To think that people who worry about gender stereotyping their kids are a bit OTT

[ilovemonsters]

I've Nc'd so if I get flamed/biscuits the shame won't stick

So I know this is a hot topic and I might get slandered here but I've seen a lot of posts in threads where parents are worrying about gender stereotyping their kids and I've just seen a post on a Facebook page saying "my daughter loves playing with a scratty old hand me down doll at my parents house, is it appropriate for me to buy her a nice new doll or am I gender stereotyping her?"

I really want to post and say "oh FFS your kid likes dolls let her play with a damn doll!! Not every frigging toy has to be rainbow coloured and gender neutral for goodness sake!!!"

Or am I horrendously out of date and crushing my daughters' souls by just letting them play with whatever they like playing with whether it's a doll, a ball or a tea set?!

No time for long post, but thought a link to Let Toys be Toys would be apt. Its a campaign against retailers stereotyping toys which began from an MN thread a few years ago.

lettoysbetoys.org.uk

Let kids play with what they want regardless of their sex, stop putting them in boxes!

I never knew this was a thing.

Both my sons love diggers, cars and trucks. But youngest now wants a dolly.

My eldest is very boyish it was never encouraged or stopped though he is who he is, youngest is a bit more flexible and we go along with that too.

I found the gender stereotyping started at around 3yo with DS1; up until then he liked purple and pink buses, but suddenly one day he announced that they were for girls and refused to countenance anything in those colours any more. It must have come from nursery 'cos it certainly wasn't us.

Bloody society.

'there are no such things as girl toys and boy toys, only toys'
F1fan this is the mantra in our house too, which has had to be extended to 'there are no such things as girl colours and boy colours' and 'there are no such things as girl cartoons and boy cartoons' and 'there are no such things as girl musical instruments and boy musical instruments' . . .because as DS gets older the external pressure is suggesting more and more 'things' that he isn't allowed to do or watch or own or play. And I'm sure it's just as reductive for girls

I would say, as with most things in life, it's about balance.

And with most parenting issues it's about looking at your child as an individual.

So it makes me equally sad that my friend's DH wouldn't allow (?) her to buy her little boy the doll he really, really wanted for his birthday and that my other friend proudly proclaims her girls "play with train sets and don't like dolls".

It makes me sad because in my house which has both trains sets and dolls the little boy in question spends his whole time playing with a particular doll. The girls I mentioned play with train sets unless their mum isn't there and then they head straight to the Barbies/ Baby Annabelle/Dollshouse.

So both boys and girls are being told that playing with dolls/playing house makes them "less".

I have boy/girl twins and I still remember the collective gasp of horror from a group of (educated NCT) Mum's when I returned with my DS from the baby change in a pink Babygrow. We'd been out all day and I was down to my last spare outfit.

"Wait until we tell your DH" they crowed.

"DH went to work wearing a pink shirt this morning"

"That's not the same!"

"It absolutely is"

So I think challenge is good where you are opening up opportunities for your child to play or wear whatever they'd like. But I think it's a bad thing where you are using it to close down opportunities (banning Disney, dresses or dolls for girls)

I used to look after two children (separately) aged about a year. They both had soft toys, train set, books, balls etc. The only "gender" toy I think they had was a train set, and they both had that.

At a year if you gave the boy something he's look it over carefully, see if it rolled on the floor and then take it apart (very good with hands-could manage child proof medicine bottles easily!).
If you gave it to the girl she rocked it in her arms and pretended to feed it her cup.

Neither was learnt behaviours. I once tried seeing if the boy wanted to feed his teddy with the cup. I carefully did it in front of him. he asked for the cup, so I placed the teddy carefully in his arms and gave him the cup. He turned the teddy upside down and rolled the cup down his back before removing the lid...

I can't see why people worry about this so much. Kids like what they like, who cares if its 'stereotypical' or not? Disclaimer: am not in the least bit 'crunchy' and this morning called a very pretty 20 week old boy a girl as he had a pink blanket and a pram printed with leaves and grass....

