Gendered brains

[MissScarletInTheBallroom]

I've read a few interesting posts recently - including just now by @haXXor on the Lib Dems thread - about the concept of "brain sex", making the point that it is impossible to tell whether any observable differences between male and female brains are down to nature or nurture.

In other words, if I am a girly girl, is it because of my DNA, or it is because my mum dressed me in pink frilly dresses and gave me dolls to play with from birth and everyone else treated me accordingly?

I am the mother of two toddlers, a boy and a girl, and I can already see how gender stereotypes are affecting them. And yes, if I'm honest, my daughter does have a lot of pink, flowery clothes. The clothes she wears to nursery are generally the same kind of practical leggings and T-shirts her brother wore, only hers tend to be pink. When she was tiny I often dressed her in her brother's hand me downs and felt irrationally annoyed when people thought she was a boy. Sometimes for special occasions I do like to put a dress on her, because she looks adorable.

Clothes aside, my son is obsessed with trucks and cars, but sometimes at nursery he will pick up and play with a doll. We never had dolls in the house until my daughter was born, and now of course we do because her grandparents were desperate to buy them for her. But she prefers to play with her brother's toys, as well as things which are not toys such as mobile phones, card readers, cables, everything you don't really want your baby to play with. She also has a much more extroverted personality compared to her brother, who is quite shy and sensitive.

Without wanting to be too extreme about it because I do want to put her in cute dresses sometimes, what is the best way to avoid gendered stereotypes in raising my children to encourage their brains to develop in the best way for each of them to reach their full potential, whatever that is, rather than what society thinks they should be doing based on their sex?

Gina Ripon’s ‘The Gendered Brain’ is worth looking up on this subject, OP.

Being "a girly girl" cannot be because of DNA, because "girly girl" is a set of behaviours that are culturally defined.

I would say not to get too hung up on avoiding stereotypes; fashions and trends will always exist, and it is always a choice to follow them or avoid them by treading our own paths.

For your kids, you should reassure them that however they wish to dress, or toys they wish to play with, or if they want to play roughly or calmly that is okay, and perfectly normal.

At the same time you can remind them that some people take these issues very seriously, and around the world they are enforced less or more strictly depending on the culture surrounding them.

But I don't think it's helpful to raise a "genderless" child. By giving a girl pink stuff to wear it is equally likely that they will reject it purely because it comes from their parents. Some kids are just like that.

Yeah, I am not saying I want to raise "genderless" children.

I once met a woman who told me she was a non binary person raising two non binary children who would be allowed to choose whether they want to be a girl or a boy or something else. I thought that was fucking ridiculous, quite frankly.

And I also know that even if I tried to raise my own children "without gender", realistically they spend most of their waking hours outside the home being looked after by other people, who will impose their own perspectives on my children whether I like it or not. I can't control everything they will be exposed to in their childhood.

Regarding the pink stuff, I guess I take the view that I have at least another year, probably longer, before my daughter starts expressing an opinion about what she wants to wear. I could dress her in nothing but sad beige, or her brother's hand me downs, in an effort to raise her in a gender neutral way, only for her to tell me very firmly a year from now that what she wants to wear is pink dresses. And if that happened I'd probably feel a little bit sad that I didn't dress her in pretty things when she was little. Equally, if in a year's time she tells me her favourite colour is blue and refuses to wear dresses, I will respect that.

So with clothes specifically, I guess what I'm asking is, is there any harm in dressing her in pretty stuff when she's too little to really care what she is wearing - as long as it is still practical and not impeding her physical movement in a way that "boys' clothes" wouldn't, or am I ingraining stereotypes even by doing that?

In terms of toys, I suspect she will gravitate more towards trucks and cars in the early years at least, because that is what we have the most of at home and that is mainly what her brother likes to play with.

I don't want to be too militant about it, I just want to try and avoid being a contributing factor in my children having very fixed ideas about what stereotypes boys and girls should be conforming to at a young age.

We were all dressed in orange and brown corduroy with identical bowl haircuts in the 70s, society still ended up with a pink toy aisle and a blue toy aisle by the time we had our own kids 😬

Dress your children in whatever you like, as long as it’s, comfortable, non restrictive and non-harmful (and don’t get cross if the frill gets ripped off the pretty dress while your daughter is climbing a tree).

When your children start to show their own preferences for haircuts and clothing support them to choose within your ordinary budget and within sensible health and safety rules.

