Once again, I was told that "girls and boys are obviously different, because...."

[conuly]

"...my girl never played with toy cars I naively bought her!"

First, let me say that this does not at all agree with my own experience. I routinely see girls playing with toy trucks, and boys playing with cooking stuffs. Seriously.

But anecdotal evidence, I know, I know. My anecdotal evidence is no better than their anecdotal evidence. Except that in order for me to believe this "TRUCKS!" argument, I would have to believe that somehow, ten thousand years of evolution occured (more! I know!) just so that baby boys would play with toy cars, something that wasn't even invented until very recent generations. And girls would play with - what, make-up? Because there's no culture in the world where men care at all about their appearance and wear make-up. (Unless they're really gay, and no culture in the world accepts that because it's unnatural, right? And they all have nuclear families with two-person marriages, one male and one female, because that's logical and it just makes the most sense, all right!)

I don't buy it. If you want to convince me that girls and boys play differently at this young age, you'll have to show me something a little less superficial. Prove to me that girls talk more, or that boys run up and down more, and I'll at least blink an eye a couple of times.

Otherwise, it's just your eyes and ears against mine, and mine will always win. ('cuz they're right, of course!)

Comments

[fledchen.livejournal.com]

I'll believe that girls are praised/encouraged to talk more, and that boys are praised/encouraged to be more physically active, and thus they'll continue acting that way. I truly doubt that gender-specific behavior is innate at that age.

[conuly]

Well, if it's innate at any age, it would have to be innate from birth. /pedant

[sporks5000.livejournal.com]

For some reason, when I read this, it played in my head with a southern accent...

<shrugs>

[peaseblossom03.livejournal.com]

When my oldest niece (now 8) was a baby,she'd take her pretty little girly dress shoes and go "Vroom vroom!" and "drive" them around like toy cars.

[leora.livejournal.com]

One of my favorite toys when I was a very young child was a dump truck in bright red and yellow. I liked it because part of it actually moved. So, you could put something in it, wheel it, then spill that out.

I loved toy cars, especially the ones that had doors that opened. But I didn't have any, because my mother believed in sex-appropriate toys. I only got to play with them when I went over to my friend's house, because he was a boy and had a large collection> This was when I was 4 and then 5. He also had some little garages and things to run the cars into.

When transformers came out, I thought they were really cool. I didn't own any, but every now and then I got to play with my cousins' (both cousins are male). But very rarely as they lived far away.

I only liked my dollhouses because one had actual working electricity and the other had an "elevator" that was a pulley system.

I didn't like most dolls. But I liked the ones with hair I could actually style (I rarely had these), and the talking cabbage patch, because it could do some cool things.

I really liked blocks, legos, lite bright, spin art, computer games, rubik's magic, silly putty, and probably some other things that don't come straight to mind. Oh, like anti-coloring books. I hated coloring, but I loved anti-coloring books.

[lady-angelina.livejournal.com]

I was a really weird kid, LOL. I LOVED toy cars, but I also played with Barbies, too. (Shut up! XD ) Didn't much care for sports, but I wasn't much into "girl stuff" (like clothes or make-up) either. Also, I loved math and was fairly good at it, and no one seemed to bat an eye over the idea that a girl could be good at math.

However, I got a real disappointment in the sixth grade when we went to Outdoor School. (I think it's a local program, so you might not have heard of it, but it's where they have sixth graders spend a week at a campsite learning about the natural sciences -- LOTS of fun). I wanted to participate in certain elective activities, such as archery and woodcrafting, but they wouldn't let me. =( Instead, I got stuck with hiking and cooking, both of which I HATED. XP They didn't come right out and say this, but I suspect it was because they didn't think that it would be appropriate for a girl to be learning archery and other stereotypically "boy" activities. =P

[mayna.livejournal.com]

Well anecdotal evidence you know, but I would think the "proof" would be a girl having an older brother or a boy having an older sister. Logically, they would be most influenced by their older sibling and if playing with certain gender toys was learned and not innate, the younger sister or younger brother should prefer to play with toys of the opposite gender.

