There isn’t much about 11-week-old Piper Monosoff that says she’s a girl. Her nursery is painted brown, yellow and orange; she travels around in a green stroller; her wardrobe is an assortment of quirky stripes and polka dots.
“I want people to see her as a baby, not a baby girl,” said her mother, Sara Steinbach, of Portland, Ore. “I don’t want people to expect things from her or treat her a certain way because of their preconceived notions of what girls are like.” Steinbach often faces the question: How old is your son? But that is a small inconvenience toward the greater goal. Many couples like Steinbach and her husband have sidestepped an all- pink lace and frills wardrobe for girls and are steering clear of monster trucks for boys in an attempt to avoid gender stereotypes in the formative years of a child’s development. Averse to pigeonholing children into society’s “blue boy boxes” and “pink girl boxes,” they’re practicing what they call gender-neutral parenting, a philosophy designed to give children the freedom to express their own likes, dislikes and interests, and ultimately, to determine their own identities.
This process now starts even before the baby is born. At their recent 20- week ultrasound, New York parents-to-be Joey Drucker and Debra Flashenberg sat with their faces turned away from the sonogram screen.
“If we found out we were having a boy, we would be flooded with cars and sports stuff; and if we were having a girl, it would be pink bows and princess dresses,” said 34-year-old Drucker, who convinced his wife to wait until birth to find out whether they were having a girl or a boy. “I want my child to be able to choose for himself or herself what is fun, what is interesting, what is creative.” Drucker, a master’s student in social work, developed his parenting ideology after a class in human sexuality, where he learned the difference between sex and gender, the former determined at birth and the latter, socially learned. Sex is binary in nature, he explained, divided in a “black-and-white way” into male and female, but gender is not.
“Gender is certainly a spectrum,” said Judith Stacey, a professor of social and cultural analysis at New York University. “What is masculine and feminine differs from society to society and culture to culture, and even historically.” She believes that while men and women have some innately different predilections, “gender-enforcing” parenting magnifies these differences in ways that can be oppressive. A boy with a nurturing side, for instance, might be deprived of the opportunity to explore and develop it if he is surrounded by balls to bounce and soldiers to assemble, but can’t play with his sister’s dolls, Stacey said.
Dr. Lise Eliot, a professor in the department of neuroscience at Chicago Medical School and the author of “Pink Brain, Blue Brain: How Small Differences Grow Into Troublesome Gaps and What We Can Do About It,” says gender-specific parenting has the effect of “reducing the palette” of a child’s skills. She draws a cause-and-effect connection between the low writing and reading levels of boys and the fact that they tend to spend more time with cars than with people and books.
“What you do with your time is what your brain becomes good at,” said Eliot. “So what we call our children, how we talk to them, what they wear, what they do, wires up their circuits in a specific way.” She suggests deliberate “cross-training” of children, a practice that involves talking to boys, singing to them, reading to them, and making eye contact with them; and getting girls to be more active by encouraging them to build, hop, skip and run. Eliot concedes that a completely gender-neutral upbringing is a “fantasy,” given parents’ limited influence once the child begins to interact with the world. “But remember that the child is learning from birth,” she added.
Niharika Mandhana, Columbia News Service, Photo: 123RF
Author: Mile High Mamas
Carolyn Douglass
My children are all grown up, but this strikes me as a no-brainer. Just let them decide for themselves what they like and how they want to play. When a son-in-law objected to his son “playing with dolls”, it was pointed out to him that those were “action figures” and that made it more palatable to him.
I was never a girly-girl myself, and my parents provided the kind of clothing I liked (except for church!).
Gretchen White
I used to believe society made girls girly and boys boyish. In fact, when I was in college I knew so much about sociological constructs that I smugly lectured a McDonald’s clerk over the Barbie toys for girls and the Hot Wheels for boys in their Happy Meals.
Then, I had a bunch of kids and observed that they blaze their own trails despite trying to shelter them from mean old Barbie and Princesses and Thomas with his Tank Engine. My girls like girlish things and my boys like boyish things.
Is this WRONG?
Is there something inherently evil about a baby doll? If my daughter plays with one, will she end up like ME!? Poor little lamb, never knowing she could have been the next Sir Topham Hatt.
