You are being patronizing, though. Cordelia Fine, who does psychological research on this, has a great anecdote about this entire line of argument- the nonsexis

You are being patronizing, though. Cordelia Fine, who does psychological research on this, has a great anecdote about this entire line of argument- the nonsexist parent who tried to do gender neutral parenting, comically failed, and then realized boys and girls truly are different, and now campaigns from the opposite perspective. She brings up one such anecdote from another book, where parents really tried to give their daughter firetrucks AND dolls, jeans AND dresses, but at the end of the day, the girl was tucking the firetruck to bed like a good mom and wanted to wear dresses. That book was all about how girls have innate nurturing tendencies and so on. Of course, the mom was the one tucking the girl to bed almost every night. It was funny that parents failed at giving their daughter fire-trucks, but it's even funnier that someone would ignore the massive impact their own behavior had imprinted on their kids. Same with dresses- mom may wear jeans frequently, but dad absolutely never wears a dress. How are you going to ignore this, even if your kid is only three years old? They learn to speak like you in such a short period of time, and you're going to chalk up zoos vs. irrigation pumps to biology? You say you're a proud machinist and woodworker in your profile. Does your wife spend equal amounts of time in the shop? Do you think your kids are not already making choices about whether they're more like you or your wife? She also brings up some interesting research by Castelli et al [0], where parents are interviewed about their opinions about racism (ie: I am NOT racist, and I teach my kid to NOT be racist), but then evaluates them on their implicit attitudes towards race (everyone's somewhat racist, I hope you'd agree), and kids match their parents really well not compared to their explicit attitudes, but more in the implicit ones. The truth is that if you tried to raise your kids in a gender-neutral environment, you completely failed, because we make it absolutely impossible, unless you control absolutely all media and social influence and tune your own behavior accordingly, which would be creepy and Stalinesque. It doesn't mean that there are no innate gender differences, or that they undesirable, but it definitely means that parents who get together to talk about how they "can't believe what [they] used to think" because they've been awokened to gender differences have just swapped one unfounded source of condescension for another. [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19271841 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19271841 > Previous literature based on self-report measures has not found a clear relationship between the ethnic attitudes of White parents and those of their children. In particular, no study has evidenced such a relationship in the case of preschool children. In the present study, the authors measured parents' implicit and explicit racial attitudes as well as the racial attitudes of their 3- to 6-year-old children. They found that parents' explicit attitudes were not related to children's responses. In contrast, mothers' implicit attitudes (but not fathers' implicit attitudes) were significant predictors of children's attitudes. Results demonstrate that early racial attitudes might develop within the family.