However, I have a 150% girly girl daughter who WILL NOT play with boy toys. She does not like to watch Thomas the Train videos, and the tv shows with talking cars she just walks away from. She wants princess videos or something girly in it or she won't watch it (ie. she liked Maid Marian in Robin Hood all right). She does not like to play with trains and won't do it. She did play with cars once when it was the only toy around and she was a bit younger (we were at my grandparents' house) but she won't now.

Greg, on the other hand... he did not like boy toys until about turning age 2. He HAD cars and stuff but would not play with them, before that. He hit age 2 and -somehow- is obsessed with trains (and now Thomas Train since we fed his obsession buy getting him a wooden set, but then again he was making trains out of anything he could find before that, and still does). He LOVES explosions and monsters and dinosaurs (Maylie gets scared and cries when the bad guys in Disney movies are too scary for her.). They now have to adapt their play so that Maylie can be the princess and Greg is either the dinosaur or monster or they have an imaginary monster that's chasing them (they play this like every day).

I remember growing up and playing toys with my younger brother. When we played with Voltron, i was always the princess. If we played My little ponies, my brother was this baby pony he tied a little cape on and made it "super pony". I couldn't stand playing with cars or Transformers. We played He man and she-ra (he was he-man and I was a she-ra doll).

I think boys and girls just inherently play differently.

Now, cooking or dollhouses, those are different... Boys seem to love dollhouses, probably because they themselves live in a house and they can easily relate to it. And cooking isn't a woman's job, lots of men like to cook.

[conuly]

Which isn't backed up by what I see watching Ana or Evangeline, or seeing any of the kids in the SICM playing. Ana plays with trains, and trucks, and firetrucks, and cars. Her favorite exhibit at the museum for months was the firetruck, because she's the brave firefighter. So are most of her friends (most of whom are girls, because that's who shows up for the toddler programs). For months, her favorite toy was a motorcycle that used to be Seth's. Then we lost it. (And then yes, her favorite toy was a wand that made noise.)

It's not that she doesn't play with girl toys, but she plays with boy toys as well.

What I see (and I've said it before, so ignore me if you've read it before) is that people often encourage their kids to play with the "right" toys, even if they don't see that they're doing it. I see this, I see people doing this. And I don't think I'm making this up. I'm sure they don't see it when they do it, and when I do the same, I'm sure I don't see it. But it happens. And even if you don't do this at all, sooner or later your kid spends time with other children, many of whom have been socialized by their parents (and OTHER other children) to prefer the "right" toys.

So if your kids are in daycare, already you're not the big influence on what they'll play with - the other kids are.

When I was a kid, my barbies were superheroes, never princesses. I wanted (want!) to be a hero of some sort. I was influenced a lot by my dad's endless stories of his days as a civil rights activist - a lot of my games involved sorting toys up by various characteristics (this is a common activity for kids on the spectrum - in my family, we call this "playing" but in other families they seem to think it's scary) and having them all get along and make friends in the end. Like most children, I emulated the models I had around me. Unlike most children, that dis-included most other children and the vast majority of popular culture. (We were a very insular family, and I certainly wasn't about to be the social, outgoing one.)

And cooking isn't a woman's job, lots of men like to cook.

Except that in this country, that's often considered a novel idea. Plenty of people swear up and down that toy kitchens are girl toys - that's why so many of them are pink! And in this country, women do most of the cooking in the home. It's not about what they enjoy, it's about gender roles. Cooking is a women's job, or tends to be, in this society.

[conuly]

I had this toy train that you wound up, and then you could see the colored gears working inside. God I loved that thing. I REALLY WANT IT BACK, too.

I actually like coloring, though. I don't like the idea behind coloring books, and I understand that it's better for kids to come up with things on their own, but there's something really satisfying in coloring in all the lines.

