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My daughter was raised similarly to the girls in the article -- we bought gender-neutral toys, painted her room in neutral colors, and deliberately avoided buyi

by bmelton 16y ago

My daughter was raised similarly to the girls in the article -- we bought gender-neutral toys, painted her room in neutral colors, and deliberately avoided buying any toys that swayed particularly one way or the other. By the age of three, she had all but insisted that we buy her pink clothes and girlier toys, to which we of course caved (I mean, if she wants it, so be it -- we just weren't trying to influence.) She's a smart kid, and she's into plenty of non-girl things (She's currently training mixed martial arts at the age of 8, and loves playing in the mud) -- but her school wardrobe almost entirely consists of decidedly non-boy attire, and her field hockey and lacrosse sticks are pink. We weren't exactly TRYING to steer her away from it, and it was by no means an experiment on our part, we just didn't want to predispose her to girlie things without provocation, so it's in no way scientific -- but we definitely didn't steer her.

sprout 16y ago
I think a substantial part of it is also parents missing the importance of their expectations. If you're aggressively trying to be 'neutral,' you've got some extreme in your mind you're trying to avoid steering your child towards, and your child can, over time, subconsciously pick that up.
- bmelton 16y ago
  I suppose that's possible, but we were trying to steer away from either extreme -- it wasn't as though we replaced her Barbies with GI Joes, we just bought Legos instead. We tried to ensure that all her toes were educational, even if it wasn't the focus of the toy (i.e., we didn't try to eliminate 'fun'.) That said, we weren't doing anything in particular to keep her away from commercials, or limiting social interactions from her peers or anything, so there really wasn't much of a 'control' group whatsoever.
elblanco 16y ago
I have a male cousin who's parents absolutely refused to supply gender specific items. Going so far as to purposely ban toy weapons and other "kinetic and violent" items from the toy chest. By four he was turning anything and everything into a sword or a gun -- legos were assembled into firearms, airplanes were turned upside down and held by the tail as a mock gun, sticks and cardboard tubes were swords and clubs...finally after trying to put the lion back in the cage, at 7 or 8 they finally relented and let him join the rest of the world. The whole exercise seemed like an utterly pointless endeavor to everybody else...boys will generally find kinetic ways of expressing themselves, girls will generally find non-kinetic but more social ways -- prompting or no prompting. Most surprising is watching my female cousins and nieces grow up, several of whom were quite physically active (doing more kinetic type play activities, climbing, wrestling, etc.) until 5 or 6 when they all very quickly toned that part of their activity patterns and started upping their social patterns. I think this had to do with their development of more complex speech patterns.
- natrius 16y ago
  How did he know what guns and swords are? There are plenty of outside influences that could pass on societal gender norms even if the parents avoid doing so. Five or six is when kids typically enter kindergarten in America, where cultural influences from others abound. I don't know what the right explanation is, but I wouldn't discount culture.
  - frossie 16y ago
    How did he know what guns and swords are? Excatly. I am very wary of the whole "we were gender neutral with our kids and then the girl wanted a pink dress SO PINK MUST BE HARD-WIRED!" argument. I am pretty sure if we took a human child to a planet where boys wore pastels and girls wore primary colours and that is what the shops had, that is what the characters on TV advertised, that is what the kids in the playground wore - the girl wouldn't turn around and say "You know what someone should invent? A pink dress!". You only have to look at historical non-western cultures - if you look at some of the African Tribes, men and women dress in bright primary colours. In India, gold, green and red dominate. If you look at historical Japanese kimonos, you see black and red and purple and gold and so on. So, if pink for girls is cultural, and you didn't promote it to your kids, somebody else did. And they are passing all sorts of other messages too. You can't raise a kid in a box.
    - gyardley 16y ago
      If you liked, you could look at historical Western culture as well. In the 1800s, both boys and girls wore white, and gender differentiation in clothing style was quite subtle for the first few years of life. Styles only began to diverge around 1900 and the pink / blue dichotomy only became really prevalent after WWII. That doesn't prove all gender preferences are cultural, but color choice certainly seems to be.
      - billswift 16y ago
        I was browsing a book on etiquette published in 1905 a while back and stumbled across an interesting mention that "a parent couldn't go far wrong following the standard conventions and dressing a girl baby in blue and a boy in pink"; it stuck with me and I have been wondering when the conventions changed the other way around. [The quote is from memory and probably not exact, and I can't check it, because I can't remember the book's title.]
joe_the_user 16y ago
By the age of three, she had all but insisted that we buy her pink clothe.. So are you saying the color pink is genetically programmed? I mean, observing something general like being more cooperative versus more competitive could lend credence to the idea that some behaviors are genetically predisposed. Observing her say she wants to be like Barbie would lend credence to her watching and understanding more Barbie commercials than you imagine.
- bmelton 16y ago
  Oh, I'm not making any claims, just observations. Like I said, we hardly raised her in isolation -- by the age of two, she was engaged in social activities with other kids (co-ed), and watching TV shows targeted to her age group. I have almost no doubt that it was a societal influence, it just took us for a loop, as it definitely hadn't come from us. Even saying that sounds somewhat insincere though, as it wasn't as though we were avoiding fairly traditional gender roles ourselves, but Mrs. Melton has absolutely no predisposition to wearing pink.