I’ve always gone for a combo of an expansive dressing up box plus comfy messy clothes at home but closely sticking to the uniform rules at school, which echoes the reality of work life and home life for most people.

The only non-negotiable in the growing years has been properly fitted footwear (youngest is now in the pubertal growth spurt so my Clarks shoes era is almost over, thank fuck!)

Thank you, just downloaded this to add to my already very long reading list!

No matter what you do it'll be forced on them at school because of the other children. If they are confident in their own likes and dislikes and you support them they should get through it. For instance I have always derided designer items - why should I pay a fortune to advertise the company that is selling me the item, eg. Adidas? That rubbed off on my kids.
My son wore his sister's hand- me- downs at primary school - I used to get comments from other mums about his pink anorak etc., but he loved pink and the garments were in good condition, so why not? (DH loves bright colours too, and has long hair so I suppose their male role model wasn't conventional)
And we've never discouraged them from particular toys or interests. DS is in his thirties and has a lovely collection of My Little Pony plushies 😁

(Edited to sound less like I'm telling the OP off!)

Of course it's natural to contrast your two children, because they are different sex. What is actually interesting (I find) is if you have two the same sex - then imagine one is actually the opposite sex - would you find things in their nature that you would then attribute to being the opposite sex?

E.g. if you have two girls, one is more sensitive the other more boisterous but both into pink, bunnies etc (as lots of boys are in my experience!).

You can say one is sensitive and shy in a girly way, one is a bossy diva in a girly way. Yet if the sensitive one was a boy you might say 'typical nerdy boy' or the other one 'boisterous boy'.

Or two boys, one 'aggressive' and shouty you might say was, if a girl, emotional. My primary school nephew is super organised and remembers every appointment - if he was a girl this would definitely be attributed to a girly thing!

The thing to remember is unless the correlation between sex and a cluster of traits is really high, it's not particularly helpful. You can't say 'we need to hire a member of staff who's good with kids - women are on average 20% better with kids across the entire population therefore we can only hire a woman'.

Clothes, just wear what they want, ultimately it doesn't matter. It's the stereotyping of behaviours that is really harmful.

I think just giving them the available options to do/wear what they might be interested in is fine. My kids have a very strong message from us that there's no such thing as 'boys' things' or 'girls' things' but other people think that there are.

Expose them to as much as possible of everything within time and money constraints (music, dance, science, sport, languages, maths, arts). And read lots to them. Spend time with them and encourage questions. They are little for such a short time and I found it fascinating.

Point things out. I was very much against pink but didn’t try and stop if they were practical. More against the impractical clothes. I remember complaining to a clothes manufacturer that they boasted about the reinforced knees on a pair of boys trousers being good for tree climbing. There was a photo of a boy up a tree, next to a girl with a short skirt on. I remember chatting to the children about that. I asked the children if they thought the manufacturer didn’t care so much about girls’ knees or that girls should be very careful compared to boys. They said she was tougher! I fed this all back to the manufacturer and then told them about their grovelling reply.

The brain thing forget about - you provide the strong role models until they are secondary school age. Just make sure they have some good sleep and down time to process everything.

As KellieJaysLapdog says, gender stereotyping of clothes, and hairstyles, etc., took a turn for the worse after the 70s-80s.

I was looking recently at some old photos from the 70s, and honestly, you couldn't tell the teenage boys from the teenage girls - the same [awful!] hairstyles, the same short jumpers with round necklines, the same wide baggy trousers; and the teenage girls didn't have a screed of makeup on.
A photo of primary school kids was similar - lots of jogging tops and bottoms, pageboy haircuts and kicker boots.
Then there was a huge backlash [coinciding presumably with the backlash against whatever advances feminism had managed to make?] and the frilly pink princess butterfly fairy vibe came in with a vengeance.
So anybody who thinks 'I don't like the influence this wall-to-wall fairy princess mullarkey has on my little girl' is not unfairly resisting some inherent eternal girliness, they are resisting a relatively recent massive marketing campaign to sell a frilly pink 'lifestyle' to little girls.
Pink is a nice colour. Frills look nice on party outfits. Fancy little shoes are great on special occasions. No dogma

one things to consider is that if you dress your girl in pink frilly things and your boy in blue/grey, then other people are also more likely to treat them differently

watch this short video to see an example

(to begin with) I always dressed my girls in fairly neutral clothes (colorful, not strongly gendered) so as to reduce their exposure to stereotypes from others. But they did still get dresses for parties. Any by the time my youngest was 4, she went to parties in Disney princess dresses if she wanted to because I'd given up on being strict on this.

