“I Don’t Want a Girl Shovel!”

I was recently at an event for kids that at one point involved digging in a large sandbox. There were a number of shovels for the children to choose from, half pink with princesses on them and half red with Mickey Mouse on them. While my children were digging, a father with two boys, probably around four and two, came over to join us. The only remaining shovels were pink. The four-year-old boy threw an absolute fit, screaming that he would not use a girls shovel. There was so much contempt in his tone I was taken aback. The father turned to me apologetically.

“It’s just the two boys at home, we don’t really have any girl stuff,” he explained.

“You might want to work on that,” I responded rather sternly.

Maybe I should have said more—maybe I should have said less—I don’t know. I saw this over a year ago too, at a summer concert, when a boy about the same age absolutely refused to sit in a pink lawn chair, because it was a girls‘ chair. His disgust was evident.

Of course, the critic might point out that Sally had chosen a pink princess shovel—which she had. I asked her later why she picked it, and she said because it was pretty. I asked what she would have done if the only shovel available had been the Mickey Mouse one, and she said she would have waited. Why? Because the pink princess shovels were prettier, she repeated. In other words, Sally expressed a preference for the pink princess shovel rather than a disdain for the Mickey Mouse shovel. The little boy, in contrast, said focused not on a preference for Mickey Mouse shovel but rather on his disdain for the pink princess shovel.

I realize that at this age children are still working out gender, and beginning to recognize differences between boys and girls. But I also feel like there’s something else going on here.

Little girls frequently gravitate toward princesses and dolls (sometimes because they are pushed in that direction by the adults in their lives, and sometimes to fit in with the other girls they play with), but I rarely see them exhibiting a disdain for boy things. Indeed, little girls frequently participate in boy-coded activity, and what might have been called “tomboy” behavior in the past is becoming increasingly accepted as normal. In contrast, I see little boys not simply gravitating toward trucks and superheroes (again, sometimes because they are pushed, and sometimes to fit in) but also exhibiting a disdain for for boy things.

Little girls play with trains too, but do little boys play princesses? Little girls wear clothes with dinosaurs too, but do little boys wear pink?

I worry that we are teaching our little boys both that they cannot play with girl things and that girl things are somehow disgusting or below them. My two-year-old son Bobby spent an hour the other night helping his baby doll play with his matchbox cars. His excitement about sharing his love of cars with his beloved doll was one of the most adorable things I’ve seen in a long time. But if I had been another parent, I might well have taken that doll away from Bobby the moment he picked it up—and it was only in the house in the first place because it was originally Sally’s.

We need to be as careful about the messages we send little boys as we are about the messages we send little girls. We talk a lot about the ways girls are socialized away from STEM field careers. What about the way boys are socialized into relating to girls? The problems facing women in tech, or in gaming, don’t begin with adulthood or adolescence. They are also not only the product of the way we socialize girls. They are also the product of the way we socialize boys. The seeds we plant in children of both genders when they are young are critically important.

I understand that young children are still working this whole gender thing out, and I get them showing preference toward an item coded to their gender, given the gendered coding they receive from birth. But that is not the same thing as the kind of disdain I saw exhibited by the boy in the sandbox. We live in a time when some boundaries are becoming more fluid, but others are hardening, and I’m afraid one thing that is hardening is the gendered dichotomy into which we as a society push our children—and when that gendered dichotomy promotes disdain for the other, it doesn’t bode well for the future.

I wish the father at the sandbox had at least tried to explain to his son that there is nothing wrong with using a “girl” shovel. His son is getting those messages somewhere, and they need active counteracting, but so far as I saw no such counteracting took place. His father, seeing the shock apparently evident on my face, simply apologized with a “what can I do” kind of shrug.

Because, apparently, boys will be boys.