Gender conditioning

It just happens like that, it's not gender conditioning.

We went neutral colours all the way with our kids (Boy and a girl) we didn't force a gender specific colour on them. Sure, we put the girl in dresses and the boy in pants, but we didn't deny them access to other clothes if they'd chosen to put them on.

My daughter just naturally likes to dress toys up, look after them and generally 'baby' everything she plays with, from small plastic puppies to her reluctant younger brother.
Clobber of choice: flouncy frocks, pretty shoes, multiple hairband combinations, accessories such as small handbag.

My son likes trains and buses. If it's got wheels he 'brums' it around the carpet for hours. Send him to get dressed and he'll sling on the first thing on the pile, but if it's in any way 'fancy' (ie pretty designs, frilly, smart) he'll have nothing to do with it. Clobber of choice: Super Mario t-shirt, shorts, sandals.

Oh, and my daughter was given free reign in the shoe shop yesterday. She picked out sandals that were so glittery and pink and sickly sweet I instantly contracted type 2 diabetes.

I think there are some parents who do 'condition' their kids, making the lads tough and wear their local football strip 24/7 and the have girls dressed like miniature prom queens, but on the whole I think girls and boys drift slightly towards gender stereotypes fairly naturally. This is generally, and is, of course, not always the case.

I don't think that there would be anything wrong with boys and girls slightly drifting towards gender stereotypes. I would argue that if it's a 'slight' drift, we're not talking about gender stereotypes any more.

I'm not sure I'd choose the term 'gender conditioning', as I don't believe in behaviourist ideas of conditioning. I mostly talk about gender stereotyping. I believe that this is very much real, but that it's very difficult for individual pairs of parents to 'do anything about it'.

I would assume that, like all children, your children were very perceptive from an early age and were influenced by things that you didn't even notice them being influenced by. Limited gender roles really are still very much omnipresent, and even in ways that we stopped noticing as adults, or before we grew up. Children still pick these things out because they're new to them. That's not to say I know what your children were really influenced by!

Children essentially just want one thing: To be big and grown-up. They observe their parents and everyone around them constantly, and one of the first distinctions that they understand is the gender distinction. When my little nephew was about 21 months old, his parents asked him:

'What's your mum?'

"Wauf." (he used to move the consonants of the German word "Frau" for 'woman' around)

'What's your nan?'

"Wauf."

'What's your dad?'

"Mann."

'And what are you?'

"Mann."

This was when he had barely started to speak and these words were among about thirty or forty that he knew.

I looked into this some years ago (there are trillions of studies, hard to get a handle on the research). Children from a surprisingly early age have a handle on that aspect of who they are, enabling them to sort information by gender, and (most studies seemed to conclude) to act in accordance with it. It's one of the most obvious aspects of human beings and most people find gender identity much earlier than one might expect.

The problem is of course not finding gender identity but overshooting that aim by identifying aspects as belonging to a particular gender that don't belong there. My general assumption is that both genders share in the whole range of human personalities. Accordingly, there will be highly competitive and athletic women as well as highly sensitive and caring men, as well as the traditional stereotypes of competitive and athletic men and highly sensitive and caring women, and of course plenty of less extreme personalities in between.

Ideally, of course, a reduction in gender stereotyping would lead to fewer total extremes; there are ridiculous examples of over-competitiveness all around society which are partly caused, I think, by people playing up to these stereotypes, being guided by them. It is utter nonsense to assume that men are 'naturally' more competitive. There may be all sorts of reasons for them to be, but if you look at people carefully, you notice all sorts of traits that are either expressed or depressed to a certain extent. Gender stereotyping generally causes people to over-express or over-depress certain traits, and that can lead to all sorts of failures and unhappiness.

Anyway, it's a fairly inexhaustible topic and hugely interesting. I'm very much enjoying watching the Women's World Cup at the moment, as that will hopefully break up a few silly stereotypes about women's sport. Obviously, some way needs to be found to ensure that the opposite happens about what men 'cannot' do, too. :)