Reader question: My daughter likes 'girly' things. I think it's innate.
A reader thinks she avoided gender socialization with her child, but also believes that liking pink and other stereotypically feminine behaviors are innate.
This was a reader question/comment on a recent post. I thought it warranted a longer post, so I’ve styled it as a Feminist Advice Friday-style question.
A reader asks…
I’m neurodivergent with two older brothers. I never liked dolls, pink, dresses, etc as a kid. I was a female first in my career.
When my oldest daughter was born, she looked and acted so similar to me that I assumed she’d be the same with her preferences. And I wanted her to be gender neutral. Dressed her in her boy cousins’ hand me downs, neutral toys, name, etc. But she just was like a magnet to all the pink and pretty friends toys as soon as she was mobile. No interest at all in the cars or trucks that we tried to interest her in, years of trying.
Her little sister was the same. And their boy cousins so immediately and intensely attracted to cars and not to the pink that I truly think that there is a gender preference from a young age that is not societal.
I initially responded with this:
What possible genetic sequence could cause boys to be drawn to cars? How would this evolve given that cars have been a part of human life for only about 100 years? There are societal influences other than children's parents. Did your kids have friends? Relatives? Access to television?
The reader followed up with more information:
I really don’t know how this came about. Was totally surprised as I also thought this was societal and I could overcome those influences. I referenced cars but it was all the things. Like regular Lego vs. “Girl Lego”. Clothes.
She had zero TV (we’re not big on it and she had no interest until preteens). screens were not a thing in our house for years (I was flip phone til 2013 when mine died and I couldn’t find another!), our friends didn’t have kids yet. Books were neutral. I don’t do the pink thing. Pretty introverted so not a lot of visitors.
As to genetics, I understand that gender has many influences beyond simple chromosomal X vs Y. I’m not a geneticist or sociologist and can’t extrapolate or explain it. This is just what I observed in my home.
My answer
This is a question, and a societal concern, I care deeply about. I believe that socializing girls to accept poor treatment from boys begins when we socialize them into a feminine gender role, prioritizing prettiness, daintiness, and niceness above all else.
We treat girls and boys differently before they are even born. We host gender reveal parties at which we assume girls and boys will have different likes and interests. Parents experience gender disappointment because of their false beliefs about what their child’s gender means. They form gender stereotypes about their children’s behavior in utero, and even apply these stereotypes to ultrasound images. They make attributions about a baby’s cries based on the child’s presumed gender. And anyone who has ever spend 30 seconds in a group of parents knows that gender stereotypes are constant, aggressive, and everywhere.
Until we eliminate all gender stereotyping and conditioning, we have no way of knowing what is innate, and it makes no sense to make those claims. Moreover, it just doesn’t make any sense at all that something like liking pink (which was viewed as a stereotypically masculine trait) would be genetic or otherwise hard-wired.
I know so many parents who claim to have raised their children with gender neutrality. Inevitably, before their children are even speaking in full sentences, they’re talking about how gender is innate and their kids love all the stereotypical things—as if their kids are finished products at two, and as if their children cannot hear the harmful things they are saying about gender. I believe that they earnestly tried to practice gender-neutral parenting, but we are all products of our society, and are often unaware of our own conditioning and biases.
I find that women who are gender-nonconforming often have rather paradoxical views of gender. They may see themselves as unique, as not like other women, and view anything other women do as highly gendered. I’m getting that vibe from you here. It’s not a judgment. We live in a culture where anything women do is wrong, so it makes sense for women to want to separate themselves from other women, and from the stereotypically feminine. But this attitude has very like affected your parenting.
I don’t know anything about your parenting other than what you have told me, but based on these very few paragraphs I know of at least three ways that gender stereotypes have made their way into your household:
You believe that there are gendered and gender-neutral toys. In reality, there are just toys. If you have only given your child toys you deem gender-neutral, it makes sense she would be attracted to the toys to which she does not have access.
You make broad claims about gender based on a sample size of one. Your daughter liked pink. Rather than concluding that she is simply a child who, much like many boys, likes pink, you have decided to attribute this to her gender. When you put everything into a gendered category, it is inevitable that your child will like some things you place in the “girl” category.
You believe gender is innate or hard-wired. This belief will color your interactions with your child in ways you may not notice except for their manifestations in your child’s behavior. Your child hears and knows about your gender stereotypes.
So while you may believe you raised your child in a gender-neutral environment because you chose “neutral” clothing and toys, the reality is that you raised her in an environment with high gender salience.
Stereotypes are incredibly powerful. So powerful, in fact, that we know that minority groups (women, people of color, etc.) will underperform when merely reminded of their minority status. For example, a stereotype persists that women are naturally less good at math than men. When girls are reminded of the fact that they are girls—such as by checking a gender box before taking a standardized test—they underperform. This is stereotype threat. In a household where parents believe gender is innate, children are constantly exposed to stereotype threat.
