How do you (and indeed can you) stop little girls becoming "mini-whores in pink and tinsel"

[snickersnack]

I have never come across Miley Cyrus before this Vanity Fair fuss - as the parent of a 3 year old dd I've been spared that for now. But reading Germaine Greer in today's Guardian on the commercialisation/sexualisation of childhood got me wondering about the way she's already turning into a super-girly, pink-obsessed princess. I am pretty sure it's nothing I've encouraged actively - when I look in her wardrobe there's a lot of non-pink stuff there (mostly unworn), she has cars (mostly unplayed with) and I try and remind her regularly that it's not all about being pretty (though I'm not winning that battle).

How do you, as a parent of a young girl, teach them to be feisty and brave and bothered about important stuff? And not a fluffy pink fluffle of a thing.

I have a pink hallway

And that's not a euphemism

I don't worry about it at all ... you never know what's around the corner with children. Today pink and girly. Tomorrow/next week/next month/next year ... who knows!

I've stopped buying clothes that are not pink because that's all DD age 3 will wear. She loves playing out on her bike, and gets very dirty digging in the garden. She loves princesses, fairies and ballerinas, but is equally passionate about Thomas the Tank, Fireman Sam and is very interested in construction toys suchas lego and sticklebricks.

However even if she was completely obsessed with pink girly-type stuff, it wouldn't bother me as long as she was happy and confident about who she is.

I was really girlie as a child - liked dolls, reading etc and hated all the rough and tumble play my brother was into.

But the whole 'pink thing' is just so obviously commercial and I hate the idea of my child being soiled by that.

I am totally with margoandjerry on the pink shoes ban. Mine wears shiny black patents (the kind I longed for as a child)which go with everything.

Oh Greer. She's full of it

dont worry my little girl always wanted to wea dresses ( but rarely did as who can be bothered to iron them? seriously)

and she was a girly girl

now she is 15 and her favourite colour is BLACK , black hoodie, black jeans, black tshirts, black eyeliner, black hair.

Totally cannot stand this weird consumer obsession with pink. Have two DDs and my older one in particular (3.5) is pink/princess/fairy/sparkly obsessed even though I try to avoid it - her room is multi-coloured as are her clothes, plates etc. But she still wants the pink cup, the pink t-shirt etc etc. Keep trying to steer her towards SNow White as at least her dress is blue!

And don't get me started on children's books - the amount of books she has been given that run through a plot checklist of fairies/princesses going to beauty salons/hairdressers/clothes-shopping and finishing with a party/ball/more shopping. All in pink.

Makes me long for the days when Barbie was a doctor or an astronaut.

I loathed black patents as a kid. I always scuffed them on day 2 and then they looked shite for months.

I don't find any difficulty in sourcing clothes in colours other than pink for 5 year old dd.

She loved pink when younger, grew out of it though and now prefers blue, green, brown and purple

Surely not in the remotest bit important?

And the children's books comment? Good grief - dd has hardly any fairy / princess books. So much good children's literature to choose from

last time I was in H&M the girl's clothes came in a huge aray of colours, it was definately not mostly pink. PErhaps pink just happens to be the olour that little girls like best, not because of social conditioning, but because they like it best?

I know that at the age of 3 and 4 children can be very very gender stereotypical, because they are just identifying with themselves as either male or female, just begining to realise there is a difference, but have not yet grasped the notion of gender-permenance, so for a 3 year old to be a girl she has to look like a girl, same for a boy, if they are mistaken for the wrong sex then to their minds they could become the opposite sex. I think that's where the obsession with pink stems.

i think it must come down to role models.i seem to have produced 3 very non-pink girls,and i havent actually tried to influence them,in fact,i bought dd1 disney princess and barbie stuff when she was little.now she is 9 and very interested in wicca. she wont wear pink.atall.

dd2 is 2.5 and obsessed with cars.she has been since she was about 9 months and shunned her baby toys in favour of ds2's cars.she would rather watch top gear than cbeebies.

dd3 is only 13 months,so its a bit early to tell,but she tends to go for anything to do with animals atm.

ive not had any problem finding non-pink shoes.dd2 has some white with rainbow strap shoes for everyday and a pair of black shoes for nice.i saw a child wearing leli kelli(?sp)shoes the other day and i wanted to rescue her from the evil person who put them on her

It is a phase. As soon as they are confident in gender permenance they deviate more from their rigid gender stereotypes.

