Joshua and I spend the morning drive to school talking. About anything and everything. Usually Sonic the Hedgehog or Toy Story. This morning’s conversation made my heart sink a little.
“Mama, what song is this?”
“This is the fairy godmother song from Cinderella.”
“Mama, do you like Cinderella?”
“I do.”
“I like Lightning McQueen. Mama, you can like Cinderella and I can like Lightning McQueen.”
“You can like Cinderella and I can like Lightning McQueen, sweetie.”
“Cinderella is for girls, Mama.“
My boy in the pink hat flashed across my brain and I felt myself tense up a little. I knew this would happen sooner or later. I knew it and I sort of hoped against it.
I knew the day was coming when Joshua would start to associate some things as boy and other things as girl. That the day when his peers held more sway over his likes and dislikes than I did would happen.
To be honest, I’m a little sad about it. Not because I want him to like “girl” things. But because I want him to know that I don’t care if he likes girl things.
I want him to know that it’s okay to love what he loves.
I tried to tell him this morning that it was okay if girls liked Lightning McQueen and boys liked Cinderella. Movies are for everybody. We can all like whatever movies we want to like.
We all love what we love and like what we like and that’s okay.
He said “Cinderella is a princess, Mama.” And I let it drop and kept on driving.
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What I wanted to say was that it will never matter to me what toy he wants to play with, whether that’s Barbies or baseballs. It will never matter to me if Emma wants to race cars or rock baby dolls.
I will never care because they are my children and what I want for them above all else is happiness as they’ve defined it for themselves and not as it has been defined for them.
I wanted to shout that it shouldn’t matter to the rest of the world either. Because it shouldn’t. Why do people care so much what toys kids choose to play with?
Boys get trucks and girls get tiaras. Bah. That’s dumb.
Toys are toys. Games are games. Kids are kids.
We don’t have to define the world for our preschoolers in terms of gender-specific everything.
Why is it okay for our girls to like blue? What if our boys LIKE pink? If we tell them pink is for girls and they can’t like it because they’re not girls, what message are we sending to our boys? For that matter, what kind of message are we sending to and about our girls?
Why can’t we just let kids love what they love? That should be enough.
I am amazed at how much my son knows about gender and what colors, toys and roles are assigned to each. We had never talked about it. I too didn’t want to make it an issue, just wanted to go with the flow. One night at dinner, he correctly identified the gender of everyone in our family and we had never talked about it!
My dilemma – I hate all the “girl toys”. I cringe when I past those aisle at Target! Right now my daughter is happy as a clam to play with cars and dinosaurs – and blocks and rocks and legos too.
I love walking down the toy aisles, both the boy and girl aisles, to see what Emma will reach for. So far her favorite thing is a red steering wheel from B! Toys!
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What the heck happened with my comment–that was weird. Anyways, I was going to write the following:
Preach. On the flip side, a friend of mine doesn’t want his daughter dressing/liking/playing princesses because he doesn’t want her to buy into all the girl stuff, but what if that’s what she likes, dude???
I walk a very, very fine line of wanting to buy Emma princesses and the like but not wanting to immerse her into princess culture. As with everything, it’s all about balance.
I learned to embrace the princess culture because of how much Madison adores it. I’m certain I introduced her to it, I was the one who let her watch a Disney movie and she was sold. And my house is constantly filled with tutus and wands and tiaras. It gets overwhelming. But we also have doctor kits and pirate costumes and super hero capes so they can be whatever they want. Watching their little minds go to fantasy land is SO amazing that sometimes I feel like we (society… not you directly) are sometimes projecting too much on them. Like we’re so concerned with them not feeling like they HAVE to love princess stuff because they are a girl that we are making more of something than is actually there. I mean, there ARE differences in genders, right? I gravitate towards accessories and shoes and pretty things. Clint gravitate toward sports and cars. But I love watching football and he will rock a tiara and wand with the best of them. So naturally our kids pick up on that.
I think as long as you correct them when they say “swords are for boys, tiaras are for girls” and say that while many boys do like swords and many girls do like tiaras, that he can love whatever one he wants, that is enough. It may not sink in now, it may not sink in the tenth time- but eventually they will hear you. It would be different if you were telling him he HAS to love the boy stuff, but you don’t… so your’e doing it right. At least in my opinion.
And Hannah is totally into princesses too… same exposure as Madison, but don’t you dare give her the pink tutu. She wants the blue tutu and the blue wand and the blue shoes. So, ya know… they like what they like :).
It’s totally not the dress-up and pretend play that bothers me about princess culture. Not at all. Because all of that can be balanced with buying dress-up kits for a host of options, like you pointed out, and pretend play is incredible for development. (Also adorable, not gonna lie.)
The parts that give me pause are the parts that discuss beauty as a virtue and method of getting a boy’s attention, like the Disney princess book I bought her from the Dollar Spot at Target. (That book hit the trash can.)
I’ll never tell them what they have to like, ever, and can only hope that they grow up understanding that whatever they choose to like is okay by me.
Ugh. I hate how many times I have to say, “there are no boy toys or girls toys in here, there are kids toys.” “there is no boys table, there is no girls table, there are tables for preschoolers.” Oh AND what kills me the most are the little girls who CAN’T use any color other than pink, WTF? Ahhhhh.
Yeah, that would make me nutty, particularly if I think the girls were choosing the color because it had been drilled into them that that’s their favorite color, you know? (I do think it would be possible to tell, at least with some of them.) If, however, she genuinely loves the color pink, I’m down with everything being pink.
