4 ms·

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 viole

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.]
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
- elblanco 16y ago
  I think that this is probably the case. I can't say for certain if he was mimicking swordplay or just clubs (it's not too specific at that age). But he was definitely mimicking some type of projectile weapon quite often...and often with absurd pretend devices that bore no possible resemblance to a gun...like animal sound boxes and such. He'd just hold them at some specific angle and make loud "bang!" sounds. Interestingly, he was home-schooled until about 9 (when his parent ultimately realized that it's actually not possible to absolutely isolate a child from the world and have them grow up healthy and well adjusted), so it's not like he was getting alot of this from other kids. In general though, I think it's too easy to simplify things to "girls go with pink and dolls" and "boys go with blue and guns". I think it's far more likely to be "boys tend to go towards kinetic play as they grow older" and "girls tend to go more towards social play as they grow older"...and I think this appears to hold true cross culturally and I don't think it has a lot to do with social expectations. At least in my family, there's a pretty concerted effort to play with the masses of kids in the same games and pretty equally.
- nandemo 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. But of course. This is exactly what ojbyrne said at the beginning of the thread: "parents underestimating the influence of society vs their own influence".
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
WalterBright 16y ago
I've heard essentially that same story from lots of people my whole life. My grandparents even tried it with my father. It never works.

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.]
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
elblanco 16y ago
I think that this is probably the case. I can't say for certain if he was mimicking swordplay or just clubs (it's not too specific at that age). But he was definitely mimicking some type of projectile weapon quite often...and often with absurd pretend devices that bore no possible resemblance to a gun...like animal sound boxes and such. He'd just hold them at some specific angle and make loud "bang!" sounds. Interestingly, he was home-schooled until about 9 (when his parent ultimately realized that it's actually not possible to absolutely isolate a child from the world and have them grow up healthy and well adjusted), so it's not like he was getting alot of this from other kids. In general though, I think it's too easy to simplify things to "girls go with pink and dolls" and "boys go with blue and guns". I think it's far more likely to be "boys tend to go towards kinetic play as they grow older" and "girls tend to go more towards social play as they grow older"...and I think this appears to hold true cross culturally and I don't think it has a lot to do with social expectations. At least in my family, there's a pretty concerted effort to play with the masses of kids in the same games and pretty equally.
nandemo 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. But of course. This is exactly what ojbyrne said at the beginning of the thread: "parents underestimating the influence of society vs their own influence".
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]

WalterBright 16y ago

I've heard essentially that same story from lots of people my whole life. My grandparents even tried it with my father. It never works.