CHILDREN’S LONGING FOR GENDER: I basically agree with this email from a friend. I’d add that, as she says, parents can and should meet kids’ longing for gender in some ways… while resisting kids’ tendency toward really rigid and sometimes destructive ideas about gender (for example, the tendency to mark out some activities which are generally fruitful for both sexes, like crying or art, as the territory of only one sex). As I indicated here, a unisex world would lack some necessary beauty–but so would a rigidly-gendered, stereotype-affirming world. Parents can teach flexibility while modeling adult life as man and woman. At least, I think they can…!

Hi Eve, this is a bit late but I have been thinking about your post about whether we can have gender roles without reducing them to functions. It’s been a quandary to me for a long time, so I don’t have the answer, but your opener about young kids’ clothes reminded me of taking developmental psych as an undergrad. A common refrain I heard, in my feminist-leaning college, was, “I thought gender roles were something society imposed on kids, until I actually had kids.” One person who had a revelation along those lines was the psychologist Vivian Paley, not so much from having kids as teaching kindergarten, which inspired her to write an entire book about how her kindergarteners tried to define themselves as male and female. Since they were years away from the business end of gender, they tended to latch on to secondary and sometimes arbitrary things. I don’t remember many details after 20 years, but sometimes the kids would make up rules like “Boys skip, girls hop.” So when you’re looking at little kids’ clothes — at least if they aren’t too little to talk — keep in mind that a lot of these choices may have been insisted upon by the kids themselves. (It helps, of course, that there’s a whole industry of children’s products happy to pander to this.)

Many people outgrow that sort of thing, but still, ‘the child is the father of the man,’ especially when you’re talking about a physical discipline like figure skating that people have to start in childhood to get really good at. But that’s also all the more reason for kids to have strong adult figures of both sexes in their lives — like, say, parents — because otherwise the random rules their peers make up can end up defining gender for them. At five, a child isn’t going to understand abstract concepts like ‘icon’ and ‘genre’, but they can look at an adult and say, ‘I want to be like that,’ and grow into understanding by imitation. If I do end up going to grad school in psych, it will be very interesting to find out what’s happened in the last 20 years on this front. Once you’ve realized ‘OMG gender differences are probably innate!’ the next issue is, ‘Now what do we do about it?’