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I think the issue with babies is that they all look alike so the colors you dress them in let everyone know whether they are boy babies or girl babies.
In our family of blue-eyed redheads, nobody wears pink (but blue looks really good).
I did put one of my girls in a pink sailor dress once, when she was a little under a year old. People still asked me how old "he" was. I figured by the time she was old enough that it mattered, they'd figure it out. Apparently somebody did, because she's now a mother of two!
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Originally Posted by Momma_bear
As far as toys, kids will play with all sorts of toys. My boys would play with dolls if they were at a girl's house but they never asked for dolls (they did have a kitchen though). And the girls would play with whatever we had at home when they visited us. But kids ask parents to buy what they like at a very young age.
My boys always had very masculine personalities. I did not have to do anything to develop them.
Our philosophy was always "toys don't care who plays with them". Sometimes my son wore the pink Easter bonnet to play make-believe, sometimes he wore the fire chief's hat. Occasionally, both. <g>
I saw this program about this person named David Reimer who was born a male and his penis was accidentally destroyed during circumcision. So his parents had to make the decision to leave him as a male or "reassign" him as a female, which they did. I think there was some doctor who was overseeing the reassignment who wanted to prove that gender identity developed primarily through social learning from early childhood. His parents bought him dolls and he wore dresses but he never identified as female so he began living as a male at 14. I think he committed suicide when he got older. I just thought that was an interesting story.
Society and cultural norms affect us and control us.....No one wants their son to look like a sissy...or "gay" because he likes to play with dolls...or likes to sew at an early age etc. Girls have it a little easier...it's okay for girls to be tomboys as long as they don't take it too far....I ran into a young mother once who was obviously unhappy with her daughter. The mom was pregnant at the time and I heard her tell her daughter that she hoped the new baby would be a girl too. What she said next seemed so cruel.....She said that she hoped the new baby would be a "real girl"....not a tomboy like her first daughter was.....SAD. ...The daughter held back her tears .
Forget about the economy, unemployment, and the recession. Forget about global warming, lack of health care, earthquakes, war, death and destruction!!! What's really, REALLY upsetting, is gender stereotyping in the nursery color scheme!
Maybe as our genes get further screwed up by environmental assaults, everyone will be born a hermaphrodite and then the babies can all be dressed in purple (you know, a cross of blue and red). End of argument.
I have a son and a daughter. The daughter is the oldest, when she was young I tried very carefully to avoid the gender stereotyping. She had trucks along with her Barbies and babydolls, she had a "toolbench" instead of a kitchen (frankly, I just thought it looked like more fun) and I really tried to buy gender neutral clothing (at least for sleepers and playclothes) simply because I knew we were planning on at least one other child and I was trying to be economical....Indeed, our second child was a son and having an older sister, he certainly had dolls and stuff to choose from (and did from time to time) and he certainly wore his share of pink infant onesies and sleepers (doubt he knows that now that I think of it). Over the course of time, no matter what, DD tended to dress up and have tea parties and DS tended to spend HOURS in the back yard in a dirt pile with rocks and Tonka trucks...shrugs....kids are who they are. My DD is pretty much a girly-girl and my son is pretty much a typical teenaged boy who is into sports and XBox and uses any excuse to drive somewhere with his newly acquired DL....What they wore or played with really didn't matter one way or another....
I never liked...as a grandfather, seeing my granddaughters only getting Barbie dolls. That was very flustrating. I definitely want to see the girls be more well rounded!
Even if you hand your girl a barbie doll, doesn't mean she is going to play with it and it doesn't mean that a boy isn't going to pick it up and play with it.
Kids are born liking what they like, you cannot make them into a girlie girl or a jock.
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