[leora.livejournal.com]

I hated coloring. Mainly because it made my hand cramp, and who likes pain? But also because it seemed so tedious. In kindergarten we had to do a lot of coloring, and I didn't realize til years later that we weren't supposed to hate it. I knew you did work at school, and thus I shouldn't expect to like everything I had to do. I did it because I was a good kid. But in retrospect, I think it was a complete and utter waste of my time.

[conuly]

As for being influenced by your older sibling... *shrugs*

Look at Su and Deniz.

Deniz, at 5, is a real girly-girl. Favorite colors are pink and purple. Picked out a china teaset for her birthday, and has used it since then. I bought her a whole "make your own princess gear" set, and the kid nearly went into a faint at how cool it all was.

Which would seem to prove the point about girls (except I don't see any reason we'd evolve so that girls would like pink, purple, and shiny things; nor that boys would like dinosaurs and trucks; nor that girls would want to be princesses and boys would not similarily want to be princes - but that's another tangent) except that you look at Su....

Su is 2.5 right now. And she likes bugs. Loves bugs. Loves poking in the dirt, digging in the dirt, lifting up rocks and looking at the bugs. She picks up bugs. She "reads" about bugs, or has her mom read to her. She. Likes. Bugs.

And when it's not bugs, it's snakes, or frogs, or lizards, or the occasional fish. Her favorite part of the mornings when I take her out with us? The part where they hold dinosaurs and march around singing about how they're dinosaurs. She has asked me to sing it to her, which I did, but ONLY because I like that song. (She has a greater affinity to all the widdle forest creatures, but she really likes bugs, have I said?)

Why are they so different? Hell if I know. But one didn't influence the other to be like her, that's for sure.

[leora.livejournal.com]

Around age 2 is when kids start becoming aware that they are a boy/girl and some people are different. Some kids start to want to make sure they fill that role "properly". So, they'll do whatever they think they should be doing. I didn't ask for the boys' toys I so desperately wanted, because I knew my mother considered them to be boys' toys. Instead, I watched a lot of television and was bored most of the time.

So, it is quite possible both that kids have no natural preferences for different toys, and that many kids over the age of 2 will show clear gender-stereotypical preferences.

That's even more clear by the examples you gave. The girl is perfectly happy playing superhero, when the superhero is seen as an okay thing for a girl to be (she-ra). The boy is perfectly happy playing My Little Pony, if he can masculinize it, so it's "acceptable for a boy to play".

[mayna.livejournal.com]

Well I can't speak for my brother but I can speak for myself... I didn't WANT to pretend to be a boy and if I played He-man then I'd have to pretend to be one, I wanted to pretend to be a girl like I was. I liked watching He-man on tv but I didn't want to 'be' he-man. Same thing with Voltron. And I just plain didn't understand the appeal to playing with cars... they don't have mouths so they can't talk, and making them drive around was pointless. And something about Transformers I just didn't like, I don't really know to this day why I didn't like them but I didn't (there are female Transformers).

My brother had a big infatuation with superheros... he was a big fan of Superman for the longest time (he might even still be a fan). He'd write short stories about a little boy becoming a boy superhero and stuff like that.

[brownkitty.livejournal.com]

From observation only, I would say that boys and girls tend to play in a different manner, more importantly than that they play with different things. The girls I've seen tend to play interactively more, while the boys tend to play either competitively or parallel. I'm not trying to say it can't be the reverse, just that that's the tendency I've seen.

Given a swing, two chains for ropes and a flexible rubber seat, I've seen two girls share the swing (one sits on the other's lap so their legs are sticking out in opposite directions, and they swing in sort of a see-saw sort of way) but haven't seen two boys share one that way.

Boys, in my observation, are more likely to get into competitions to see who can swing highest, or to see who can go farthest if they jump out at the apex of the swing arc.

[conuly]

This, I can agree with.

Well, not that this happens - I don't think either niece is really at an age where you can see this yet, so I don't know. But that it's something I can believe happens simply because of innate differences rather than cultural conditioning. It's not a superficial "princesses or trucks" difference.

Of course, it might also not be an innate difference, but at this point, I don't think we'll ever get to the bottom of that.

