a huge rag doll which looked like her - ds, then about 5 said, aww, I wish I had a doll just like me - so I made him one, and he was delighted - it lurked in his room til he was about 10, and is safely stashed away as requested.
Barbie? I decided pre kids that Barbie would be banned, and started a Barbie smear campaign as soon as I could - eg, belittling her for being a brainless fashion slave, saying, huh, nobody ever looks like that, etc, when dd was very small, and it WORKED! Someone gave her some, and they were hardly bothered with at all. So go to it, start the anti Barbie campaign as soon as you can!

[the-warwick.livejournal.com]

Good thinking. Time to start dissing Barbie, Disney, Sindy and My little pony.

[ailbhe]

Miss Manners claims it works for junk food too - make disgusted faces at it and refuse to eat it even when you *do* agree to bring your child to McD's or wherever. Then refuse to allow the child to eat really good "junk" food (handmade organic chocolate? homecooked handmade burgers with real chips?) "because they obviously won't appreciate it". I think she has older children in mind though.

[(Anonymous)]

You know, this post has made me think. Roisin is very often taken for a boy, and in general people tend to smile at her and laugh at her antics rather than look disapproving. I've put it down to her being endearing ;-)I'm not rabidly anti-pink (I'm not the rabid type) but we try not to dress her in girly-girl clothes. I don't get upset when people mistake her for a boy - but I find people get upset out of all proportion if they have got your baby's sex wrong. Some of it is just fear of upsetting me, but some of it is sheer horror that they called a GIRL a BOY!

In the park if people think she is a boy they just smile, if they know she is a girl we get a lot of comments like 'oh, isn't she very fearless' [am I imagining the subtle undertone of disapproval often present?]or 'what an adventurous little girl'.

[whirligigwitch.livejournal.com]

Sorry, the above anonymous post was me - I hadn't realised that I wasn't logged in.

[(Anonymous)]

I don't have a girl myself, ;-( but I have two - no, sorry, three - nieces. The oldest is five and a half, and apparently no longer likes pink because "everyone likes pink".... this is something of a relief to her mother who is more rabid than me and sighed a little over her daughter's independent decision that pink was good. (It's also a little bit of a smug moment, having a child think that way...)

This child's brother (age 3) insisted on going to a party as a fairy. They both love their Thomas wooden track and their Sylvanian Families dolls houses.

The middle niece, nearly 2, has an older brother and a mother who likes blue, so though she does have lots of dresses she also wears "boy's clothes" - and her shoes are "boy's shoes" too, apparently (very small child decided this).

The youngest isn't yet one, but her mother doesn't like pink either.

I dressed Christopher in pink babygros when he was little. (Well, they were 50p from the charity shop.) However I must have been influenced by my environment over the last 5 years because I look at old photos and feel a little uneasy, and I didn't use the pink ones for Oliver.

Oddly enough, my *father* bought us a set of pink Winnie-the-Pooh babygros when Christopher was first born. I'm still not quite sure what happened.

I know I have Deliberately sung "I love little pussy" to both my boys because it's always depicted as being told by a girl. ;-) Other than that, I hadn't really thought about gender and nursery rhymes.

LBs

Julie

[sidheag.livejournal.com]

My favourite study - sorry, don't have the reference to hand or time to look it up right now - concerned what parents and others present said to newborn babies *in the delivery room* (sic!) It was radically different, depending on whether the newborn was a boy or a girl, and this could not be accounted for by any actual observable differences between the babies. That conditioning starts so early that there is no hope of knowing whether there are in fact innate differences between boys' and girls' toy preferences etc., or whether it's all conditioning.

I feel a certain relief at having a boy, and a certain guilt about having that relief - it seems to me that the issues are easier in raising boys, but then I wonder whether I should think that. When he was tiny he had several hot pink items of clothing, but now I no longer dare dress him in pink. I encourage him to imitate me doing household tasks; but I'm aware that this is normally imitating me, not DH, because I do most of them! He won't get guns or barbies from us; if he had any interest in any of the stuffed animals he has, I might be more inclined to buy him a doll, but he hasn't. He loves cars and vehicles of all kinds. I've certainly encountered generalisations about what "the boys" and "the girls" like doing from the staff at his nursery, so even if I'm not giving him the gender stereotypes - and I'm sure I am, actually - he's getting them from there anyway. I think all I hope to do now is to make him aware that they *are* stereotypes, not rules.

[sidheag.livejournal.com]

PS Wouldn't the girl's nursery rhyme book simply have been a book containing one nursery rhyme whose protagonist was female? Boys read books about boys, girls read books about girls... of course!

[ailbhe]

The obstetrician was the one who told us to check whether Linnea was a boy or a girl - Rob and I were busy touching her as she lay on me and saying "That's my baby, do you see my baby?!" and so on. It took Rob several hours before he changed from "it" to "she" when referring to her; I changed almost immediately.

"When I was born, they looked at me and said What a good boy what a smart boy what a strong boy. And when you were born, they looked at you and said What a good girl what a smart girl what a pretty girl." - Bare Naked Ladies

(And re the nursery rhyme - it could easily have been a rhyme with a girl in rather than a rhyme with a boy in, you're right.)

[webhill.livejournal.com]

hehe. I think any place where a baby is born is a "delivery room."