But you’ve done more here than that make gender salient, as in those stereotype threat studies. You’re explicit in your belief that your children’s choices are gendered, and that this outcome was inevitable. You’re telling your kids their behavior is because of their gender—a parenting style known to increase gender conformity (and that includes all the gendered conformity of choosing harmful heterosexual relationships).
And this is just your parenting. There’s a wider world are kids are part of, too. I’ve taken extraordinary measures and done years of research to protect my kids from gendered stereotypes. It’s one of the reasons we chose nanny care. But today, I used group childcare for my toddler. One of the very first things the (otherwise kind and lovely) director said to me was, “Boys are just different.”
This shit is everywhere, and none of us can protect our children from it. To believe otherwise is to put our heads in the sand, leaving our kids to manage the onslaught of gender role socialization all alone. So rest assured that I am not judging you for letting this gender shit in. I’m merely asking you to abandon this silly notion that gender is innate, when the evidence is overwhelming that we undertake extraordinary efforts to ensure gender conformity.
So what can parents do? There are entire books on avoiding harmful gender stereotypes, so I’m not going to regurgitate all of that here. Instead, I’d like to offer some additional wisdom beyond the rather obvious advice not to force gender role socialization:
Never attribute anything to gender. Doing so reinforces gender stereotypes and causes objective harm. No matter how many kids you have, you have a very small sample size. Even hardcore gender determinists admit that the (questionable, often poorly designed, and far-from-conclusive) research shows a very small statistical difference between boys and girls, which means that gender explains only a very small fraction of the difference—again, if you believe the highly questionable research.
Don’t assign a gender to any specific toy or action or clothing. Dresses, dolls, blocks, cars, etc. are for everyone.
Remember that the way things are today is not how they will necessarily always be. For example, my daughter at 2, 3, and 4 had zero interest in car toys—much to my disappointment, as I love diecast cars. At six, she became absolutely obsessed with cars out of nowhere and spends at least an hour a day drawing car logos.
Let your kids be who they want to be, without assigning any particular label or value to what that means now or in the future. Your child is not gay because he likes makeup, or trans because he likes dolls. He’s just a kid, doing the wide range of weird things kids do.
Kids are weird. Let them be weird. The weirder your kids have the freedom to be, the better.
Model gender non-conformity as much as possible. Let them see you pushing against gender constraints.
And know, above all else, that motherhood cannot be perfect and children cannot be ruined. Perfectionism inspires guilt, which undermines your ability to tend to yourself and your children. You are not failing your kids because you can’t do the work of an entire village alone. No matter how you have approached gender until now, you have done your best. Maya Angelou, one of our great foremothers, advised us that when we know better, we do better.
Know a little more and do a little better each day. That’s the true activism, and the true liberatory power, of motherhood.
When we ascribe gender roles to playing with dolls or pretend cooking or cleaning, we tell kids that parenting and household tasks are things only women do. All kids should be exposed to dolls, play kitchens, and toy brooms! It's detrimental to both girls and boys to tell them this is for girls only.
By telling girls OR boys that a toy is "girly" is also telling our kids that being a girl is bad or less desirable. Typically feminine interests are not a bad thing for girls or boys and we don't want to ascribe negative, weak, or less important characteristics to "girly" interests. Its ok to love to dress up and go to the salon and you can still be feminist af.
This is very interesting to me. I'm not a parent so I have only a hint of an idea of how difficult it is to maintain gender-neutral practices with kids. I'm incredibly fortunate that I grew up with schools that didn't assume what I could or couldn't do based on my gender. I loved math and was encouraged and I don't remember ever getting any pushback on that--mostly encouragement from several great teachers at various levels.
At home though... I think my Mom was initially dedicated to trying to make sure I wasn't indoctrinated into "girly" stuff. My brother and I had the same haircuts and were sometimes mistaken for two boys. Mom got me pants and shorts and practical clothes and wanted me to run around outside. A lot of "girly" stuff fell into the "forbidden" category: no nail polish, no makeup, no heels. A wide range of things became an ongoing battlefield: there were fights about me wanting to grow my hair past my earlobes, about wanting to wear skirts (they were more comfortable for me), about not running around outside, about wanting to learn to bake (I made a mess), about wanting to play with dolls. I'm not suggesting that "girl" stuff is innate, only that many things coded "girly" were things I wanted to do (as a female child), and that they were sources of contention. Partly as a result of this, I've had a very fraught relationship with how/whether/when it is ok to perform "traditional femininity" even when sometimes things like wearing skirts are things that I legitimately inherently want to do.