by bmelton 16y ago

sprout 16y ago

I think a substantial part of it is also parents missing the importance of their expectations. If you're aggressively trying to be 'neutral,' you've got some extreme in your mind you're trying to avoid steering your child towards, and your child can, over time, subconsciously pick that up.

bmelton 16y ago
I suppose that's possible, but we were trying to steer away from either extreme -- it wasn't as though we replaced her Barbies with GI Joes, we just bought Legos instead. We tried to ensure that all her toes were educational, even if it wasn't the focus of the toy (i.e., we didn't try to eliminate 'fun'.) That said, we weren't doing anything in particular to keep her away from commercials, or limiting social interactions from her peers or anything, so there really wasn't much of a 'control' group whatsoever.

elblanco 16y ago

I have a male cousin who's parents absolutely refused to supply gender specific items. Going so far as to purposely ban toy weapons and other "kinetic and violent" items from the toy chest. By four he was turning anything and everything into a sword or a gun -- legos were assembled into firearms, airplanes were turned upside down and held by the tail as a mock gun, sticks and cardboard tubes were swords and clubs...finally after trying to put the lion back in the cage, at 7 or 8 they finally relented and let him join the rest of the world. The whole exercise seemed like an utterly pointless endeavor to everybody else...boys will generally find kinetic ways of expressing themselves, girls will generally find non-kinetic but more social ways -- prompting or no prompting. Most surprising is watching my female cousins and nieces grow up, several of whom were quite physically active (doing more kinetic type play activities, climbing, wrestling, etc.) until 5 or 6 when they all very quickly toned that part of their activity patterns and started upping their social patterns. I think this had to do with their development of more complex speech patterns.

natrius 16y ago
How did he know what guns and swords are? There are plenty of outside influences that could pass on societal gender norms even if the parents avoid doing so. Five or six is when kids typically enter kindergarten in America, where cultural influences from others abound. I don't know what the right explanation is, but I wouldn't discount culture.
- frossie 16y ago
  How did he know what guns and swords are? Excatly. I am very wary of the whole "we were gender neutral with our kids and then the girl wanted a pink dress SO PINK MUST BE HARD-WIRED!" argument. I am pretty sure if we took a human child to a planet where boys wore pastels and girls wore primary colours and that is what the shops had, that is what the characters on TV advertised, that is what the kids in the playground wore - the girl wouldn't turn around and say "You know what someone should invent? A pink dress!". You only have to look at historical non-western cultures - if you look at some of the African Tribes, men and women dress in bright primary colours. In India, gold, green and red dominate. If you look at historical Japanese kimonos, you see black and red and purple and gold and so on. So, if pink for girls is cultural, and you didn't promote it to your kids, somebody else did. And they are passing all sorts of other messages too. You can't raise a kid in a box.
  - gyardley 16y ago
    If you liked, you could look at historical Western culture as well. In the 1800s, both boys and girls wore white, and gender differentiation in clothing style was quite subtle for the first few years of life. Styles only began to diverge around 1900 and the pink / blue dichotomy only became really prevalent after WWII. That doesn't prove all gender preferences are cultural, but color choice certainly seems to be.
    - billswift 16y ago
      I was browsing a book on etiquette published in 1905 a while back and stumbled across an interesting mention that "a parent couldn't go far wrong following the standard conventions and dressing a girl baby in blue and a boy in pink"; it stuck with me and I have been wondering when the conventions changed the other way around. [The quote is from memory and probably not exact, and I can't check it, because I can't remember the book's title.]

joe_the_user 16y ago

By the age of three, she had all but insisted that we buy her pink clothe.. So are you saying the color pink is genetically programmed? I mean, observing something general like being more cooperative versus more competitive could lend credence to the idea that some behaviors are genetically predisposed. Observing her say she wants to be like Barbie would lend credence to her watching and understanding more Barbie commercials than you imagine.

bmelton 16y ago
Oh, I'm not making any claims, just observations. Like I said, we hardly raised her in isolation -- by the age of two, she was engaged in social activities with other kids (co-ed), and watching TV shows targeted to her age group. I have almost no doubt that it was a societal influence, it just took us for a loop, as it definitely hadn't come from us. Even saying that sounds somewhat insincere though, as it wasn't as though we were avoiding fairly traditional gender roles ourselves, but Mrs. Melton has absolutely no predisposition to wearing pink.