to wonder how the heck these kids got these ideas?

[NormalityBites]

My DD has just started nursery, she is 3.2. When picking her up I've been talking to some of the other kids, all 3-4 years old. I was getting her wellies when a little boy demanded to know whose they were, and refused to believe that they were DD's because they are blue. Apparently girls can't wear blue, it is for boys. I told him that anyone can wear any colour and it doesn't matter if they are a boy or a girl. I said that DD's Daddy wears pink. Now he keeps telling DD that her Daddy is a girl.

Approached by a little girl of exactly DD's age, I was asked if DD likes Barbie. Then if she likes princesses. I had to ask DD if she even knew what a Barbie or a princess was - she didn't/doesn't have a clue. I was told that ALL girls like princesses and ALL boys like Ben 10 (which to be fair I have no idea about!) and cars. I asked DD what she liked and she said tigers, spiders and trains. She hasn't got the foggiest idea that people gender specify colours and activities, and I really wanted it to be a while before she found that out

AIBU to wonder where these ideas come from? Is this really normal??? Barbie vs Ben 10, pink vs blue, and ne'er the twain shall meet? I'm not blaming the kids, and know that they are really at the discovering/defining self stage. But they have to pick it up from somewhere. Is the world really so divisive that 3 year olds can be so sexist?

Interesting.

My 4.5yo was commented upon by his teacher (reception) regarding the colours he chose for paper weaving. Whilst the girls all chose different shades of pink, ds (I am told) was much more imaginative, chosing a green background (favourite colour) with pink and yellow (does actually look quite nice ). But a lot of the girls in his class are fixated on pink and princesses (with the occasional fairy). Its quite difficult to avoid! (Oh, and despite lack of colour paranoia, ds is very much into Ben10 unfortunately!)

It is sad, isn't it?

They pick it up form older ones, parents and tv/advertising/etc. Even 'decent' kids tv is gender stereotyped. And in shops, toys are very gender stereotyped. Pink kitchens and blue cars, etc.

Pisses me off. I have no doubt that there are genuine gender differences, but not to the ridiculous extent we have.

Have you googled Pink Stinks? Been a few discussions on it here and you might be interested.

I hate pink, but it's really quite hard to avoid it in girls clothes. I like nice bright primary colours for children - nice & cheerful.

Clothes are a nightmare.

You can get nothing BUT pink for wee girls.

It a bit sad but it is pretty normal in most children I know. I tend to just let mine pick whatever they want my daughter often picks pink but also yellow and green etc my son picks alot of pink although as he gets older i expect he will stop picking pink because of the attitudes you describe. I tend to let it go I have no real problem with pink as long as its not the only option (annoys when you can only get pink though)

I'm not much into pink myself, I used to actively dislike it but I calmed down when I had a DD I've been quite careful to treat it like any other colour, knowing that banning it would have the opposite effect that I intended. It can be tricky to find girls clothes without pink, but DD's wardrobe is very balanced, with a lot of oranges, reds, turquoise, browns, purples etc. I've worked hard to keep it that way. She has a dressing up box, that has fireman outfits alongside butterfly wings and fake beards alongside handbags. She loves her train set and her dolls house. Her bedroom is turquoise. She's been in a toy shop only once in her life and I didn't let her go down the pink aisle I just wonder how they get so segregated so young, when my DD and all the other kids I know have never shown sexism in this way

YABU and a tad disingenuous, I think. Gender stereotyping starts at birth and is everywhere - TV, book, films, toys, advertising. It sucks.

UK is terrible for this. I never noticed it so much before we moved to Switzerland (from Germany) and the DC had English friends for the first time.

One of the little boys said to DS 'you cannot sit on that car seat, it is pink'. The car seat is dark burgundy, and has never bothered DS before.

DS did like 'boy toys' - cars, diggers etc but also played with his sister and her barbies. All of a sudden he started asking for Ben 10 and Transformers.

YANB entirely U but from experience (ds is now 4.5 and dd nearly 2), you need to be realistic. DS has been coming home from first nursery and now school with all sorts of 'statements' and ideas that he has picked up from the other kids in his class. And talks knowingly about things like Batman, Spiderman and Ben10 even though he has never watched any of them (and would be terrified if he did! ). I've tried hard to ensure that we didn't over-stereotype stuff like colours, toys etc at home, but even so, it is glaringly obvious that dd's wardrobe has a good whack of, for example, pink stuff in it, whilst ds' doesn't. Having said that, dd plays equally with dolls and hand-me-down trains, cars, planes, dinosaurs etc and I am glad that one result of having an older brother is so mucn exposure to 'gender-neutral' toys, since I'm not convinced I would have bought a garage, train set etc for her (although I would like to think so...).

So where does it come from? Well, other kids, us (a bit, even when we don't mean to), the world they observe around them, tv if they watch it, and so on. I just try very hard to remind ds that boys can wear pink (daddy wears pink shirts here too!) and girls can be pirates and batman if they want. So far its mostly working...so don't despair

I recall the following exchange when at nursery:

Little girl was crying as she had hurt herself...
Small boy (3) to father: Daddy why is she crying?
Father: Girls are crap and cry all the time, don't bother about her.