[conuly]

But there's the thing. You wanted to be a girl, because you were a girl. If society says that "boys play with dinosaurs", and you're a girl (and you don't want to be a boy), you're more likely to dislike dinosaurs, because, hey, girls don't play with dinosaurs. (Or whatever.)

I'm not saying that a little kid is necessarily thinking all this out, but at this age, the world is still really confusing. Gender is still really confusing, kids are still figuring it out. So it makes sense that they'd want to stick in firm gender roles - less confusion. Doesn't mean that those gender roles, or toy choices, aren't cultural ones, though.

I can't say it right, it's clear in my mind, but I can't say it right, and I'm sorry.

[conuly]

I'm also sorry for keeping this up. I meant to drop the subject, but then I thought maybe it was more rude not to answer you. Not sure which is better....

[mayna.livejournal.com]

Well, that's an 8 yr old... but how do you explain a 1.5 yr old boy who is infatuated with trains... doesn't own any trains himself but makes trains out of anything he can? He was also infatuated with dinosaurs (from books and at the museum) but until Christmastime didn't own any dinosaur anything himself. I usually stuck with farm animals. Now he DID want to be a princess but his big sister has told hiim a zillion times that boys can't be princesses and so now he doesn't say that, but he does like wearing rings and necklaces, and A. who is almost 4 likes traipsing around in the princess dressup shoes (and he likes necklaces and rings too, some guys like their bling I guess)

[conuly]

I think that some kids just have interests in some subjects. I mean, I know I spent periods in my youth where I was very interested in My Little Ponies, in collecting every type of crayon I could, in getting every possible color of those weird triangle shaped beads (the ones that are like ys?), in names (well, you know that by now! Honestly, you seem to have been the unfortunate recipient of most of my recent weirdness), in cats, in dinosaurs (for a very brief period).

I wasn't a typical child, but I know that typical children also go through similar phases. I think it's a kid thing, more than anything else.

For that matter, Maylie's current bit of being very girly (she really likes skirts and dresses over pants, right?) might be a similar phase. Deniz, who is also a girly-girl, went through a period of insisting that girls couldn't be pirates or superheroes or who knows what else. She still played those games, but she'd say she was a pirate princess or a superhero queen, which in her mind made it "all right". And she was four. Like I said, I think all this stuff about girls and boys is very confusing for young children, and for a lot of them, sticking with clear definitions makes things a lot easier.

(In short, I don't explain it. I just go on and on about it without ever trying to explain it at all. Sometimes, you can really think too much! But I don't know if I mean you've been thinking too much, or I have. Probably the latter :P)

[fledchen.livejournal.com]

I'll believe that girls are praised/encouraged to talk more, and that boys are praised/encouraged to be more physically active, and thus they'll continue acting that way. I truly doubt that gender-specific behavior is innate at that age.

[conuly]

Well, if it's innate at any age, it would have to be innate from birth. /pedant

[sporks5000.livejournal.com]

For some reason, when I read this, it played in my head with a southern accent...

<shrugs>

[peaseblossom03.livejournal.com]

When my oldest niece (now 8) was a baby,she'd take her pretty little girly dress shoes and go "Vroom vroom!" and "drive" them around like toy cars.

[leora.livejournal.com]

One of my favorite toys when I was a very young child was a dump truck in bright red and yellow. I liked it because part of it actually moved. So, you could put something in it, wheel it, then spill that out.

I loved toy cars, especially the ones that had doors that opened. But I didn't have any, because my mother believed in sex-appropriate toys. I only got to play with them when I went over to my friend's house, because he was a boy and had a large collection> This was when I was 4 and then 5. He also had some little garages and things to run the cars into.

When transformers came out, I thought they were really cool. I didn't own any, but every now and then I got to play with my cousins' (both cousins are male). But very rarely as they lived far away.

I only liked my dollhouses because one had actual working electricity and the other had an "elevator" that was a pulley system.

I didn't like most dolls. But I liked the ones with hair I could actually style (I rarely had these), and the talking cabbage patch, because it could do some cool things.