I read anecdotally about retailers inventing the pink/blue binary in the early 20th century in order to sell more. Makes sense, in that why would a mother buy something new if they could easily re-use the first thing they bought for the first baby, regardless of sex?

Didn't really catch on until about the 80s though, as shown in that Lego advert where the girl is dressed in jeans that now would be considered cut for a boy (gives me the rage that even clothing cuts are different according to sex at preschool age - tight t-shirts and cap sleeves for girls, trousers tight on the thigh with a bootcut?! Standard straight jeans for boys. And what's with the fucking SHOULDERS all stupid and puffy for girls and normal for boys)

I would say that yes, if you dress your girl in a flowery frock and mostly pink, and do not do the same for your boy, they will both assume as they grow up that there are some things 'for girls' and some things 'for boys.' This in itself isn't harmful, though I personally find it tiresome at this level since it implies that girls are supposed to be (or have the default option) to be 'pretty' and boys are supposed to be handsome / manly in darker colours and hardwearing gear. When my two (one of each) were little babies I did dress him in pink and flowers sometimes, but when people said he was a girl I was forced to examine my reactions to that. I noticed the irrational feelings that it was somehow shameful for him to be mistaken for a female. And then I tried not to show those feelings to him.

When my girl was little I dressed her in her brother's hand me downs - some of which were pink and flowery. She was often mistaken for a boy, but by then I had trained myself not to give a shiny shit.

Raising kids as nonbinary is ridiculous however, since some things ARE for girls and some for boys - for example menstruation, and single sex spaces. I just wanted to show them both that in terms of how they presented they could do whatever they felt they wanted to and not be restricted by gender norms.

My boy is rugby mad, straight as a ruler, dresses like a roadman. But he didn't blink when I got him a pink toothbrush. Not sure what that proves haha

I do find this so interesting. And as PP said Gina Ripon is fascinating on the neuroscience perspective. I have a baby girl, I buy a lot of her clothes second hand on Vinted. Obviously babies all look like babies and you can’t tell girls from boys. I find unless I dress her in pink or obviously ‘girly’ stuff people just assume she is a boy. It’s so odd. E.g today green trousers and multicoloured jumper, everyone sees a little boy. But adult women don’t walk around only wearing pink, it’s strange it’s the norm just for children. Also interesting that historically pink was a colour for little boys, I’m not sure when it changed perhaps the Victorian era?

I think just provide choice. I went from being a 3-4 year old who loved ballet and dressing up as a fairy to a 8-10 year old who cut my hair short and only wore baggy jeans and hoodies (still went to ballet class). Parents always just let me do my thing which I think is the best way. And yes we can’t fully protect them from the ridiculousness of the world we live in!

I think a certain amount of hands-offness is helpful in a lot of child-rearing.

I also think the brain being influenced in it's developmental pathway thing is true but often understood in a somewhat surface way. Sure, maybe it's things like toys at the nursery. But it's also real things, like the experience of being a brain developing in a female rather than male body, physically. Even the social parts of the male or female experience aren't just arbitrary. Some social norms and roles reflect real differences in experience or common differences in temperament.

I think just offering kids lots of options to reflect their interests and being positive about them, whether they are "girly" girls or something else, is fine.

Most kids do go through a period of being more rigid about gender norms like clothes, or interests like princesses or superheros or whatever. It's normal, by the time they are 10 they have pretty much all figured out that most of this stuff is conventional rather than innate. They go through similar concrete thinking about other things in childhood. Then you often get a period of reflexive rebellion which is also conventional (not that they will admit that.)

It seems to me you are doing a pretty good job already!

We all live in a gendered society and we all have to figure out sex and gender. And in the process, children can be extremely gender conforming, extremely gender non-conforming, and gender neutral, and sometimes all at the same time in different ways. When my DC was in primary school, the teacher ran a dance class after school. Several of DC's male schoolfriends would go dancing and then dash off to rugby practice afterwards.

Plus, what you do as a child doesn't pre-determine how you grow up. The frilly flouncy frock I demanded as an eight year old didn't stop me getting a PhD in a techie subject or spending my twenties in Tshirts and jeans. (And let's set aside the skin-tight pencil skirt and the pink dungarees I tried in my teens, both of which were very impractical for different reasons!) And I know that women can be just as technically competent as men whether they wear smart heels and make-up or flat shoes and bare face.

