{"id":3219,"date":"2014-02-20T07:17:35","date_gmt":"2014-02-20T12:17:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/?p=3219"},"modified":"2016-01-18T20:36:36","modified_gmt":"2016-01-19T01:36:36","slug":"beating-gender-branding","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/2014\/02\/20\/beating-gender-branding\/","title":{"rendered":"Beating Gender Branding"},"content":{"rendered":"

Teaching children about gender is a funny thing.\u00a0 Of course there are differences between boys and girls, both physical and as a mommy to both and previous childcare teacher, I can say there are definitely behavior differences too.\u00a0 But does that mean they should be treated completely different?<\/p>\n

Our culture is constantly placing gender labels on everything from toys to movies to clothes (have you seen the \u201cneutral\u201d baby clothes selection?!?!) and it makes it hard to help children understand that things are just things; there are no \u201cboy things\u201d or \u201cgirl things\u201d.\u00a0 It is everywhere but I\u2019ve always encouraged my kids (both at home and work) to play with what interests them and make-believe whatever they want. It\u2019s generally understood in the realm of early childhood that children learn by doing, pretending and creating their own understanding.\u00a0 All a boy pretending to be a \u201cmommy\u201d means is he is assimilating what he understands about mommies.<\/p>\n

\"SONY<\/a>The controversial Goldieblox is a great example of this gender branding.\u00a0 I\u2019ve watched the Goldieblox ads (on silent, of course, so as to not draw the unwanted attention of my own little goldies) and while I might have missed something without the dialogue\/music\/text, all I could wonder was: why can\u2019t girls just play with legos?\u00a0 Why do they need their own set of GIRLIE blocks to encourage their inner-engineers?\u00a0 I mean, I can\u2019t argue with books that talk about different kinds of people doing lots of different great things, but why pink and purple blocks?\u00a0 How are the pink and purple builders any different from all the pink toys the girls are getting rid of in the ad?<\/p>\n

As a mommy of two little girls, I\u2019m not worried about the stat that Goldieblox is based on: only 11% of engineers worldwide are female.\u00a0 Ok.\u00a0 Well, only 2% of early childhood teachers are men but I don\u2019t see anyone inventing a \u201cBobby Babysitter\u201d doll and accessories aimed at boys.\u00a0 I don\u2019t think the problem of women are not becoming engineers is a matter of what they play with, In our culture I think it\u2019s just a matter of women liking and wanting to be other things more (I realize worldwide, this may not be the case and women in other places may not have the opportunity to delve into this career path).\u00a0 I\u2019m good at math and love building and designing things but I loved dance and education more so I chose to follow that path.\u00a0 It\u2019s not that I don\u2019t think I could have been a successful engineer; it\u2019s that I didn\u2019t want to.<\/p>\n

\"SONY<\/p>\n

I think we\u2019ve just gotten too engrossed in the differences between boys and girls and the assumptions of what it means to be a boy or a girl and have forgotten that all children are just that: children.\u00a0 Doodle likes pink sparkly high heels as much as the girls (though he prefers to nibble on them whereas they like to stomp around in them).<\/p>\n

Honeybun saw a commercial awhile ago and made the comment \u201cEEW!\u00a0 Skylanders are for boys.\u201d\u00a0 And I said \u201cwhy?\u00a0 Girls can play with them too.\u00a0 If you wanted to play with Skylanders that would be fine.\u00a0 And if Doodle wants to play with Barbies, that\u2019s fine too.\u201d\u00a0 And not five minutes later I handed Doodle his favorite squeaky toy: a pink piggy.\u00a0 As he played with it I thought \u201cshould we bring that on our trip?\u00a0 Maybe not, it\u2019s very girly\u201d and then I stopped myself.\u00a0 Who the heck cares?\u00a0 I just told my five-year old that it doesn\u2019t matter and here I am thinking it!<\/p>\n

So, I\u2019m clearly not above the cultural pull that plays such a part on gender roles in our country, but I\u2019ve now seen that I need to try harder.\u00a0 And I am doing better.\u00a0 While out a few days ago, Sugarplum saw something that she thought was \u201conly for boys.\u201d\u00a0 So we had a long talk about how there is nothing that is just for boys and there is nothing that is just for girls.\u00a0 That anyone can play with anything they want.\u00a0 And together, we settled on the new family saying \u201cPrincesses are for people.\u201d\u00a0 I\u2019ve had to remind the girls of this phrase a few more times (once when Sugarplum proclaimed that we needed more boy toys for Doodle and again when Honeybun asked why her friend\u2019s brother was coming to see Frozen<\/i> with us too) and it\u2019s something I intend to reinforce over and over again with my children.<\/p>\n

I truly don\u2019t care what my children are when they grow up, so long as they are happy!<\/p>\n

As far as toys go, I love this graphic and will be basing all future toy purchases on this idea:<\/p>\n

\"o-BOYS-GIRLS-TOYS-900\"<\/a><\/p>\n

(I don’t want to steal someone else’s idea and am not sure who the original creator of this is, so here are a few different versions I found: The one I used is by Kristen Myers found on\u00a0Huffington Post<\/a>. \u00a0She credits\u00a0Cy and Eva<\/a>\u00a0with the original. Then there’s\u00a0this one<\/a>\u00a0that credits different sources but I wasn’t able to actually track the original image down!)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Teaching children about gender is a funny thing.\u00a0 Of course there are differences between boys and girls, both physical and as a mommy to both and previous childcare teacher, I can say there are definitely behavior differences too.\u00a0 But does that mean they should be treated completely different? Our culture is constantly placing gender labels […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[66,31],"class_list":["post-3219","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-family-life","tag-gender","tag-toys"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3219","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3219"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3219\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3228,"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3219\/revisions\/3228"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3219"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3219"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beyondmommying.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3219"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}