Hey can we stop acting like parents are the sole deciders of the way their kids are raised? like yeah they are the most significant influence in most cases but there are literal thousands of people and institutions and attitudes that will shape a kid’s life in their formative years so let’s stop pretending that parents who raise their kids in a “gender neutral” environment are the answer to all problems of oppressive gender roles
And I mean yes, please, by all means raise your child without gender roles but when your daughter starts picking barbies over tonka trucks maybe consider the fact that her preschool teachers are encouraging her to play with dolls and her friends have pink plastic kitchen playsets at home that look like so much fun and there are commercials and print ads with girls her age having the time of their lives with a purple glitter makeup set instead of just throwing your hands up and saying “Welp I guess femininity is innate”
YES. This reminds me of this anecdote by Deborah Rhode in Cordelia Fine’s Delusions of Gender:
“One mother who insisted on supplying her daughter with tools rather than dolls finally gave up when she discovered the child undressing a hammer and singing it to sleep. ‘It must be hormonal,’ was the mother’s explanation. At least until someone asked who had been putting her daughter to bed.”
Parents should try their best to raise their children in a gender-neutral way! but it’s not going to make a dent to counter outside socialization unless the parents’ own behavior matches their words, and in most cases that’s not how it is. Children generalize their parents’ behaviors to represent what men and women are “like”. But a mother saying, “women don’t need to wear makeup” while herself wearing makeup isn’t going to convince her children that women don’t need to wear makeup, for example.
There was a study done where children were interviewed whose parents had evaluated themselves as encouraging their children to play with “opposite-gendered” toys, but despite their parents words, the children still played with “same-gendered” toys and believed their parents would have a problem with them playing with “opposite-gendered” toys (Freeman 2007). They know. Children are getting sooooo many more messages than their parents’ words.
Even if parents do everything right in this regard, if they both create a gender-neutral environment in the home and model gender-neutral behaviors themselves, it’s still only going to make up a small part of their children’s socialization. We are undermined constantly by children’s media, their peers, their teachers, other family members, literally the random people at the grocery store who comment on my son’s toenail polish! Gender is enforced everywhere. It’s inescapable in our society.
Even when it’s not enforced by being specifically instructed or punished, gender is commented on! It’s noted! And even that matters. There’s another very famous study where an arbitrary role system was created to see if we can artificially model gender: preschoolers were randomly assigned to a Blue group or a Red group for a three-week period. They wore t-shirts to match their group. In one classroom, that’s all they did, it wasn’t mentioned again once they put on their t shirt. But in the other classroom, the color groups were used constantly- children had to line up according to their color, they had their cubbies decorated in blue or red, they were referred to by those labels (“good morning, Blues and Reds!”). And this grouping for three weeks was enough to change children’s views in the room where the groups were emphasized- the children grouped themselves into playgroups according to color, they wanted to play with toys they were told other Reds or Blues liked !! (this is Bern 1983 btw) And is this not how gender is treated in our society? Children are color-coded, their toys are color-coded, the fact that they are a boy or a girl is commented on CONSTANTLY, EVERYWHERE. Children come to the conclusion that there is something fundamentally different about boys and girls because so much emphasis is put on distinguishing them. It’s all so arbitrary! We don’t need gender! Like it would be laughable that our society is so artificially constructed if it weren’t so goddamn harmful
Anyways yes it is much bigger than parenting
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