. I just had to share! I am reprinting it here, with the parts I found most important in bold. As the mother of a two year old daughter, I deal with these sorts of things all the time! Enjoy!<\/span><\/p>\n\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2013<\/span><\/p>\nIT\u2019S 28 YEARS SINCE THE founding of NOW, and boys still like trucks and girls still like dolls. Increasingly, we are told that the source of these robust preferences must lie outside society \u2014 in prenatal hormonal influences, brain chemistry, genes \u2014 and that feminism has reached its natural limits. What else could possibly explain the love of preschool girls for party dresses or the desire of toddler boys to own more guns than Mark from Michigan.<\/span><\/p>\nTrue, recent studies claim to show small cognitive differences between the sexes: he gets around by orienting himself in space, she does it by remembering landmarks. Time will tell if any deserve the hoopla with which each is invariably greeted, over the protests of the researchers themselves. But even if the results hold up (and the history of such research is not encouraging), we don\u2019t need studies of sex-differentiated brain activity in reading, say, to understand why boys and girls still seem so unalike.<\/span><\/p>\nThe feminist movement has done much for some women, and something for every woman, but it has hardly turned America into a playground free of sex roles. It hasn\u2019t even got women to stop dieting or men to stop interrupting them.<\/span><\/p>\nInstead of looking at kids to \u201cprove\u201d that differences in behavior by sex are innate, we can look at the ways we raise kids as an index to how unfinished the feminist revolution really is, and how tentatively it is embraced even by adults who fully expect their daughters to enter previously male-dominated professions and their sons to change diapers.<\/span><\/p>\nI\u2019m at a children\u2019s birthday party. \u201cI\u2019m sorry,\u201d one mom silently mouths to the mother of the birthday girl, who has just torn open her present \u2014 Tropical Splash Barbie. Now, you can love Barbie or you can hate Barbie, and there are feminists in both camps. But apologize for Barbie? Inflict Barbie, against your own convictions, on the child of a friend you know will be none too pleased?<\/span><\/p>\nEvery mother in that room had spent years becoming a person who had to be taken seriously, not least by herself. Even the most attractive, I\u2019m willing to bet, had suffered over her body\u2019s failure to fit the impossible American ideal. Given all that, it seems crazy to transmit Barbie to the next generation. Yet to reject her is to say that what Barbie represents \u2014 being sexy, thin, stylish \u2014 is unimportant, which is obviously not true, and children know it\u2019s not true.<\/span><\/p>\nWomen\u2019s looks matter terribly in this society, and so Barbie, however ambivalently, must be passed along. After all, there are worse toys. The Cut and Style Barbie styling head, for example, a grotesque object intended to encourage \u201chair play.\u201d The grown-ups who give that probably apologize, too.<\/span><\/p>\nHow happy would most parents be to have a child who flouted sex conventions? I know a lot of women, feminists, who complain in a comical, eyeball-rolling way about their sons\u2019 passion for sports: the ruined weekends, obnoxious coaches, macho values. But they would not think of discouraging their sons from participating in this activity they find so foolish. Or do they? Their husbands are sports fans, too, and they like their husbands a lot.<\/span><\/p>\nCould it be that even sports-resistant moms see athletics as part of manliness? That if their sons wanted to spend the weekend writing up their diaries, or reading, or baking, they\u2019d find it disturbing? Too antisocial? Too lonely? Too gay?<\/span><\/p>\nTheories of innate differences in behavior are appealing. They let parents off the hook \u2014 no small recommendation in a culture that holds moms, and sometimes even dads, responsible for their children\u2019s every misstep on the road to bliss and success.<\/span><\/p>\nThey allow grown-ups to take the path of least resistance to the dominant culture, which always requires less psychic effort, even if it means more actual work: just ask the working mother who comes home exhausted and nonetheless finds it easier to pick up her son\u2019s socks than make him do it himself. They let families buy for their children, without too much guilt, the unbelievably sexist junk that the kids, who have been watching commercials since birth, understandably crave.<\/span><\/p>\nBut the thing the theories do most of all is tell adults that the adult world \u2014 in which moms and dads still play by many of the old rules even as they question and fidget and chafe against them \u2014 is the way it\u2019s supposed to be. A girl with a doll and a boy with a truck \u201cexplain\u201d why men are from Mars and women are from Venus, why wives do housework and husbands just don\u2019t understand.<\/span><\/p>\nThe paradox is that the world of rigid and hierarchal sex roles evoked by determinist theories is already passing away. Three-year-olds may indeed insist that doctors are male and nurses female, even if their own mother is a physician. Six-year-olds know better. These days, something like half of all medical students are female, and male applications to nursing school are inching upward. When tomorrow\u2019s 3-year-olds play doctor, who\u2019s to say how they\u2019ll assign the roles?<\/span><\/p>\nWith sex roles, as in every area of life, people aspire to what is possible, and conform to what is necessary. But these are not fixed, especially today. Biological determinism may reassure some adults about their present, but it is feminism, the ideology of flexible and converging sex roles, that fits our children\u2019s future. And the kids, somehow, know this.<\/span><\/p>\nThat\u2019s why, if you look carefully, you\u2019ll find that for every kid who fits a stereotype, there\u2019s another who\u2019s breaking one down. Sometimes it\u2019s the same kid \u2014 the boy who skateboards and takes cooking in his after-school program; the girl who collects stuffed animals and A-pluses in science.<\/span><\/p>\nFeminists are often accused of imposing their \u201cagenda\u201d on children. Isn\u2019t that what adults always do, consciously and unconsciously? Kids aren\u2019t born religious, or polite, or kind, or able to remember where they put their sneakers. Inculcating these behaviors, and the values behind them, is a tremendous amount of work, involving many adults. We don\u2019t have a choice, really, about whether we should give our children messages about what it means to be male and female \u2014 they\u2019re bombarded with them from morning till night.<\/span><\/p>\nThe question, as always, is what do we want those messages to be?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I just came upon an excellent New York Times article,Hers: Why Boys Don\u2019t Play with Dolls. I just had to share! I am reprinting it here, with the parts I found most important in bold. As the mother of a two year old daughter, I deal with these sorts of things all the time! Enjoy! […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":845,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[135],"class_list":["post-314","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-feminism","tag-gender"],"yoast_head":"\n
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