conuly

Many times, I've read articles where one person will give a "personal account" of how their young child plays with non-gender-traditional toys. And, lo and behold, they always seem to play with those toys in a way that fits the gender stereotype! Little girls turn their toy trucks into families! Little boys use their dolls as guns! And so, the status quo has been upheld for another generation!

Let's just say that I take these accounts with a very liberal dose of salt.

I've maintained that most (but probably not all) of these accounts are likely the result of parents seeing what they want to see. They expect their daughter to treat all her toys in a motherly fashion, so they notice that, and encourage it, while not noticing as much when she doesn't do it. And they are worried about their son being inherantly violent, so they notice every time he does something violent, while not noticing the times he spends being gentle and quiet with his stuffed animals.

And to interject a bit, here's an interesting fact. Parents who very conscientiously get their daughters trucks, and their sons dolls, are still likely to give their son blocks where their daughter would get books. And they're still likely, from birth, to use a wider variety of words with their daughters, while their boys get more action in their day - being picked higher up and down, for example.

Interesting, huh? You can look up these statistics if you like, they're not completely taken out of my head.

So when I hear all these people talking about how they tried so hard, but their son prefers to toss his dolls up and down - well, that's what I did. I threw my stuffed animals up so that they'd hit the ceiling. Great fun. And sometimes I pretended they were monsters, or heroes, or babies, or classmates. And sometimes I sorted them by color or shape.

Or when they say that their daughter personifies her toy trucks - well, I did that with the few toy vehicles I had too. But I also used them as actual cars or whatever. My favorite toy as a four-year-old was a train that I could see the gears working inside. I moved it along the floor. Great fun.

I have lately been in a position to watch quite a few young children playing. It's fairly easy to tell if they're girls or boys because of how people do insist on dressing them (honestly, while I'm struggling to put outfits together for Ana that *don't* include pink, it certainly does predominate at the toddler programs we go to. We need more non-pink clothing for her.)

The most popular toy, consistenly, seems to be the toy stroller. Both boys and girls love walking around pushing a stroller, either with a toy inside or without. Both boys and girls are to be seen treating their dolls tenderly - or picking a large-sized vehicle and crawling around the ground with it. The favorite block-related activity is definitely building a stack and then knocking it over. Over at the Children's Museum, the favorite place to be is in the toy kitchen, cooking - for both boys and girls. They hardly ever go anywhere else, it seems.

And Ana loves to run around pretending to squirt us all with a water gun. She doesn't know yet that real guns hurt, if she did, I don't know if that'd affect how she acts.

My conclusion? Kids this age don't want to be girls or boys. They want to be adults. And adults cook, push strollers, drive cars, clutch the rails on the bus/train, splash people with water (that may just be us....), wear glasses (Ana's favorite thing right now), and play with babies. Adults generally don't knock block towers over, but that's the exception here. That's why you can get your toddler to sweep, throw stuff in the garbage, and help you rinse the dishes - they don't know yet that it's work. When it comes to that, we're hard pressed to keep Ana from helping us when her help is more hinderance than help. I suspect, from what I've seen, that most kids are like that - adults do these things, so they want to do them.

Girl stuff and boy stuff, judging from my brief experience watching young children in their not-so-native environment, doesn't come into it yet.

This isn't much of a rant. Sorry.