Gift buying, five-year-old style
Dec. 9th, 2009 03:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ailbheThe most important thing to her is to get a gender-appropriate gift. She chose a little bird toy for a male friend, but spent ages choosing a little bird in colours she deemed sufficiently masculine. I told her I thought it was ridiculous, because I happen to know that this little boy likes a LOT of colours, but she was adamant.
Later we had discussions of whether boys or girls were allowed to use certain Christmas crackers.
Now, she wears a wide range of colours, in boy and girl style clothes - brown, black, grey, orange, red, yellow, green, blue, pink, purple. She plays with "boy" toys quite happily and without any apparent sense of irony. But in spite of my best efforts - thankfully upheld by the people we spend time with - she has figured out a lot of these rules and is trying to apply them when it occurs to her.
I hate this stuff. I hate that I was scolded when she was a toddler for dressing her "like a boy" in the same orange top and blue jeans I wore myself, all from H&M children's section - I wore the Age 13 ones and she wore the Age 3 ones.
And then there was the day she was playing in a playground with a group of children; she and a male friend of the same age (the Oyster, as it happens) arrived to find a large mixed-age group already there, and the boys of that group were playing a form of football. Linnea waded in and got involved, Oyster was somewhat less forward. The game involved running and kicking and having the ball hit one by accident and so on. Until they found out she was a girl; then the older ones warned the younger ones to be gentle with her, not to kick too hard, to be careful... It was shocking to me and to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
radegund.
With Emer it's a bit simpler; we have all, as a family, fallen more into the normative pink and fluffy way of doing things, and at the same time the people who really wanted us to have feminine daughters have backed off a little with their pink-pushing and are less inclined to assume that little girls won't break things, or will want to be well-behaved, or whathaveyou. But it's still a bit... difficult.
But it's Christmas now, and we're both buying and receiving gifts. I'm half-tempted to do a little tally on The Day to see how many of them are strongly gendered and very pink (Linnea has actually asked for some fairly strongly gendered gifts).
Later we had discussions of whether boys or girls were allowed to use certain Christmas crackers.
Now, she wears a wide range of colours, in boy and girl style clothes - brown, black, grey, orange, red, yellow, green, blue, pink, purple. She plays with "boy" toys quite happily and without any apparent sense of irony. But in spite of my best efforts - thankfully upheld by the people we spend time with - she has figured out a lot of these rules and is trying to apply them when it occurs to her.
I hate this stuff. I hate that I was scolded when she was a toddler for dressing her "like a boy" in the same orange top and blue jeans I wore myself, all from H&M children's section - I wore the Age 13 ones and she wore the Age 3 ones.
And then there was the day she was playing in a playground with a group of children; she and a male friend of the same age (the Oyster, as it happens) arrived to find a large mixed-age group already there, and the boys of that group were playing a form of football. Linnea waded in and got involved, Oyster was somewhat less forward. The game involved running and kicking and having the ball hit one by accident and so on. Until they found out she was a girl; then the older ones warned the younger ones to be gentle with her, not to kick too hard, to be careful... It was shocking to me and to
radegund.With Emer it's a bit simpler; we have all, as a family, fallen more into the normative pink and fluffy way of doing things, and at the same time the people who really wanted us to have feminine daughters have backed off a little with their pink-pushing and are less inclined to assume that little girls won't break things, or will want to be well-behaved, or whathaveyou. But it's still a bit... difficult.
But it's Christmas now, and we're both buying and receiving gifts. I'm half-tempted to do a little tally on The Day to see how many of them are strongly gendered and very pink (Linnea has actually asked for some fairly strongly gendered gifts).
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(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-09 08:16 pm (UTC)I do remember throwing a huge tantrum when I was made to get rid of a hideously frilly pink frock because there was no way I'd fit into it, but after that, when I started school, I rapidly came to the conclusion that the boys were the ones I wanted to be friends with and play with and I remember arguing with the headmistress of the infants' school about girls not being allowed to play football with the boys... I did have dolls and stuff but I didn't really play with them in the usual way, I wanted all the houses and kits and whatnot, and just set them up and took them down again much as I'd do with the lego and meccano which I preferred. As far as I was concerned as a kid, girls could do whatever they wanted, it was only boys who had restrictions because girls could play with boys' toys, but boys couldn't play with girls' toys. There were a couple of lads regularly chased away from the skipping ropes, especially when we started doing double-dutch but IIRC that was mostly because they were rubbish. We let Trevor join in, but he mostly just wanted to turn the rope...