Actually, no it isn’t. It’s about raising children in such an environment. Nowhere does it specify that we’re talking about typical children. No one knows at the time that they first begin to raise their children whether their children are going to be gender typical or gender variant.
What’s with the yipping? Were you raised in a species-neutral environment or something?
I think you’re on to something.
The most fascinating thing about that article is the completely oblivious acceptance of our current obsessive hyper-gendering of small children as “normal”. Having a bedroom that’s various shades of oatmeal is not “gender-neutral” … or if it is, it’s only because most of life is gender-neutral. It’s normal. That’s how adults live. Do we know any adult women who, on buying a new house, would immediately paint all the walls pink? I think not. Do men have wardrobes consisting entirely of blue and red shirts? No, they’re allowed to wear green, white and brown instead … and some brave souls might even venture into light-red territory.
Yes, there are still gendered aspects of adult life - there are such things as men’s and women’s bikes, generally (often) we wear different clothes, there are occupations that are more guy-centric or girl-centric. But we police the line even more stringently in kids, and for what? So corporations can sell more stuff. You can’t have a little boy riding his big sister’s purple bike, so you have to buy him a red one. :smack: We are so easily led.
Discovering your kids have different interests to you is also a normal part of life - even without crossing a single gender line. Hey, book-club lady - you’ve got a daughter who’s mad for horseriding! Ex-cheerleader? All your daughter wants to do is paint and draw. Football dad? Oops, we allocated you a chess-nerd.
Which is not to deny that there are tendencies for girls and boys to like different things, be into different things, and often have different strengths and weakneses. Sure. But you don’t parent tendencies, you parent individuals
Timely.
My daughter is currently doing a paper on “why the gender binary needs to go” where she argues similar things to the letter writer. I’ll forward this on to her - paper is due Monday so it might not get in.
And, there is hope for the future. Part of the paper was a presentation. What was supposed to be five minutes of presentation and a few question went for most of the hour because the discussion and questions were so very good. And respectful. For a lot of the students this was the first time they were introduced to the concept in a broad and yet detailed way - something bigger than bathrooms.
Dangerosa - I can’t help but note the irony in you posting immediately after Aspidistra’s point about accepting that your children may have different interests.
You so often post effusive praise of your daughter, who you say is very similar to you and your husband. You often also contrast this with disparaging remarks about your son, who’s interests are quite different. You glorify her intellectualism and dismiss his athleticism as unworthy of praise. In addition, you have pointed out many times that your daughter is your biological child and your son is both adopted and of a different race even when it is no way relevant to your comments.
Your posts about your children are absolutely heartbreaking. If it is so obvious to a stranger on a message board that you strongly favor your daughter, it must be even more obvious to your son, even if you think you’re hiding your true feelings. I can’t imagine what he must feel like. Every time I see one of your posts about him, I want to cry.
I don’t know what you can do at this point to repair the damage, but maybe you can find it in your heart to step back and reconsider your feelings.
GreenBean,
I don’t talk about my son because there isn’t a lot to talk about. Since he was about ten, he has been immersed in drugs. He pops out from time to time, but seldom to talk to his parents. We have hope for him, and love him very much, and at heart he is a great kid, but I don’t share his troubles on a public message board, so you don’t hear about him
I know, right? My daughter’s room is colored like oatmeal, not because we were going for any special gender-neutral statement, but because 1) that’s the color all the rooms in the house are painted and we saw no reason to change and 2) my husband and I like that color.
Decals of woodland creatures also decorate her walls. Why? Because they are cute as hell. Would a boy like them, too? Probably. But that is not why we picked them. Maybe a boy wouldn’t like the pink elephants hanging up, but there’s also no guarrantee she will like them. The decor has to do more with what we find charming than what we think our little one prefers.
I understand the point the author is making–that children’s interests often track with their biological gender independent of what they are exposed to by their parents. But that’s not really an argument against raising kids according to gender stereotypes. If a girl gravitates more to her dollies than her legos or toy cars, that’s fine, but at least by making the legos and cars available, she has play options that she wouldn’t otherwise have. There is no harm giving kids diverse exposures that cross stereotypical gender lines, in other words, which I suspect is the real spirit behind gender-neutral approaches to childrearing.
I wasn’t and am not a “tomboy”, but I grew up in a room painted blue, played with toy trucks and GI Joe action figures, and had a few plastic dinosaurs that I would pull out from time to time. Also loved my dolls and easy bake oven. If you’d asked my parents if they were intentionally raising me in a gender-neutral kind of way, they would’ve laughed at you. But they pretty much did, especially when you compare my upbringing to theirs.
Green Bean, let’s avoid making this personal, in this forum. Use the Pit if you need to.
No warning issued.
OK, I took it to the Pit.
YES! I was so confused by the article because that’s not how I’ve *ever *experienced “gender neutral parenting”. Gender neutral parenting isn’t about not having any dolls or any cars in the house, it’s about having BOTH dolls and cars in the house. Isn’t it? Am I in bizzaroland? I was raised gender neutral, and raised my son and daughter gender neutral, and guess what? He’d line his dolls and stuffed animals up on the floor and run them over with his toy trucks, and she’d dress her toy trucks in her nightgowns and put them “in a nap” next to her dolls. And…ooooookay! Did they gravitate toward the cultural gender norms that matched their gender assigned at birth? Yep. Not a problem. And also, not for lack of options. It was their choice, influenced by their hormones or their brains perhaps, but still their choice, what to play with, how, and for how long.
Not only have I never seen a kid raised in the “gender neutral” way articulated in the article, I don’t honestly see how that’s even *possible *today. Even blocks are genderized into primary colors (boys) and pastels (girls). Lego are genderized. Toy kitchens come in blue and pink. I mean, how many slinkies and Tinker Toys (oops, they’ve genderized Tinker Toys now, too!) can one kid play with? I could not keep a child occupied with toys that are truly gender neutral in association and marketing for a full afternoon, much less a whole childhood.
Oh, yeah. I liked the letter, too.
Lego is gendered?
How many would buy this for a boy:
Lego city does have female characters, but the main page lineup is all male.
:dubious:
'Cept the fireman who has a goatee, I don’t think the gender is clear at all for any of those figures.
And current culture predominantly works on the premise that any character without clear gender is male. That lego works like this is evident with this female race car driver/support crew: https://www.lego.com/en-us/city/products/dragster-transporter-60151
And those stereotypes are things that have changed within our lifetimes, and keep changing, and are different in different locations. Which professions are acceptable for each gender; which tasks are “appropriate”; which sports are expected to be of interest…
It is not possible to raise a child in a stereotype-free bubble, but damnit, my generation had choices other than pink! My niece? Oh yeah, she can choose between Barbie and bubble-gum. Yeehaw :mad:
Yes.
We’ve now come to such a pendulum swing to the extreme that what used to be neutral is now masculine.
Here’s the thing with Lego, and Tinker Toys, and other things that were actually, honestly, gender neutral when I was a kid…
Once stuff like this is in the store, girls know that these are “Lego for girls”. Ergo, the other Lego sets must be “Lego for boys.” I know, and you know, that we can all play with both of them, but children are at the stage of development where they’re looking for opposites. Something must be either a boy thing or a girl thing, and they’re rigorously enforcing gender roles on each other.
The Target thing was an attempt to at least stock these different Lego sets in the same aisle, because in most stores, they’re in two separate aisles, literally marked “Girls Toys” and “Boys Toys.”