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Gender-specific toys, clothes, behaviour and music
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.
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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!
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