I really liked blocks, legos, lite bright, spin art, computer games, rubik's magic, silly putty, and probably some other things that don't come straight to mind. Oh, like anti-coloring books. I hated coloring, but I loved anti-coloring books.

[lady-angelina.livejournal.com]

I was a really weird kid, LOL. I LOVED toy cars, but I also played with Barbies, too. (Shut up! XD ) Didn't much care for sports, but I wasn't much into "girl stuff" (like clothes or make-up) either. Also, I loved math and was fairly good at it, and no one seemed to bat an eye over the idea that a girl could be good at math.

However, I got a real disappointment in the sixth grade when we went to Outdoor School. (I think it's a local program, so you might not have heard of it, but it's where they have sixth graders spend a week at a campsite learning about the natural sciences -- LOTS of fun). I wanted to participate in certain elective activities, such as archery and woodcrafting, but they wouldn't let me. =( Instead, I got stuck with hiking and cooking, both of which I HATED. XP They didn't come right out and say this, but I suspect it was because they didn't think that it would be appropriate for a girl to be learning archery and other stereotypically "boy" activities. =P

[mayna.livejournal.com]

Well anecdotal evidence you know, but I would think the "proof" would be a girl having an older brother or a boy having an older sister. Logically, they would be most influenced by their older sibling and if playing with certain gender toys was learned and not innate, the younger sister or younger brother should prefer to play with toys of the opposite gender.

However, I have a 150% girly girl daughter who WILL NOT play with boy toys. She does not like to watch Thomas the Train videos, and the tv shows with talking cars she just walks away from. She wants princess videos or something girly in it or she won't watch it (ie. she liked Maid Marian in Robin Hood all right). She does not like to play with trains and won't do it. She did play with cars once when it was the only toy around and she was a bit younger (we were at my grandparents' house) but she won't now.

Greg, on the other hand... he did not like boy toys until about turning age 2. He HAD cars and stuff but would not play with them, before that. He hit age 2 and -somehow- is obsessed with trains (and now Thomas Train since we fed his obsession buy getting him a wooden set, but then again he was making trains out of anything he could find before that, and still does). He LOVES explosions and monsters and dinosaurs (Maylie gets scared and cries when the bad guys in Disney movies are too scary for her.). They now have to adapt their play so that Maylie can be the princess and Greg is either the dinosaur or monster or they have an imaginary monster that's chasing them (they play this like every day).

I remember growing up and playing toys with my younger brother. When we played with Voltron, i was always the princess. If we played My little ponies, my brother was this baby pony he tied a little cape on and made it "super pony". I couldn't stand playing with cars or Transformers. We played He man and she-ra (he was he-man and I was a she-ra doll).

I think boys and girls just inherently play differently.

Now, cooking or dollhouses, those are different... Boys seem to love dollhouses, probably because they themselves live in a house and they can easily relate to it. And cooking isn't a woman's job, lots of men like to cook.

[conuly]

Which isn't backed up by what I see watching Ana or Evangeline, or seeing any of the kids in the SICM playing. Ana plays with trains, and trucks, and firetrucks, and cars. Her favorite exhibit at the museum for months was the firetruck, because she's the brave firefighter. So are most of her friends (most of whom are girls, because that's who shows up for the toddler programs). For months, her favorite toy was a motorcycle that used to be Seth's. Then we lost it. (And then yes, her favorite toy was a wand that made noise.)

It's not that she doesn't play with girl toys, but she plays with boy toys as well.

What I see (and I've said it before, so ignore me if you've read it before) is that people often encourage their kids to play with the "right" toys, even if they don't see that they're doing it. I see this, I see people doing this. And I don't think I'm making this up. I'm sure they don't see it when they do it, and when I do the same, I'm sure I don't see it. But it happens. And even if you don't do this at all, sooner or later your kid spends time with other children, many of whom have been socialized by their parents (and OTHER other children) to prefer the "right" toys.

