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

[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!