But Witch that just tells us about that particular Little boy and that particular little girl.

It doesn't tell you about all girls and all boys.

There are plenty of children for whom the play behaviours would be reversed. The point is not to shut anyone's opportunities down by telling them you have to behave this way because you are a boy or a girl.

Oh god, I see this a lot on some fb groups. Also, it seems that if you cut your son's hair, rather than let it grow long, you are not as good as those who don't cut their son's hair. I don't get it. My son looks way cuter with a hair cut, he doesn't seem to mind them, and I don't see the problem with boys with short hair ffs??!!

My boy can play with whatever he wants. We have a kitchen, a doll, tractor, duplo, train set, drawing stuff, balls... and shock horror he has a lot of blue clothes!! Amgz. Not so much because I want him to be stereotypical boy, but because he looks nice in it. He also has some brightly coloured tops and neutral jeans etc, but no - I don't dress him in a princessy dress, because I don't want to and he has not expressed a need for it. This annoys me so much, people go so far to the other side that they are practically forcing stereotypical girl things on boys (and the other way around), rather than letting kids be kids. Grrr. rant over!

Yabu to think worrying about gender stereotyping is ott.

However trading your post you seen to think that this involves not allowing toys like dolls- which in itself is gender stereotyping as dolls are not a girls toy, they are just seen as such. There'a nothing to stop a boy playing with a doll except social pressure.

I worry very much about gender stereotyping. This simply means I don't exclude things because theyre "for boys".

But there are an awful lot of people who think girls should only play with and do "girls things" and boys should not do "girl things".

It is very harmful.

Of course you let your dd play with dolls, or be a pink princess. It's the gender stereotyping of toys, and the rigidly enforced gender roles that is the problem - seeing dolls as 'girls' toys, and trucks and fire engines as 'boys' toys. Everything in a choice of pink or blue. Boy's and girl's toy sections in shops - this is the problem, it tacitly or overtly tells children that they should only be playing with stuff suited to their gender.

To those poo-pooing parent's concerned about this - as a pp says, the Science Museum currently has an exhibition implying that gender, or 'girl brain' or 'boy brain' is hardwired before even being born. Which is nonsense. It damages young people on every level - whether it's a boy being made to feel it's wrong to play with a doll, or a girl being told she has 'girl brain' so won't like maths and science.

Furthermore, girls that, say, do like maths and science, want their hair short and wear masculine clothes are being told they are actually transgender boys - and vice versa. That's kids as young as 4 being treated for transgenderism when all they are doing is not conforming to the socially constructed gender norms.

I was recently reading about how a couple had twins and they were raising them gender neutral and were very disappointed that the girl wnated to play with dolls.

So basically they don't want gender neutral, they want her to act like a boy.

Or the stereotype of a boy, IYSWIM

As I recently wrote on another thread daughter plays with toys that she wants to play with be that dolls, dinosaurs, cars or playdoh. She wears lots of different colours, as do I. We both like the colour pink and neither of us are adverse to a little bit of glitter. If I had a son I would have no problem with his also liking any of the above.

I did however find it strange that when we went to a new toddler group a few weeks back I witnessed a mother try to convince her 2 year old son to put down the superhero costume and put on instead a pink princess gown, her son wasn't impressed but she looked guiltily at her friends and said "I don't understand he loves his dresses at home".

I don't think too much pressure to conform or not to conform is particularly healthy!

Ooo, I think I might have seen the original comment on the fb page. Is it a certain ethical children's shop page? I didn't comment as a few things have kicked off on there recently.
But I agree. If a child (of either gender) enjoys something then just buy them it! My daughter has dolls. My sons have cars. Daughter also had cars, space rockets and robots. Youngest son wears dresses when he can get away with it and won't go out without his hair clips in. Middle son won't look anything if he deems it remotely girly. Daughter has got worse at the "this is for girls/boys" nonsense since going to school last year but forgot about it over the summer holiday.
Buy kids what they like. Expose them to a wide range of toys. Ignore stereotypes BUT respect your child and don't be mock outraged if your daughter likes pink. No one cares!

