My Daughter Likes Cars

My daughter likes cars. When she was almost 2 years old, my husband and I bought her some pajamas with cars on them. She was happy with her new pajamas and immediately wanted to put them on. However, she did call them 'boy jamas', and I was shocked. How did she already know about gender norms? Weren’t we being pretty gender neutral with her?

I like the idea of gender neutral parenting. I think it produces more well-rounded kids, kids who are more true to themselves. I want my kids to pursue things they actually enjoy rather than limiting themselves to things that they perceive to be in line with their gender.

In reality, however, I’m not raising my kids in a truly gender neutral way. This past Easter, for instance, I put my boys in ties and my daughter in a dress. If, in the future, my boys want to wear dresses on Easter, I know I will cringe before I say yes.

Here's the thing though: I know that I dress them this way because babies in ties are adorable and toddlers in frilly dresses are adorable! I know that if my sons want to wear dresses I will cringe not because there's anything wrong with them wearing dresses, but because of the probability that they will face ridicule.

I absolutely want my kids to break gender stereotypes. I also don't want them to be bullied. So until it becomes socially acceptable for boys to wear dresses (or until my boys start choosing to wear dresses) I'll keep putting them in ties.

In the meantime, here are some of the ways that we are getting it right:

1. For Christmas my nephew received an awesome toy car that lit up and had sound effects. My daughter definitely tried to steal it from him. That following Monday my sweet husband went to a toy store after work and got her one like it.

2. My boys will sit in a pink high chair, because that is the color of the high chair we own.

3. We watch all the kids movies/shows with Miss Two, not just the princess ones. Not surprisingly, some of her favorites are Thomas the train, Mater from Cars, Curious George, and Totoro. Because those are all really great characters who just happen to be male.

4. Miss Two wears a variety of underwear, from cars to hello kitty to plain old white. My very thoughtful mom bought the cars underwear for her from the boys section of the store, and my daughter loves to tell us when she is wearing “Mater on my butt!”

Admittedly it is pretty easy to be gender neutral with a two-year-old girl, for one glaringly obvious reason: It is much more socially acceptable for a girl to do masculine things than for a boy to do feminine things. If our daughter cuts her hair short when she’s older, people will probably say, “How practical! She is running around a lot and probably getting hot after all.” But if my boys want to have long hair, people will probably, at the very least, ask them why they don’t get a hair cut.

I honestly don’t know what I’m going to do about my sons’ hair. I’m sure there will be a variety of other situations in the future that I have not even considered wherein gender norms can either be adhered to or broken. I guess we’ll cross that bridge (and probably blog about it) when we get there.  

P.S. Here's a blog post I like about gender written by a Dad
and here's a strongly-worded (read explicit) spoken word poem about the phrase 'man up'.