When does the gendering start?

I was just like your DD. I picked up on the message that girls are valued less than boys. I knew I could run as fast, climb as well, be as brave as any boy. I was better than any stupid, wimpish geerrrl!
My mum was concerned at my outright rejection of my gender (I was always pleased to be mistaken for a boy and I didn't have to wear skirts our dresses to school and my name is not obviously girly).
Mum started to tell me about all the ways girls are better than boys -speak sooner, potty train earlier, are better at cooperative games, concentrate for longer etc. that eventually I came around to the idea that I could be proud to be a girl. I was about 9 before I was able to make friends with girls, thanks to my,mum's intervention.

Ooh for books rosie's hat is lovely

I think around 3 they get a lot at nursery from the other children - peer pressure and exposure to lots of other adults many of whom do gender stereotyping without even realising it (it's so entrenched it's hard not to slip sometimes even when you are super aware of it).

I think you need to be careful as while the whole pink princess thing is grim, the last thing you want to do with a girl is give her the impression that "girl's stuff" is shite. Because that's just as bad/ worse. It's a bit of a catch 22 really.

The saddest thing for me was at the end of term last school year DD (then 5) said that she wanted to be a boy. When I asked why she said it was because she like boys things better than girls things so she wanted to be a boy. Also that someone at school had said she was a tomboy. I explained (obviously!) that girls and boys can both do whatever they please and that being a girl is great etc. BUT how can I compete against what is just all over society / the playground every day.

She also asked DH why boys have willies (!) and said that she thought it would be better if everybody had the same. I can understand her logic.

Overall she is happy and cheerful and so on BUT it just makes me sad that she is picking up on this stuff and obviously thinking about it and coming to god only knows what conclusions. (She is the sort of child who does think very carefully about everything).

All in all I'm sure it will be fine but these things just make me feel sad for a while and I wish that we were further along this whole feminist path, so that children could just be and get on with it and not have all this gender nonsense rammed down their throats.

My DD is, I suppose, of the pink generation. She is now a teenager and hates pink. She doesn't hate it from some kind of social perspective of what it may or may not represent. She simply cannot stand the colour because she was surrounded by it and given things that were constantly pink for a whole decade of her life; she is sick of looking at it. I suspect a lot of girls of her generation will not want pinkification for their own daughters.

OP - and others - have you seen the Let Toys be Toys campaign? Started by a group of MNers before last Christmas, pissed off by the genderisation of toys. There's a petition you might like to sign.

I suspect you're right that outside influences are - well, influencing your DD. As she gets older she will develop her own character and find her own preferences. My DD liked pink and fairy costumes well enough at 3 ... by 6 she'd turned against them (not that girls necessarily should if that's what they still really like).

I think this is driven by companies wanting to sell more products - it's harder to hand things down from boys to girls and vice versa if products are gendered. Everything from clothes to toys to furniture needs to be replaced if baby number two is the other sex.

I was disappointed though, they didn't have the comic strip Pow! Zap! ones in her size. They were soooooooooo cool!

Oh, these are in Sainbury's BTW.

It's funny how people get in a tizz about things though. I have been accused of dressing DD as a boy, like when she is in her Gruffalo coat. Er, the Gruffalo's Child is a girl!

I was a child in the 80s and quite happy in dungarees, similar tops to my brother, shorts etc.

We played so happily together with Lego and ball games and I would have hated to have been restricted to the pink plastic crap which is marketed towards girls now. Looking back at the Argos catalogue www.flickr.com/photos/38301877@N05/sets/72157619206330728/ from 1985 which was practically my Bible at the time, I don't see as much pink there as I do now - just Barbie and Care Bears. Not ALL toys for girls were pink. It's a bit crap that all the active, sport-orientated toys still have boys posing with them though.

In my more woo musings I do wonder if someone's putting the advertising agencies up to encouraging more 'feminine' girly advertising to encourage these girls to grow up with less ambition and less desire to be career-minded and more SAHM to raise the birth rate (to try and abate the pension crisis etc)...well my History teacher always said we'd start to see this kind of propaganda start in this decade so who knows.

I have no idea. I am really fighting against the "girls' things" and "boys' things". I try and explain marketing but it is difficult to express it in terms a 3 year old will understand.

We avoid children's TV, and have extremely limited viewing. There is definitely no pinkification in the stuff we watch, and I avoid shops where the pinkness is extreme, but still it happens, and I have no idea where the influence comes from.

We had a huge discussion on boy bikes/girl bikes. I explained there were bikes that companies tried to sell to girls, but that bikes are just bikes. I actually took her to the bike shop so she could see for herself - the bike she wants is gender neutral, though possibly aimed more at boys because it is space/rocket themed.

I have a slight problem that my DH doesn't think that pinkification is all the prevalent but he did get my point when we went shopping yesterday to buy pyjamas for DD.

The girls' ones were all purple and pink and said things like: Pretty in Pink and My Carriage Awaits.

I promptly marched to the boys' section and bought her monster and dinosaur ones which were so much more fun. DD who is 21 months did her best monster roar in appreciation.

Pinkification is very recent. It did not exist when I was a child, nor when my children were children. It is true that there was a tradition of pink for a girl baby and blue for a boy baby (as opposed to the opposite in Victorian times when it was blue for a girl and pink for a boy) but in general pink then simply took its place as just one colour among many.

Likewise, as a child in the 50s I and my friends played cricket, football in the park, had dinky toys, built dens, climbed trees etc.

It seems that as women have exploited all their new opportunities in adulthood the trend for girl children has been to try and put them back in their box.

But where, apart from cynical marketing, this backlash comes from really puzzles me. I would like to know what younger MN posters think as, to an oldie like me, we seem to be going backwards in many respects.