Gender conditioning

For or against?
Do you think it can be damaging in one way or the other?

Personally, I hate the whole blue/toy cars for baby boys, pink/dollies for baby girls. Everything should be neutral.

Opinions?

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.

Interesting.
I liked both toy cars and enjoyed going to car shows with my dad as a child, but also took an interest in the girly side too. Maybe it's because I was the only child...

I looked and dressed so much like a boy when I was younger that me and my brother used to think it was a game to see if other kids could guess if I was a girl or a boy. We found it hilarious when they thought I was a boy and we could announce I was in fact a girl. Mum sent me to ballet for 6 years dressed head to toe in pink, and bought me dolls which I hated, when choosing my own clothes and toys I always chose boys options. I did grow up to be a lesbian though...

^That kind of proves my point. Children tend to drift in a natural direction of their own choosing. I've got a work mate who's shitting himself because his lad loves pink things, dolls, tinsel-covered toys in seaside tat shops, putting on his mum's jewellery.

I've told him, there's nothing he can do. Try and stop the lad and he'll alienate him. It might be a phase, it might be a life choice, there's nothing a parent can honestly do about it. We don't have them for long before they leave.

My daughter only plays with cars. She has no interest in dolls. She likes to play Call Of Duty with me too.
At the same time she says her favourite colour is pink and she likes all that fairy/unicorn bullshit, as conditioned by the TV and friends. I prefer her in trousers, because it's easier for me - most of her clothes are anything but pink. She still knows well what gender she is (she's 3.5yo) and what girls and boys are expected to play with/watch on tv. Our older one was very girly girly and still managed to become a lesbian-ish (or it's a fashion now, because of Nicki Minaj and such?).

Im inclined to agree with Luci, although I do wonder what effect the total media saturation of kids from a young age is.

This thread reminded me of this:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-13581835

Which does kind of throw up some ethical issues for me

The worse are the ads on telly. It's them who tell kids what to get, what to play with, what to wear. Kids take to the advertisement very seriously - they lack the distance we have (typing it from an iPad).

My Mum & Dad's god daughter was a really pretty little thing but always hated being dressed in conventional 'girlie' clothes.
Now she wears men's suits, has a flat top and is a ravin' pushbike!

She's even got a stubbly chin?!

I need an emergency Barbie!

@lileth: I think it's healthy to allow children access to as many different kinds of play as they want and allow them to find their own interests, but that isn't the same as neutral - I don't think that's possible. even if you hyper-controlled them (no pink, blue, football, digger trucks or fairy princesses allowed), dressed them only in beige, they would still play with other kids and see the stuff that's targetted at them.

I would have been a very sad panda if I hadn't been a tomboy, albeit one with a thing for cuddly toys and arts&crafts. I didn't bother to correct people (nor did my parents) and assumed they would think I was a boy, until the age of ten-ish. but my best friend at junior school was into Tammy Girl and was super-girly.

I wrote an essay on this once. A long time ago

^That kind of proves my point. Children tend to drift in a natural direction of their own choosing. I've got a work mate who's shitting himself because his lad loves pink things, dolls, tinsel-covered toys in seaside tat shops, putting on his mum's jewellery.

I've told him, there's nothing he can do. Try and stop the lad and he'll alienate him. It might be a phase, it might be a life choice, there's nothing a parent can honestly do about it. We don't have them for long before they leave.

^ This was my little bro.

He now bats for the other team. We blame our mum. She says it runs in my Dad's family.

To be fair there have been a number of 'flamboyant' relatives on that side.

Pink has only very recently become associated with girls - a while back it was seen as a boys colour. Evidence is on the internet somewhere.

And mumsnet >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

I think there are some parents who do 'condition' their kids

The worse are mums who want a WAG or Page 3 girl's career for their daughters and start early.
Or dad who make their 4yo take up competitive kick boxing.

Soon or a later thy either start working for Babestation or end up in jail. Or totally rebel against their parents at the age of 11 and go 180 deg. against their wishes.

Almost all the research has hit the same bottomline: irrespective of social conditioning, the type of play and 'image' children choose for themselves is based on testosterone levels.

There's a gender/sexuality spectrum, and we all have our place on it. The healthiest approach for parents is that which GL describes upthread. Allow them to experiment however they wish, and they will find their own path. You can't be prescriptive, and repeated/prolonged attempts to do so will either be preaching to the converted, or causing no end of psychological issues further down the line.

There is this video that my mum shot in my formative years where she dressed me up as a girl and put my hair in a ponytail and made me say "Hello mummy, my name is Antoinette"

As BMMF says,
The same hormones that are responsible for sex organ development in a fetus are also responsible for the more aggressive nature of boys. You can't fight nature, you can try but you won't win

...and everything is just fucking fine.

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. :)

My great aunt dressed me and my brother up as husband (my brother) and wife (me) and marched us down the garden path singing "here comes the bride, short fat and wide".

I turned out ok....kinda...

My great aunt dressed me and my brother up as husband (my brother) and wife (me) and marched us down the garden path singing "here comes the bride, short fat and wide".

I turned out ok....kinda...

I'm aroused.

Pink has only very recently become associated with girls - a while back it was seen as a boys colour. Evidence is on the internet somewhere.

Yep, less than a hundred years ago, young girls were dressed in blue, young boys in pink and wore dresses. Can't say I know of any historical evidence of this having any 'conditioning' effect at all.

Almost all the research has hit the same bottomline: irrespective of social conditioning, the type of play and 'image' children choose for themselves is based on testosterone levels.

There's a gender/sexuality spectrum, and we all have our place on it. The healthiest approach for parents is that which GL describes upthread. Allow them to experiment however they wish, and they will find their own path. You can't be prescriptive, and repeated/prolonged attempts to do so will either be preaching to the converted, or causing no end of psychological issues further down the line.

True.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Reimer

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 have a harm reduction approach to this. Gender stereotypes are a bitch, but trying to de-gender my kids will end up with more damage. The best I can do is to provide models that there isn't anything anyone could not do or be because of he's a girl or a boy.

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.
Is there any hot babes to look out for?

My daughter only plays with cars.

The motoring normative society is trying to turn her into another car-addict.