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

[(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!