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)]

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.