I completely agree. E plays with cars and princesses. She loves the color blue but declares pink her favorite color on the days I dare give her an orange spoon at breakfast. So far the gender stereotyping of toys has passed her over. But the other day she announced that she would only make new friends at her new school with the girls because she doesn’t like to be friends with boys. We had a similar talk which I had to drop as well because you know – once they dig in their heels, they argue endlessly. She has boy friends… I hope this will solve itself as her class is 3/4 boys this year. We shall see.
Oh, the digging in of the heels! How well I know that!
I think girls are able to skip the toy stereotyping in large part because it’s so much more acceptable for them to like “boy” things. Almost praised even. Look at every comment that’s ever been made about toy companies making pink/purple Legos, you know? There’s an uproar about it every time a new product hits the shelves and chants of “girls can play with blue, too!” echo throughout the blogosphere. So where are the chants of “pink is for boys!”?
Right here, I guess. 😉
You know, i’ve never thought of that. It is almost expected for girls to be “allowed” to play with cars and blocks and such. But not so much the other way around.
This was one of my BIGGEST fears about having a girl. Tore me up inside.
My little girl cradles her baby doll while wearing basketball jammies.
My little girl asks to play cars as soon as we get home, then, puts away cars and plays house.
That tells me I’m doing ok, and I hope to continue to encourage her to do what she loves regardless. But it’s tough. People keep wanting to buy her princess stuff and the girl loves monsters lol.
But with our influence, they will be ok 🙂
Oh, they’ll definitely be okay 🙂
I’m way less concerned about this sort of thing with Emma than I am with Joshua. It seems more acceptable for girls to like trucks and monsters and sports than it is for guys to like dolls and ballet and princesses. There’s this assumption that boys who like “soft” things are weaker, which is just dumb.
and then I got to this point and I guess I come from the perspective of a girl mom which is different. Because you’re right, my kids can play with anything and no one looks twice. But I can totally see the difference with having a boy.
So this comment addresses your earlier comment about the differences in gender, because yes, there are differences. But while they’re picking up on those differences, they’re also picking up on the more subtle and problematic notions that play into the larger culture of gender differences.
Was that vague enough? LOL
LOL. I don’t know. I guess I just don’t worry about that stuff as much. Maybe it’s because I’m a girl mom, maybe its because I know if I worry about one more thing I’ll send myself into cardiac arrest at 31. I feel like most of us grew up okay. I knew I could play with boy things and girl things. When I picked an instrument in middle school I chose the trumpet, mostly a “guy” instrument… seriously, 80+ trumpets in the University of Texas Longhorn band and 11 of us were girls. But I picked it because it was cool and I wanted to be in jazz band. And our kids are exposed to way more, I get it.
I honestly worry more about my daughters catching me saying negative things about myself (which I am working SO hard on curbing) than I am about them picking up that beauty is a virtue from princess books. Because beauty isn’t a bad thing. I tell her she’s beautiful all the time. I tell her that her face is beautiful and her toes are beautiful and that I’m most proud of how beautiful her heart is. But all of that could go out the window if she walks in the bathroom and overhears me telling Clint that none of my clothes look good on me because I’m too fat. And that worries me the most.
I don’t worry about this so much as I think about it when it comes up. I know I’m doing my best to make sure they both know they’re free to play with whichever toys they want.
I think this conversation needs the male perspective because it’s really easy for us to say gender pressure isn’t a big deal since we seem to have grown up as women who understood that it was okay for us to pursue stereotypically male things, like trumpet, or sports. I wonder what guys would say about what they experienced growing up and their thoughts now that they’re adults and perhaps fathers.
I DEFINITELY worry about the negative self-talk and try my best never to say the things I think about myself out loud when either of them is in earshot. It’s just as damaging for Joshua to hear me talk that way as it is for Emma. And of course beauty isn’t a bad thing. I definitely tell both kids they’re beautiful. But I do think that sometimes that message is promoted and heard above any other message, so to combat that, I don’t want to read her books that promote beauty above brains, you know? And that one definitely promoted beauty in a way that eschewed any other virtue the princess may have had. It was just…shocking.
Yeah. This has become an issue all of a sudden at my house, too. “I hate girl things” and “Pink is for girls” and all that crap makes me cringe. J has taken to categorizing things… “That’s a girl show” or “girl toy.” Even the aisles at Target which used to just be aisles of toys are now “Girl” and “boy.”
Stupid culture.
The culture surrounding it all really does make me insane. WHY do we force our kids to be masculine or feminine or anything other than KIDS?
My three year old niece has recently latched onto the “pink is for girls/blue is for boys” idea. While on vacation she stressed this a lot about all sorts of things including the color of her mini-golf ball. My sister and I were talking about where she could have picked up the idea because neither she or my brother-in-law care what types of toys she plays with or how she wants to play. It dawned on me while reading this that it comes from everywhere including me. I tell Sophia all the time “that’s a baby toy, you’re not a baby” when she wants to play with Jack’s toys. All she needs to do is make the leap from “baby toy” to “boy or girl toy”.
It’s so easy to say things we think will have no effect beyond our intended meaning, you know? It’s part of what makes being a human hard, much less a parent.
I want my rule book on this whole parenting thing. They forgot to give it to me when I left the hospital with each of my kids!
So true – kids will be whoever it is they want to be – who they are meant to be! My daughter gravitated towards princesses – even though I tried to avoid it. And that’s ok with me – it makes her happy.
The other day I was getting her dressed (she’s 2), I put her dress on and she said “now I’m a girl”. Oh boy! Where to go with that one? I tried to explain that girls can wear whatever they want to wear and they’re still going to be girls!!!
I’m definitely okay with princesses if Emma wants to like princesses. Or Joshua. Princesses are (mostly) cool. I want them to be happy (and healthy and safe) above all else.