So if your kids are in daycare, already you're not the big influence on what they'll play with - the other kids are.

When I was a kid, my barbies were superheroes, never princesses. I wanted (want!) to be a hero of some sort. I was influenced a lot by my dad's endless stories of his days as a civil rights activist - a lot of my games involved sorting toys up by various characteristics (this is a common activity for kids on the spectrum - in my family, we call this "playing" but in other families they seem to think it's scary) and having them all get along and make friends in the end. Like most children, I emulated the models I had around me. Unlike most children, that dis-included most other children and the vast majority of popular culture. (We were a very insular family, and I certainly wasn't about to be the social, outgoing one.)

And cooking isn't a woman's job, lots of men like to cook.

Except that in this country, that's often considered a novel idea. Plenty of people swear up and down that toy kitchens are girl toys - that's why so many of them are pink! And in this country, women do most of the cooking in the home. It's not about what they enjoy, it's about gender roles. Cooking is a women's job, or tends to be, in this society.

[conuly]

I had this toy train that you wound up, and then you could see the colored gears working inside. God I loved that thing. I REALLY WANT IT BACK, too.

I actually like coloring, though. I don't like the idea behind coloring books, and I understand that it's better for kids to come up with things on their own, but there's something really satisfying in coloring in all the lines.

[leora.livejournal.com]

I hated coloring. Mainly because it made my hand cramp, and who likes pain? But also because it seemed so tedious. In kindergarten we had to do a lot of coloring, and I didn't realize til years later that we weren't supposed to hate it. I knew you did work at school, and thus I shouldn't expect to like everything I had to do. I did it because I was a good kid. But in retrospect, I think it was a complete and utter waste of my time.

[conuly]

As for being influenced by your older sibling... *shrugs*

Look at Su and Deniz.

Deniz, at 5, is a real girly-girl. Favorite colors are pink and purple. Picked out a china teaset for her birthday, and has used it since then. I bought her a whole "make your own princess gear" set, and the kid nearly went into a faint at how cool it all was.

Which would seem to prove the point about girls (except I don't see any reason we'd evolve so that girls would like pink, purple, and shiny things; nor that boys would like dinosaurs and trucks; nor that girls would want to be princesses and boys would not similarily want to be princes - but that's another tangent) except that you look at Su....

Su is 2.5 right now. And she likes bugs. Loves bugs. Loves poking in the dirt, digging in the dirt, lifting up rocks and looking at the bugs. She picks up bugs. She "reads" about bugs, or has her mom read to her. She. Likes. Bugs.

And when it's not bugs, it's snakes, or frogs, or lizards, or the occasional fish. Her favorite part of the mornings when I take her out with us? The part where they hold dinosaurs and march around singing about how they're dinosaurs. She has asked me to sing it to her, which I did, but ONLY because I like that song. (She has a greater affinity to all the widdle forest creatures, but she really likes bugs, have I said?)

Why are they so different? Hell if I know. But one didn't influence the other to be like her, that's for sure.

[leora.livejournal.com]

Around age 2 is when kids start becoming aware that they are a boy/girl and some people are different. Some kids start to want to make sure they fill that role "properly". So, they'll do whatever they think they should be doing. I didn't ask for the boys' toys I so desperately wanted, because I knew my mother considered them to be boys' toys. Instead, I watched a lot of television and was bored most of the time.

So, it is quite possible both that kids have no natural preferences for different toys, and that many kids over the age of 2 will show clear gender-stereotypical preferences.

That's even more clear by the examples you gave. The girl is perfectly happy playing superhero, when the superhero is seen as an okay thing for a girl to be (she-ra). The boy is perfectly happy playing My Little Pony, if he can masculinize it, so it's "acceptable for a boy to play".

[mayna.livejournal.com]

Well I can't speak for my brother but I can speak for myself... I didn't WANT to pretend to be a boy and if I played He-man then I'd have to pretend to be one, I wanted to pretend to be a girl like I was. I liked watching He-man on tv but I didn't want to 'be' he-man. Same thing with Voltron. And I just plain didn't understand the appeal to playing with cars... they don't have mouths so they can't talk, and making them drive around was pointless. And something about Transformers I just didn't like, I don't really know to this day why I didn't like them but I didn't (there are female Transformers).

