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CHILDREN\u2019S LONGING FOR GENDER<\/span>: I basically agree with this email from a friend. I\u2019d add that, as she says, parents can and should meet kids\u2019 longing for gender in some ways\u2026 while resisting kids\u2019 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>, a unisex world would lack some necessary beauty\u2013but 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\u2026!<\/p>\n

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<\/a>. It\u2019s been a quandary to me for a long time, so I don\u2019t have the answer, but your opener about young kids\u2019 clothes reminded me of taking developmental psych as an undergrad. A common refrain I heard, in my feminist-leaning college, was, \u201cI thought gender roles were something society imposed on kids, until I actually had kids.\u201d 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\u2019t remember many details after 20 years, but sometimes the kids would make up rules like \u201cBoys skip, girls hop.\u201d So when you\u2019re looking at little kids\u2019 clothes \u2014 at least if they aren\u2019t too little to talk \u2014 keep in mind that a lot of these choices may have been insisted upon by the kids themselves. (It helps, of course, that there\u2019s a whole industry of children\u2019s products happy to pander to this.)<\/p>\n
Many people outgrow that sort of thing, but still, \u2018the child is the father of the man,\u2019 especially when you\u2019re talking about a physical discipline like figure skating that people have to start in childhood to get really good at. But that\u2019s also all the more reason for kids to have strong adult figures of both sexes in their lives \u2014 like, say, parents \u2014 because otherwise the random rules their peers make up can end up defining gender for them. At five, a child isn\u2019t going to understand abstract concepts like \u2018icon\u2019 and \u2018genre\u2019, but they can look at an adult and say, \u2018I want to be like that,\u2019 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\u2019s happened in the last 20 years on this front. Once you\u2019ve realized \u2018OMG gender differences are probably innate!\u2019 the next issue is, \u2018Now what do we do about it?\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
CHILDREN\u2019S LONGING FOR GENDER: I basically agree with this email from a friend. I\u2019d add that, as she says, parents can and should meet kids\u2019 longing for gender in some ways\u2026 while resisting kids\u2019 tendency toward really rigid and sometimes destructive ideas about gender (for example, the tendency to mark out some activities which are […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1071,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-132","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nEve Tushnet<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"CHILDREN'S LONGING FOR GENDER: I basically agree with this email from a friend. 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