[random-c.livejournal.com]

I suspect people *tried* to make me girlie... I mean *dad* wouldn't have, but Dad wasn't the main person around me by a long stretch. The various relations who would be sending me gifts as a litlun learned very quickly that dolls were not of much interest, though I did have Barbie, because someone bought me one and my friend Trevor liked playing with them, and I wanted toys my friends would like too. Mostly I was bought toys I would play with on my own. This was mostly playmobil, mechano and lego, though also inluded Flower Fairies (which I treated mostly as a construction set, seeing as it came with various little tableau things) and later Jem and the Hollograms and Real Ghostbusters action figures. Generally I'd put everything together, set up a scene, then take it all apart and do something different. I didn't really do *doll* things with my dolls. If they didn't come with any sort of background stuff, I'd make my own, or use the stuff from other ranges.
I was often mistaken for a boy because of my short hair and the fact that I was usually in trackies, or possibly because I was usually clutching a toy car, or that nearly all my friends were boys. I thought girls were, on the whole, rubbish. They didn't know how to play proper games and didn't do anything if it meant they'd get dirty.
I was usually the only person at any given party in a 'party' frock. Even then I was *very* particular about dressing up for parties, though most other kids didn't. I think I was about three when I threw a *huge* tantrum and cried my eyes out because my frilly pink frock didn't fit any more. I also remember a particular white one with gold trim I was very fond of. I was well into my teens before I stopped wearing bright colours.

[webhill.livejournal.com]

That sounds very odd.

I dressed my son in a lot of gender-neutral stuff and a lot of boyish stuff. People still frequently called him a girl. My girls wear either hand-me-downs from my son, or very girly pinky purply stuff - and even in the pinkest of pink, half the time people call them boys (um, as babies. Obviously it gets more obvious later. My middle daughter wears long pigtails and likes to play princess...). Just yesterday at the pediatrician's office my 10 month old was complimented for being such a handsome boy. She was wearing a pink/red/dark pink/brownish pink striped outfit with pink leather boots!

On the playground, my daughter (age 3) is much more active and agile than my son (age 5) and no one has ever commented that she is "boyish" or "not girly" because of it. Similarly no one has said my son is not manly enough. People admire my daughter's speed and agility, and always have, as she speeds by in her princess outfit or clambers up the railings in her mary janes. People offer to help my son as he looks worriedly at the ladder to the slide, too.

No one has ever ascribed masculinity to my daughter because she is a "tomboy" on the playground, that's for sure. and I definitely don't hear people cautioning their daughters not to run or climb! Surely that is what the playground is for??

Oh - my kids generally sing the same songs. Right now, the favorites are "hinay ma tov u ma nayim" (pardon my complete failure to correctly transliterate the hebrew!) and "the poo poo train is coming" which is something their father taught them... but they are also quite keen on "down by the bay" and most of the sesame street repertoire.

[feetnotes.livejournal.com]

yes, expectations of toddlers & kids of the two sexes are different - and not just those of which people are conscious; so it isn't just "them" as discriminate, it's all too easily "us", too, sometimes in ways that sneak up quietly on us.

claire went head over heels into a pink phase, despite none of her close adults evincing the slightest trace of encouragement for such.
she did eventually grow out of it - but this took a couple of years...

[sashajwolf.livejournal.com]

My daughter is very girly and very active. I've never had any adverse comment on it (unless you count the chap who objected to her crawling under his table at coffee, but I think that was a personal space issue, and he withdrew the objection when he realised she was younger than he had thought).

Mind you, perhaps I've given less opportunity for anyone to object - I don't allow running around in restaurants, for instance, regardless of gender. I do allow it in plenty of other public spaces, though.

Ahh...

[fumbluff.livejournal.com]

I'm glad to see it's not just me - as the mother of a 6 month old girl, more often than not referred to as a boy - because she's dressed more frequently in creams and other neutral colours (although I do have to admit it's because they suit her better, as opposed to being anti-pink). People have told me that I should dress her in pink - but she will run, and rough & tumble play - I have a belief that she can play with any toys she wants, I'm not hiding her from anything.

(I could have cried when I read the part about the mummy's jobs. Honestly, I just had that discussion with my husband yesterday. Apparently as a mother I have a natural instinct to know how cold it really feels to her, and he's unable to give an opinion on whether or not her clothes are too small...he couldn't give an answer why I was better qualified to tell. I'm rambling. I just wanted to say thank you for making me realise I'm not the only mother who is solely responsible for most decisions relating to their child!)

Carly

[brooksmoses]

I'm reminded of one of suzimoses's favorite stories from her graduate-level gender-studies course in college. It was apparently a small group of students, all women, and it was a very comfortable sort of space for sharing things. And. as one might suspect, among the things they shared were their distaste for Barbies, and they talked about the images put forth by Barbie and all that. Also, they talked about how the teacher was raising her two children (a boy and a girl) to try and avoid pushing them into gender stereotypes.

And so, late in the semester, the teacher came in terribly distraught. Her daughter had asked for a Barbie for Christmas, and she didn't know what to do or how to deal with this.

(I think eventually she decided that the best option was to get Barbie dolls for both of her children. My recollection that the upshot was that the daughter tired of her Barbie rather more quickly than the son did may be a fabricated memory, though.)

From within

[(Anonymous)]

It's what's on the inside that counts. Is it not? (I am English, have a boy and, well, I buy boys clothes for him) You'll never be perfect. There's no such thing. You will affect your child in ways which are completely unknown to you - you cannot control that. Ultimately all can really do is pray for guidence and allow your child to feel and accept - not to try and solve everything. Don't be afraid.