My brother had a big infatuation with superheros... he was a big fan of Superman for the longest time (he might even still be a fan). He'd write short stories about a little boy becoming a boy superhero and stuff like that.

[brownkitty.livejournal.com]

From observation only, I would say that boys and girls tend to play in a different manner, more importantly than that they play with different things. The girls I've seen tend to play interactively more, while the boys tend to play either competitively or parallel. I'm not trying to say it can't be the reverse, just that that's the tendency I've seen.

Given a swing, two chains for ropes and a flexible rubber seat, I've seen two girls share the swing (one sits on the other's lap so their legs are sticking out in opposite directions, and they swing in sort of a see-saw sort of way) but haven't seen two boys share one that way.

Boys, in my observation, are more likely to get into competitions to see who can swing highest, or to see who can go farthest if they jump out at the apex of the swing arc.

[conuly]

This, I can agree with.

Well, not that this happens - I don't think either niece is really at an age where you can see this yet, so I don't know. But that it's something I can believe happens simply because of innate differences rather than cultural conditioning. It's not a superficial "princesses or trucks" difference.

Of course, it might also not be an innate difference, but at this point, I don't think we'll ever get to the bottom of that.

[conuly]

But there's the thing. You wanted to be a girl, because you were a girl. If society says that "boys play with dinosaurs", and you're a girl (and you don't want to be a boy), you're more likely to dislike dinosaurs, because, hey, girls don't play with dinosaurs. (Or whatever.)

I'm not saying that a little kid is necessarily thinking all this out, but at this age, the world is still really confusing. Gender is still really confusing, kids are still figuring it out. So it makes sense that they'd want to stick in firm gender roles - less confusion. Doesn't mean that those gender roles, or toy choices, aren't cultural ones, though.

I can't say it right, it's clear in my mind, but I can't say it right, and I'm sorry.

[conuly]

I'm also sorry for keeping this up. I meant to drop the subject, but then I thought maybe it was more rude not to answer you. Not sure which is better....

[mayna.livejournal.com]

Well, that's an 8 yr old... but how do you explain a 1.5 yr old boy who is infatuated with trains... doesn't own any trains himself but makes trains out of anything he can? He was also infatuated with dinosaurs (from books and at the museum) but until Christmastime didn't own any dinosaur anything himself. I usually stuck with farm animals. Now he DID want to be a princess but his big sister has told hiim a zillion times that boys can't be princesses and so now he doesn't say that, but he does like wearing rings and necklaces, and A. who is almost 4 likes traipsing around in the princess dressup shoes (and he likes necklaces and rings too, some guys like their bling I guess)

[conuly]

I think that some kids just have interests in some subjects. I mean, I know I spent periods in my youth where I was very interested in My Little Ponies, in collecting every type of crayon I could, in getting every possible color of those weird triangle shaped beads (the ones that are like ys?), in names (well, you know that by now! Honestly, you seem to have been the unfortunate recipient of most of my recent weirdness), in cats, in dinosaurs (for a very brief period).

I wasn't a typical child, but I know that typical children also go through similar phases. I think it's a kid thing, more than anything else.

For that matter, Maylie's current bit of being very girly (she really likes skirts and dresses over pants, right?) might be a similar phase. Deniz, who is also a girly-girl, went through a period of insisting that girls couldn't be pirates or superheroes or who knows what else. She still played those games, but she'd say she was a pirate princess or a superhero queen, which in her mind made it "all right". And she was four. Like I said, I think all this stuff about girls and boys is very confusing for young children, and for a lot of them, sticking with clear definitions makes things a lot easier.

(In short, I don't explain it. I just go on and on about it without ever trying to explain it at all. Sometimes, you can really think too much! But I don't know if I mean you've been thinking too much, or I have. Probably the latter :P)