Avoiding gender and sexuality 'norms'

Is anyone else trying to not impose gender or sexuality norms with their children? I always thought I would raise my children without presumption over what they will enjoy/do due to their gender or what sexuality they may choose later in life.

But phew- I can't believe that already at 3 months old people comment "Ooo look they're holding hands" if my son's hand touches a little girl's hand, or "You don't want to be a sissy in pink".

I didn't realise it would be so hard and I've realised now that I wont be able to shelter him from these cultural norms of our society so I'll just have to balance it in the home. Anyone else trying to do the same and have any tips/experiences to share?

Haha, Riv LOVES pink, it's his fave colour by far. I suppose it depends on your view re: nature vs nurture. I do believe that girls and guys have some differences, like guys tend to be stronger (my dh is less active than me and heaps stronger), and girls make the babies. So, the anatomical differences.
And I suspect we're even wired a bit differently when it comes to how we interpret the world, how we communicate and stuff.

But you're right, people do place these expectations on our kids. What I'm going to try to do is give my boys (and girls if I ever have any) the opportunity to make their choices based on their interests, not societies expectations. If my son takes a liking to a doll or pink clothing, well, why not? And if someone tells them they can't do something because of their gender, I'll defend my kid's right to pursue their interests.

Okay...I might have rambled, I'm watching Rove at the same time...sorry. :P

Yes - same school of thought here.
DS is now 5yrs. I think people now leave us alone about it, but for most of his first 4 yrs we got alot of comments. I used to dress him unisex clothes sometimes,)not skirts or love hearts but purple pants etc -coz so much boy stuff is sooo bland and predictable imo) but some people found it too weird. My mum found him a t-shirt wen he was about 2yrs, that said "tough guys wear pink". It was a pink T ;) . Frankly I dont care if he`s a tough guy or not but I appreciated being able to put him in it iykwim.
He started ballet at 3yrs, and we got the 'gay' comments!?*#@$%@! As if the dancing might actually turn him gay!!!:rolleyes:
I have let Ds take the lead in what toys he wants. He still plays tenderly with his babydoll, and when visiting a friends place recently he asked for the betty spagetti dolls to play with so I got them out for him. U get anoyed when I hear other people talk to him and they make comments that are gender specific, but I just try to balance that out with how we talk to him or i will even correct them - bluntly or jovial - depending how stupid their comments are.
Oh - and DS has long hair lol. And thats been and still is a problem for some - but its DS choice and he wants long hair.
The only thing we try to be sensitive about now that he is older is directing him away from something if its too girly ( not towards 'boy' stuff, but just away from the 'girls' )and he`s keen on it - but he is at the age where he is becoming away of gender differences too. He is aware that with his long hair and good looks, he doesnt want people to mistake him for a girl.

So, my son is sensitive and creative, he likes fairies and sparkly stuff , but his first choices will without a doubt be for lego and starwars etc - and thats because thats what he`s into by his own choices. If he shows an interest in something (such as wanting long hair, cooing over cute babies or a love of dance - or transformers, thomas tank engine and dinosaurs) then thats what we allow him to try out.

If we have a daughter we will bring her up the same way. I wont be dressing her in lots of pink etc, but if she gets shows an interest in it then we will allow some of that, but I think its great not to start out telling them what is expected of them.

Alot of people just are not comfortable with this kind of approach, but as I see it, males need to be free to express themselves and know who they are , not what they are.
In my opinion a man who is sexy is one who is confident in his sexuality and masculinity.

I hope I`m raising a son who will be a confident man, and a loving caring 'in tune' partner one day.


:redface: Sorry if this is quite long - but as you can see, its a subject I have alot of interest and feelings about!

I shoudl add, I read Nelles post above and perhaps I could have said the same thing as short as her - but yea, I agree that males and females are different, but let your little person be who they are going to be, not what anyone else makes you feel they should be.

I went into raising DS in the same way and it was easy as we lived away from family and the friends so didn't have them imposing their values. DS is very gender neutral and although his play styles are different to most kids as he has autism he is attracted to both playing kitchens and tea sets with his"dolls" and fiddling with trucks, Yugioh etc. up until recently he would choose pink and purples over blues andreds etc.... however now at school we noticed his gender neutralness added to his social difference so we have been "teaching" him some social norms to stop some of the teasing from other kids.

Our DD on the other hand happily plays with all of her brothers toys, trucks, cars, Bob the builder plays soccer etc but LOVES dolls and chooses pink everytime. Her fav past times are giving her dolls bottles and pushing them in the pram. So there's my little take on two kids raised the same way with the same toys and how each one is so different and also some cons to raising neutral kids in a gender orientated society....

Yes!

I am really passionate about children choosing what they want to do and who they want to be in their own time without the pressure to be a BOY or a GIRL, they're just KIDS! My DS would have been about 9 months and we were in a charity shop and he started playing with some strings of beads in a dish on the counter. An old lady said, "Oh, you can't play with them, you're a boy, beads are for girls" WTF!!! I was horrified (yeah sure there are probably more important things to be horrified about but it really socked me at the time). He's a baby, what baby would not want to play with some interesting colourful beads?

