This past weekend, I was at a ‘Saturday Night Meatballs'[1] event with some old friends. Amongst other things, I was watching how the children interacted with each other. There were a collection of children of various ages, from a few different families. Seeing them interacting with their parents, they were all well-loved, and each of the parents were practicing what I would consider modern parenting, setting down firm, well-defined, sensible rules, and encouraging their children to resolve problems themselves by thinking of solutions and implementing them[2].<\/p>\n
At the same time, I saw the children self-segregating by gender, both in behaviour and location. One of the parents, talking about a female child mentioned that before they went to daycare, they were into a variety of non-gender-stereotypical things. Almost immediately afterwards, it was Pink and Purple and Princesses. For me, this was a huge stark reminder of the uphill parents face. One could see that even if all of the parents were giving their all to make a non-gender binary household at home, that a culture could persist in a playground or daycare, passed down from year to year by the children.<\/p>\n
You can also see it other children’s behaviours. One of the girls wanted to go play with the boys, but was too afraid to go downstairs to the basement[3]. The group of girls sat downstairs for much of the afternoon\/evening while the boys ran around and yelled upstairs. When the girls went up to join them, that lasted for a while, the yelling intensified, then they came down to complain about how they were being treated (which prompted the solution-finding conversations above).<\/p>\n
I don’t have good answers, just a few observations. I’m sure this is better than it was decades ago, but there’s still a large amount of genderism that we still have to unpack as a society, and it needs to be unpacked early and unconsciously, for the sake of our children.<\/p>\n
[1]It’s a great idea, in the tradition of eating together with family and friends to build community. There’s a great description of the ‘original’ Friday Night Meatballs here<\/a>.<\/p>\n [2]I particularly liked this tactic. The first question is ‘Can I help you think of more options?’, to help the kids develop the coping and problem solving skills to deal with others.<\/p>\n [3]This could also have been because she was new to the group.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This past weekend, I was at a ‘Saturday Night Meatballs'[1] event with some old friends. Amongst other things, I was watching how the children interacted with each other. There were a collection of children of various ages, from a few different families. Seeing them interacting with their parents, they were all well-loved, and each of … Continue reading Pink, and Purple, and Princesses, Oh My!<\/span>