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

[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."