At DS's primary school, all the reception girls are in pink, but if you look at the girls in yr4 5 or 6 there is very little pink or glitter.

pink is a very soothing calming colour.

I found the same thing with skirts and dresses - dd would insist on wearing exclusively skirts and dresses when a 2 and 3 year old. Now she is perfectly happy in jeans

Don't want to put you off but it gets much worse: impossible to buy non-pink/ non-harlot clothes now for DD1 (11) unless we go for boys stuff.. at simplest, girls t-shirts are fitted but boys are loose, girls jeans have addedd sparkle/ glitter (and don't wear so well).

And as for shoes! Please Clark's reconsider your decision not to make nice girls summer crepe soled t-bar for summer; pink is completely impractical, open toes even more impractical in our climate... DD3 only one still young enough to want these "buckle shoes" but we've run out of shops with old stock to buy them in. What do other girls wear in the summer: we end up with cheap Converse-type sneakers for jeans and cheap Birkentock things for skirts/ dresses...

FWIW check out fat face (sale is 50% off), TK Maxx (some very nice non pink things if you look hard enough), some Boden (but same t-shirt problem: clinging to11 year old buds?!)

What about a mumsnet campaign to make Clarkes make shoes we want? And another thing, where can you get ankle boots (kickers/ DM but without the attitude) for girls over about size 11... yet again I end up in TK Maxx where they sometimes have German ankle boots to wear with jeans/ trousers all winter... girls don't need knee length boots to climb trees. And school shoes for a size 5? So horrid and lumpen!

There's a real opening for enterprising mnetter: real clothes for real girls up to age 14...

But that's my point - it's not "just a phase" for us because DD is not old enough to express a preference. It's imposed on girls externally and then, unsurprisingly, they internalise it. Literally every shoe in the shop was pink (and sparkly). No orange, no green, no black. The one option was yellow (with pink butterflies). She's 18mo and it's already being forced on us.

That's why I stick her in boys shoes which, tbh, are just as bad the other way (mud colours with possible truck decoration).

Boden - not cheap, but 'none harlot' clothes for older girls

'pink is a very soothing calming colour'

i disagree with that.my living room is pink(we havent got round to decorating yet)and i find it really horrible and hot and claustrophobic.

yes, there are non-pink clothes, great books etc.

BUT, i was in woolworth's today and the 'Girl's toys' (this is how the aisle was labelled) was one long sea of pink. Clearly it's no great big deal, most girls grow out of it etc etc, but it is something that has emerged relatively recently - we just didn't have that representation of what it means to be a girl when we were kids.

Likewise books, of course there are loads of books but an increasingly large proportion of them, marketed at girls, are one long obsession with fairies/princesses. Try looking in the gift secion of waterstones - fairy castle/fairy wedding/princess wedding/fairy beauty salon etc etc. And it annoys me. Enid Blyton was pretty sexist in her own way but pink didn't feature. Or beauty salons.

The pink thing was a bit of a red herring, I think. It's not really the pink that worries me, it was a shorthand for being fixated on appearance as this seems to manifest itself as a pink obsession. I'm more concerned about the marketing pressures that little girls come up against, and how you help them deal with it. I don't really care if she wears pink, I do care about the fact she's going to grow up being made to think that how she looks is the most important thing. Some useful ideas on here though, the role model thing is interesting - there is one older girl of 10 or so who she adores and who is very much the kind of non-fluffy little girl I'd like dd to become...

H&M too - none pink options!