So I would just try to offer options, support your children's choices and explorations and nudge them towards reality *no you can't be a mum when you grow up but dad still look after the baby". And not close off options for the future.

Having said all that, at the moment our society is saturated with the idea that letting someone change their gender identity and then change their body to match is the solution to all sorts of problems. It's not easy to counter those beliefs when so many people still promote them without question. But they are starting to be challenged and I am hoping that these ideas will fade away, hopefully before your children are really old enough to put themselves at risk.

I think you do have to accept that you have already contributed to your children's idea of gender and hold your hands up to that fact: you dress your daughter, but not your son, in pink and flowery clothing; you say you put your daughter in dresses because she looks adorable in them, but I'm sure your son would, too! Unfortunately, I don't know a single heterosexual parent who doesn't in some way impose gender stereotypes on their children, even those parents would describe themselves as being totally against gender stereotypes.

I'm not having a go at you, I just think that parents need to really critically examine their own behaviour and how they may be imposing gender stereotypes on babies who, let's face it, really couldn't give a fuck what colour they are wearing as long as their clothes are comfortable, or what toys they are playing with as long as they can chew them.

Incidentally, my daughter is also usually mistaken for a boy as I mostly dress her in blue. It never bothers me, except in the case of one old woman, who was particularly insistent that my then-4-week-old baby must be a boy, because, "Her blanket is blue!" I was sleep deprived and snapped, "Yes, but she has a vagina," which shut her up!

(gives me the rage that even clothing cuts are different according to sex at preschool age - tight t-shirts and cap sleeves for girls, trousers tight on the thigh with a bootcut?! Standard straight jeans for boys. And what's with the fucking SHOULDERS all stupid and puffy for girls and normal for boys)

Absolutely this, it's madness. I went looking for trousers for a boy and all the colours he liked had frills or bows on the pockets or were leggings.

Someone bought him a dinosaur tshirt without realising it had puffy shoulders.

So with clothes specifically, I guess what I'm asking is, is there any harm in dressing her in pretty stuff when she's too little to really care what she is wearing - as long as it is still practical and not impeding her physical movement in a way that "boys' clothes" wouldn't, or am I ingraining stereotypes even by doing that?

Basically, yes, you are ingraining stereotypes and you need to be honest with yourself about that. It doesn't mean you need to stop doing it, but it's ridiculous to pretend that you aren't dressing her in certain clothes just because she's a girl, and that will definitely be sending a subtle message to both your son and daughter about "boys things" and "girls things".

look at it in an ungendered way-

Always Dress the child for the occasion- practical trouser type clothes for scrambling around. More formal clothes for fancy situations.

Everyone needs to contain their behaviour in fancy situations- no ‘boys will be boys’. If it’s a children’s party in a play centre jeans are better that dresses.

Choose bold colourful and neutral for both, and check the messaging- she can be ‘daddy’s little scientist’ too. No one should be mummy’s little monster.

You have already set up gendered behaviour by not having prams and dolls for your son. He has been shown really clearly that babies are for girls.
You need to address that quite powerfully by buying her toy tools, toy dr sets etc. I don’t know how old he is for you to redress it with him.

I’m depressed we’re needing to do this. We’ve been working on it since the 60s, were doing Well in the 70s, I had my boys in the 90s and they tried on my shoes, had handbags and pushchairs, as well as trucks and Lego.

What’s your home dynamic like? Does dad wield a vacuum as well as a drill? Are you doing DIY?

Dress her in what you like while she doesn't have an opinion. That will soon change!

My daughter wore a range of clothes for her first 4 years then she was vehemently anti anything 'girly'. I used to take her to dress up days at school in Batman outfits because she wouldn't want to be a princess, that's too boring.

She's autistic and she then went through her I want to be a boy phase where she literally wore boys clothes every day for years. She was always mistaken for a boy and she started playing on a boys cricket team. This lasted for years. We had the trans querying phase and I was persistent with the 'no wrong way to be a girl' thing and guess what, now post puberty she's still not in dresses BUT she's wearing girls cut clothes has grown her hair long etc and no longer thinks she's a boy. She still plays cricket with the same boys she's always played with.

