Gift buying, five-year-old style

[ailbhe]

The 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 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).

Comments

[gothwalk.livejournal.com]

This interests me a lot - particularly the use of pink, and the change in it since the Victorian era. I have a couple of pink shirts, which I wear reasonably regularly. It's been remarked on from time to time, which amuses me. And yet, I can't stand to pick up the papercraft magazines I see and am somewhat interested in, because the sheer level of pink is overwhelmingly offputting.

Trying to find non-pink items for inannajones can also be difficult.

[ljgeoff.livejournal.com]

Linnea is right at the age when a kid is internalizing all the gender stuff. She doesn't have the degree of intellect yet to make fine distictions or to be abstract; at this stage everything is very concrete and it either goes in this collumn or that one.

Even at 9, Luke has difficulty with the idea of gender bending and how gender is a spectrum.

I don't how different it might be over where you are, but her in the Midwest US, we've been going through a bit of a backlash from the 80's; kids are being given very strong messages from just about everywhere of the importance of acting Midwest US gender-appropriate. I think that kids really pick up on the color thing. A while back, I was hunting up a clean pair of socks, and found a pair of mine that would fit Luke. It looked just like men's socks, but it had a line of pink by the toes. And there was no way in hell he was going to wear Girl Socks.

[pocketnaomi.livejournal.com]

Grace went through a period of being extremely into pink princessy stuff. Drove me nuts. She's thankfully out of it now, and in fact makes a point of saying she does not like pink, and refusing anything to do with princesses. She still strongly prefers wearing dresses over pants, and we let her if it's warm enough (she has some good warm dresses and thick tights, but there are days in Seattle when that isn't enough). She's definitely more girly than I ever was, but she has glommed successfully onto the concept that there is nothing boys can do that girls can't or vice versa except stuff having to do with making babies. So I figure that's sufficient.

[pocketnaomi.livejournal.com]

Our son is much more fond of pinks and purples and flower patterns right now than our daughter is, and his winter coat is a hand-me-down from her in a very girly lavender. Happily, he loves it, 'cause we would have a hard time affording one in a more traditional Boy Color. :)

[iuil.livejournal.com]

Thankfully Sorcha is out-growing the All-Pink All-of-the-Time phase. It does pass, honest.

[thealmondtree.livejournal.com]

We've just had to buy Theo (3½) a new winter coat. The one we bought is available in navy blue, red and fushia. T left to himself would have had the fushia. Unfortunately during the lifetime of the coat he will start school so I just couldn't bring myself to let him have the pink as I think it would cause too much troube at school. But we have just bought him a Dotty Wot rather than Spotty Wot.

[1ngi.livejournal.com]

My nephew is having an extreme pinkness stage that his mother is fine with. His father on the other hand...

[myfirstkitchen.livejournal.com]

Between 5 and 9, I got quite distressed if people said I looked like a boy and was very upset when I was mistaken for one or was made to play a male role in games and hated that my mum cut our hair short. Blue was my favourite colour, but I went off Lego and onto Barbie and baby dolls. I grew out of it and if anything went the other way when I was older. My male cousin went through something similar and wanted all his long curly hair cut off and started asking for train driver outfits and stuff. Again, he's quite non-macho now... I think it's a thing, for a lot of (particularly sensitive) kids, where they work the gender thing out and wonder where they and their friends fit into it all and it can make them feel more comfortable to define themselves heavily as girly girl or boyish boy.

[random-c.livejournal.com]

You can get pink lego now...
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...

[mrs-redboots.livejournal.com]

It does pass! Middle Niece, now 10-going-on-18, used to be all pink and frilly and feminine; when I asked her what she wanted for Christmas this year, she said "Anything as long as it ISN'T PINK!"

[the0lady.livejournal.com]

My take on the boy-colour present choosing thing is that Linnea is discovering morality: that set of deeply held views about what is appropriate that _other people_ do _for their own good_. *g*

Less facetiously, I think the theory of mind thing is interesting here. She's obviously got some strong beliefs about what recipients of presents *expect* those presents to be, and wants to conform to that - even if for herself she bends the rules more. It's not that different from how most people make this kind of choice as adults, really.

[the0lady.livejournal.com]

I was the same at that age, but I grew up all mixed up: extremely feminine in choices about appearance, quite conformist in academic focus areas, radically gender bending in choices about pretty much everything else that I bhad a choice about as a child. *shrug* It's not really a continuum, even. It's more like a mixed bag of randomly assigned personal preferences - which is what gender actually *is*, anyway.

[pocketnaomi.livejournal.com]

Yeah, my kids' dad is a lot more edgy about the pink thing than I am. I think it's kinda cute.

Gender-specificness

[(Anonymous)]

One of the biggest humiliations of my young childhood was visiting a nursery school where all the girls were sitting on a pink mat and the boys were sitting on a blue mat. There was no room on the pink mat so I sat on the blue mat. Ritual humiliation and mass laughter ensued, instigated by the teacher. Age three, I thought it was ridiculous and very upsetting. Age fifty-three, I still think the same. Daphne xx