Tuesday, September 2, 2008

Adventures in Gender Identification

Miss D has recently gained some strong opinions about males and females. I noticed it a week ago when we saw a young boy riding a pink Barbie bike down the street and she said "That's not a boy bike, that's a girl bike!"

I was surprised of course, and asked her why it was a girl's bike- I think it eventually came out because of the pink. I explained that colors do not make some thing "boy" or "girl" and that girls could have red or blue things and boys could have pink things but I don't know if it really sunk in.

Then yesterday, she told me I was her best friend. (yay! I will remember this day forever!) but she went on to say that Dada was not her friend because he is a boy. This went on all day and carried over to our friends Mr. and Mrs. H when they came to visit. (Mrs. H being friend and Mr. H being not)

While it is amusing, when I tried to delve deeper into it she said that boys were different from girls and that's why they were not her friends. i told her it's often very nice to have friends that are different than we are. But again, not really seeing the sink-in.

I'm not sure if it comes from school (she's around older children a lot) or television or a combination of the two. I haven't done any research yet but I suspect it's pretty normal to self-identify this way. I'd be curious to hear from others though- on what if anything should be done to combat this sort of thinking?

A cool article on the subject

4 comments:

Lakeview Coffee Joe said...

Damn I wish I could offer something intelligent to say, but I don't have kids. It SEEMS that being drawn to people like yourself only would be a normal, relatively short phase that kids would go through right? For others though, they never grow out of it (i.e. Rush Limbaugh).

Anonymous said...

My suggestion is wait for them to have kids of their own and then look on in confused amazement that you ever got through it yourself.

Anonymous said...

I'll leave this one to the people with kids...

alexis said...

I think it's quite normal once they start recognizing themselves as a "self" to experiment with the elements that make them different.