"The idea is not to stop girls and boys playing with stereotypical girl and boy toys, it is to make sure that a girl does not stop playing with 'boy' toys and boys don't stop playing with 'girl' toys because of gender stereotyping."

^this.

'Just let them play with what they want' is fine, but you realise that girls don't 'naturally' prefer pink, don't you? It is marketed heavily to them almost from day zero. (Yes I know pink is just a colour, I'm using it as an example where it's very clear there's no inbuilt preference) And of course their friends reinforce ideas of girls and boys toys.

So of course some people might tie themselves in knots unnecessarily sometimes, but if there's no attempt to challenge it then we're left with science kits targeted at boys only, jewellery kits for girls, etc etc. And parents saying 'oh I gave completely free choice and my daughter just happens to prefer jewellery to science.

I agree OP but I also think that the parents over-worrying about gender stereotyping are not the ones to get annoyed at.

Get annoyed at the corporations who created this ridiculous gender divide in the first place. Get annoyed at the marketing teams who don't give a crap about your kids and can only see the dollar signs flashing up when parents have to fork out for another bicycle because little Oliver wouldn't be seen dead on his elder sister's pink bike.

They're the ones you should be annoyed at. The over anxious parents are simply reacting against this crap.

The reaction against the problem isn't the problem. The problem is the problem.

In response to your actual thread title, I think YABU, as now my DS has been at school a while I've had to counteract a fair bit of harmful gender stereotypes re toys/colours/tv programmes/animals ()/clothes, and he's not particularly unusual (no tutus or bunches etc).

If you're talking more about those that make it into some huge crusade against all forms of pink for girls/trucks for boys then YANBU at all! It gets right on my wick.
My DM was one of those, and frankly it's just as limiting as the other way around.

Just to be clear, I don't mean you should pressurise children, my post was aimed at people implying gender stereotyping is an invented problem and parents concerned about it are just being pretentious.

What VforV said

ballpark "The reaction against the problem isn't the problem. The problem is the problem."

YY, this with bells on!

I see it as one of those imaginary problems that crunchy parents invented to give themselves something else to "challenge" and not conform to.
In the real world, kids play with toys. That's all they see. A toy.
It's not like they look at a toy tractor and see an imaginary sign on top of it that reads "Only Penises Allowed"
My Dd has dolls, pink teddy bears, loads of Disney princess crap stuff, but she's also got a set of Toot Toot cars with a garage and a menagerie of dinosaurs (she takes great delight in holding them up and shouting raaaaaaaaa!! ).

I fail to see why me buying a pink t-shirt for her instead of a yellow one is a problem in the mind of the "gender non-conformists" I actually saw someone on a Facebook group then other day describe her Dd as "my female-presenting child" what sort of wanky bollocks is that?!

And Lessthan and Rose

Eggy I agree to a point - small children and toddlers couldn't give a shit by and large, a toy is a toy, but the more socialised they are the more gender stereotypes creep in and become 'rules' that they adopt.
School age children tend to be very conformist and loathe to go against the tide.
Hence, my 2yo is absolutely free and easy and plays with anything he likes, but my 5yo has self imposed (ie societal) rules he's picked up from his friends/TV ads etc and often makes comments or refuses something he claims is 'for girls'. It's frustrating, and IS worth working against.

Eggy, you buying a yellow/pink/purple striped with clashing green lighting bolts on it t-shirt is not at all damaging to you, your DD or anybody else.
The fact that you/she have little choice or have to actively seek out an alternative choice or have to defend your choice or explain that she is a girl 'in spite' of the fact that she wears, say, green - that is a problem.