I find my kids play with all sorts of toys. They make them into what they really want to play with. The pink plastic stroller my 4yo uses for dolls, my 2yo son uses as a truck he puts dinosaurs in, bashing into stuff. The little boy who desires to nurture something WILL do it—with whatever he has. The example of the boy unable to learn to nurture without access to dolls is complete idiocy. A rock can be a doll if a kid decides it is…there are, presumably, friends and family to nurture as well?
I’m interested in what will happen if Piper comes to her parents around age 3 and wants a pink tutu. Will they honor her wishes or will they continue to force neutrality on her? How long do they plan to keep it up? 2 years? 5? Longer?
Last, a post-modern thought: By forcing gender neutrality, you aren’t being neutral at all. Who defines what is neutral?
Lauren
I don’t think men and women are unequal, but they are different. I don’t think parents should force things on their kids, but I have no problem with traditional roles and preferences of boys and girls. It seems like some of these kids might be a bit confused one of these days.
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JoAnn
I love Gretchen’s comment about how forced neutrality isn’t neutral. That’s so true!
My princess loves to play in the dirt AND wear tutus and tiaras AND play with Legos AND play rough-and-tumble or racing games AND sit and color quietly AND is very nurturing. I don’t think these things are mutually exclusive. I jokingly call her my Renaissance Woman.
She IS, however, very different from the boys she plays with, and it’s not anything that was forced upon her.
I’ll never forget when she was really little and was playing cars with a little boy from our playgroup. He was zooming them around and racing them, and she grabbed three of them, and said, “This is the Momma car! This is the Daddy car! Here is the Baby car!” and then proceeded to make-believe conversations they were all having. They were both “playing cars,” but in very different ways, and that was awesome.
ray ban
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Great article, lots of smart tips. I am going to show my buddies and ask them what they think.
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Mary H.
Amen Gretchen!! I have both boys and girls and they are just different without any help from me. My first two kids ~ girl then boy ~ are just 19 months apart. We had lots of dolls and strollers and kitchen type toys and not many stereotypical “boy” toys. My son gravitated to balls and wheels and couldn’t have cared less about the dolls. However, this is also the boy at 2 that dressed up in a tutu and tiara and declared “I’m a princess!” and that was fine with us. He was having fun with his sister!! He’s now 10 years old and couldn’t be more of a stereotype boy. But he and his older sister are still very close; they confide in each other and support each other a lot. I’ve decided that he will be an ideal husband. But then again, don’t all mothers think that? 🙂
Paul
This is stupid…and to warm it over as “okay” or “progressive” is euphemistic drivel by “professionals” who like to gray the lines between the sexes. There is no such thing as “gender-neutral”…we are one or the other. What decent parent would do such a thing to their child merely to promote a whacked selfish ideology? (or is that “idiocy”?) Gender-neutral “parenting” clearly flies in the face of God’s perfect design of man and woman which will only result in years of psychotherapy for the child to unravel their brains from their parents damaging indoctrination. Having children does not make one a parent…that’s just nature running its course. Not only do I consider this approach to parenting stupid and self-serving, I consider it child abuse. No gray there.
Ryan
“There is no such thing as ‘gender-neutral’…we are one or the other.” – Just how many genders do you think there are? You do realize there are more, right?
While I agree that things shouldn’t be forced on children, I think that this might be the best way to go. You say you don’t want to force gender neutralism down their throats, okay, I get that. It being considered child abuse? Not so much on that band wagon. But what about the pink and blue? Wouldn’t that also be like forcing things down their throats? They can’t tell you as infants what they like, and even though I’ve read some wonderful stories on here about great kids who don’t conform to social norms even at their young ages, not all kids are like that. Not all kids have understanding parents.
You forget there are other people out there. Other children out there. Other children who would love this opportunity.
Kids will grow up, and eventually choose their own.. well everything. To me, this seems like the perfect stepping stone. And while I don’t completely take out the pinks and blues in my kid’s closet (if he tells me he wants it, then in the basket it goes), I do make sure it’s his choice.
I sit down with him and I ask him about what he thinks of gender. What’s for boys and what’s for girls. I see that by talking to him and letting him know that boys and girls are equal in any way they want to be, he’s growing up to be a wonderfully open minded kid. And I know that he’ll make a lot of people happy.