I know this wasn't the purpose of your post but I wouldn't overthink it. Ultimately they will wear what they want. When my daughter only wore boys clothes someone on here suggested she say 'they're not boys clothes they're my clothes'. I thought that was brilliant.

When I was pregnant with my eldest I only bought boy stereotype clothes because that’s what I wore myself at the time (baggy jeans, check shirts, band T shirts). I hadn’t found out the sex at a scan (hospital policy at the time) and didn’t really think about anything beyond my own taste. When I laundered it all prior to my due date my elderly nanna helped me and she asked
me what I would do if it was a girl?

I stared at her, she stared back and then we both cracked up. I told her if she really wanted to she could buy her granddaughter a pink hat to wear with the clothes I already had.

Eldest was a boy and is in his mid 20s now. He has long hair in a is surfer/skater kinda way and his favourite colours to wear are pink and purple, ‘boy’ stereotype shapes in ‘girl’ stereotype colours.

No hand me downs between my kids because they have a big age gap but when my daughter was born I quite liked dressing her the opposite to her big brother, so ‘girl’ clothes in ‘boy’ colours (eg blue dresses).
I bought a lot of basic t shirt material H&M dresses that had matching leggings because that was what she was most comfortable in, especially when she was sick and had tubes and ports etc. Plus they were in soft fabrics and worked as pyjamas.

Now she’s in the diddy goth phase and I HATE it (not a fan of black) but I know I have to pick my battles so if it’s weather and occasion appropriate and not a waste of the family budget I try and step back a bit (but not all the way because teens look for boundaries to push against and if they don’t find them they escalate!)

The female teen in our family with gender distress (wavers between NB and transman) grew up in a very rigid family (mum and stepdad are Eastern European so slightly different set of stereotypes) and she was never allowed anything from the ‘boys section’ which seems utterly daft to me.

My daughter has always had jeans from the boy section (bigger pockets!) and often shoes too.

I really do think the lack of sturdy shoes is a problem for girls especially in primary school - not all girls want to play playground football but most want to use the climbing frame and boys school shoes are much more technical, supportive and robust than the girl equivalent from the same shops (which have been largely patent Mary Janes with thin straps over the last ten years or so).

it’s strange to me that as the world of work has opened up to women and women are more in control of family size (and able to chose to have no children at all) that the accoutrements of childhood have become
MORE gendered. I don’t think it’s a conspiracy or ‘owt, just a marketing thing to minimise hand me downs but it’s an interesting phenomena to observe.

Just for clarity, I think children’s personalities win out but the messaging does have an impact, even if only subtle. Your child may well bust all the stereotypes because of their personality but gendered expectations have still been enforced in wider society and in some homes those dc will have very restricted choices. Better we all challenge it for the sake of all the kids.

Oh, and I used to think single sex education was a bit old fashioned but my daughter is now at a girls high school, mostly her choice but I really liked the idea of her being somewhere where EVERY subject is a girls subject, and girls are top (and bottom!) of every class.

There were only three girls in my double science GCSE class because the majority of the girls took single science and food science/home economics (this was right at the start of GCSEs so late 80s/early 90s).

The terfery of the last few years has really made me value single sex spaces and rethink single sex education (especially until we get a handle on sexual assault in schools/early age hardcore porn exposure, as boys are overwhelmingly the perps in these cases).

I think It’s really important to protect the self esteem of naturally GNC kids. It’s shitty when you don’t fit in without all the hyper pink and blue bullshit on top.

There's an interesting episode of "Gender: A Wider Lens" on this (the episode is called stereotypes, I think it's podcast number 34 or thereabouts). Basically on the nature vs. nurture of personality, especially "gendered" personality.

I was a complete tomboy but I still didn't enjoy rough and tumble type play, I hated dolls with a passion but I loved stuffed animals. I've also always wanted kids and felt very maternal despite retaining all my so-called "gender non conforming" traits 😂.

My 2.5 year old daughter is a complete girly girl in her dress style, but I suspect this is because of all the gendered media and family buying her pink frilly clothes and that's what she's decided she likes. I don't really care too much because both myself and our childminder are very much into the non-gendered, child-led play thing so I do believe the people she spends most of her time with aren't putting her into any kind of box, at least not consciously!

I do think that we (as a society) tend to focus on girls a lot, regarding maximising their potential to become engineers, scientists and mathematicians but forget that fostering and allowing space for caring, nurturing and gentle play in boys is important too.