This was particularly ironic because this particular small boy used to cry for at least 20 minutes each morning after he was dropped off and often cried when other parents came to pick up their children but not him.
I nearly said to the father "your son is the biggest cry baby in this nursery you sexist git!" but thought this would provoke a scene and would not help the poor boy (who was definitely a sensitive soul).

So...this boy was being told this stuff because his father was a sexist shithead.

Our nursery had a fair few male staff and a couple of them used to delight in deliberately wearing pink t-shirts. They never stopped the boys wearing blue or the girls being pink if they wanted to, but they wouldn't allow kids to put one another down or to mock any boy who wanted to dress like a princess. Quite often I'd arrive to find DS racing round in a Snow White dress and nobody would ever have questioned it or even noticed - adults or children. Not the same now he's at school though..

My two year old boy loves bags, sunglasses (inside, in the rain, at night) watches and hats. His favourite outfit is a shirt and tie. His brother and father are not interested in that stuff. So maybe children just like what they like. I do think some people would be bothered by a boy carrying a handbag. But is that really the worst thing in the world? I think the kind of people who force any kind of gender sterotyping on an innocent child show ignorance. What they are afraid of is someone being different to them, because it could mean they were wrong.

My DD (nearly 5) comes out with all this stuff constantly: Pink is for girls, blue is for boys. Boys all hate pink. Girls all hate blue. That is a boy's blue vest, I won't wear it. She wants everything pink, and loves Sleeping Beauty who wears pink (she calls her Pinka )

I pick her up on it and say "everyone can like what they like, my favourite colour is blue and I'm not a boy" etc.
I don't really like it and it has surprised me how strong the environmental pull towards it is. There are loads of other things she doesn't notice but obviously this one has really sunk in. None of it has come from us, I'm 99% sure. We did get somewhere by reminding her that if everything was pink, a rainbow would not be so beautiful....

What amazed me was one day she came out with (watching something on TV about a clever girl) "That's silly! Girls are pretty, boys are smart!" I nearly had a fit, tried very hard to stay calm and reasonable and explain, that's silly, everyone can be clever etc. But it really shook me. I was racking my brains how on earth she has got hold of that idea.

Absolutely love the idea of the male nursery staff, even without the pink t-shirts, but with them - fantastic.

Looked at the pinkstinks campaign but it seems very aggressive and negative. I would rather she just has an open mind to non-pink things than trying to stop her having what she likes, IKSWIM.

I really hate the habit retailers have of doing two of a toy, one in mixed primary colours and the other in pink. Do some parents really deprive their DDs of Lego or tricycles because there isn't a pink one? Or rather, do they need to be reminded to buy these things for girls by seeing a pink one?

In the corner shop the other day, she was looking at the choc bars and said "Where is the one that girls can't have?" I was about to go into the "Of course girls can have anything that boys can have..." then she pointed out the Yorkie. A woman crossed out symbol and Not For Girls plastered all over it. What do you say in the face of that?

The earlier story about the dad saying "girls are crap" reminded me of that. They (I assume) think it's ironic and humourous and if you find it sexist you have no SOH, but it does affect how our daughters think.

[meant to only write one line but a massive rant came out emoticon]

My ds 5.5 does this all the time, he recently told me i shouldnt watch football, as i was a girl!

He found it hard to believe that women play football too and have teams etc. Perhaps more to do with you only see men playing football on TV, than our attitudes at home. Also adverts for toys seem to be gender based, so perhaps lots of children get their ideas from there.

In his defence he did walk downstairs wearing my make up just the other day and then asked why boys didnt wear it!

My MIL taught DD the rhyme "Pink to make the boys wink" I mean WTF? I ensure that I very rarely buy her pink and tell her that she can do anything she wants to do in life. I have to keep reminding DF to let her be and not say things like 'but she is a girl' when she is doing her pretend karate like Princess Fiona or climbing up her swing, etc

although DD does love Ben 10 but I think its because she hero worships her big cousin

One wierd thing my daughter keeps saying is "only boys can smoke" now thats wierd as no one here smokes, men or women and smoking is a huge no no for anyone as far as I am concerned and yet somewhere she has the idea that men smoke women do not? I have no idea where from!

On Monday it was the first day of the January intake into our reception class. One of the new boys dressed up in a lilac fairy dress and pink wings and ran around with a wand. No one batted an eyelid. I love this class

My dd 8.7 comes out with this sort of nonsense too. She told me that her dad was probably a poof because he wore pink shirts to work. My face must have given my feelings away. She then became all placatory and said she was only joking. I asked her where she'd heard that sort of nonsense and she told me a boy at school had said it to someone else. I asked her if she knew what a poof was. She didn't. I was exceptionally annoyed, she was a bridesmaid at our poofy friends wedding, she is a very accepting little girl. The boy in question has a very unstable home life and I suspect it was macho dad's words coming out.

it won't always come from home - I have 3 girls, we're not a frilly pink filled house that only has barbies and pink scooters. Going down the toy aisles wherever we are - my youngest who is only 3 comments that 'these are the boys toys mummy' or 'this isn't the girls aisle' etc etc. We don't watch much tv with adverts but the message still gets through somewhere. I cant believe that already at her age the message is driven home

they grow out of it (except Katie Price)