I wish shops just had children's sections, not a BOYS section and a GIRLS section. Ergh, but it only seems to be getting more and more extreme this gender identification/indoctrination thing?

I think this can be taken over a number of things really.

We choose not to have our children christened as we really wanted them to find the religion they felt comfortable with. My boys go to a catholic school and NIkoalus has said that he would like to be christened now so we are supporting him in his decision.

I caught Wilhelm my 6YO breast feeding his dolly the other day...it was such a beautiful sight that it bought a tear to my eye (and Jeds as he has autisum and its such a lifting thing to see that he is tkaing in what I am doing) then today I caught vyolett this a toy hard hat on and a 'hammer' hitting the timber frame with her daddy.

I think we need to allow our children to be able to find their inner selves with out the interferrances of the negetivitive and stereo typing that we see so much of today. They need to be able to explore all the wonderful things life has open to them before they grown to old and have their minds posioned buy the polluted nonsence of todays society.

I'm of two minds about this issue. If you had asked me when I was in my early 20's (before I had children) whether I planned on trying to dismantle gender stereotyping when i had my own children i would have replied with a passionate "yes!!!" but as I grow older I'm starting to see the value in allowing each gender to celebrate their differences. My thinking started to change when i fell pregnant for the first time. My DH is a "sensitive new age man" you see... and up until I fell pregnant I quite liked that he was in touch with his feminine side etc. But as my pregnancy progressed I realised that i bloody well wanted him to toughen up and act like a bloody man! No more of this emotionalism and fainting at the antenatal classes!!! That was meant to be my realm! LOL So... I started to encourage that kind of response instead (affirming his masculinity) and have been doing so for the past 14 years. I now firmly believe that men and women are meant to be different BUT I don't go over the top. I have never encouraged my DD to be a "girly girl".... never drenched her in pink... never raised her to be a delicate princess.... I dressed her in mainly gender neutral clothing... I bought her gender neutral toys like Duplo (She received a Duplo train set for her 3rd birthday). These days i happily allow my boys to play with the few dolls that are lying around the place. I dress them in cardigans. So I guess i have mellowed to believing that polarising gender behaviours is the thing to be avoided rather than neutralising them. By this I mean avoiding the extremes. Regarding my daughter i just don't want her to get too swept up in spending all her money on girly stuff that i think is disempowering... I think it's a real "con" that women 'have' to spend so much time and resources on being feminine. I want my DD to be strong enough to use her $ and time for better things... and to be more resilient and strong... and this is going well because she has managed to strike a good balance in celebrating her femininity yet having all the traditional attributes of strength and resilience (she is heavily into sport to name 1 example). This is largely due to her school environment and policy (she has always attended all girls' schools) where the staff are very focussed on helping girls adopt stronger roles and perceptions of themselves.... plus they don't have the constant judgement of boys which can force girls into the "girly girl" trap as they compete for male attention IYKWIM.

So... essentially I accept that most people are still reliant on the stero-types.... and many people are quite defensive of the value in promoting the stereo-types. But personally I see value in simply communicating to your children that you accept them for what they are and will support their interests as long as they don't harm anyone else or themselves.

The movie Billy Elliot would have to be the most frequently watched and hired film in our house... i think that kinda sums up our attitude :) Excellent film!

Boys and girls ARE different, no matter what you do. Give a one-year-old girl a soft toy and she'll cuddle it, give a one-year-old boy a soft toy and he'll hit someone with it. Generally speaking, of course. We should celebrate this, not aim to make both the same, this usually involves saying the boy is in the wrong because cuddling is more acceptable than hitting - OK, I agree, I like cuddling more than hitting, but both children are discovering the properties of the toy and using it for what they like best - by design. Men are designed to beat up bears, soft ones or not!

My DS loves cars and trains. He also can put on lipstick and eyeshadow... not well, but he likes putting the brush in the powder and then almost getting it on his/my eyelids. I let him put his own lipsalve on when I'm putting on my facepaint.

DS likes pink... until he realises there's not a girl hiding in the pink! He associates pink with girls, and girls with hugging. He doesn't hug boys. That's not a learned behaviour, that's just him. He prefers to play with the toy workshop than the toy kitchen. However, at home he loads his nappies into the dryer (he likes tumble dried nappies LOL - he does this with ones on the airer, or even dry ones!), loads and unloads the dishwasher (not well, I admit) and pushes the hoover around (while it's turned off). He isn't allowed real tools, so plays with his plastic ones if he's not playing with mummy's kitchen toys.

The expectations I place on DS are that, as a male, he is to "look after" females. I expect that behaviour from all gentlemen, so that ladies don't have to be defended. He is to be polite, kind, considerate and, most of all, himself. He is not to beat others up (unless they start it, or they start it with someone weaker than himself, including with a girl of any size or age). I don't want to influence hobbies (he's a great dancer!), his school preferences, his job preferences, but I do expect him to be a gentleman. He is not to be a lady.

I tend to agree Ryn, when I fell pregnant I was surprised at how defensive I was of my need to be protected.... I felt so vulnerable. Good point.

This reminds me of a funny but true book I saw whilst queued up at our book store: called something like "Porn for New Mums" and featured page after page of gorgeous, hunky blokes doing things like the vacuuming, changing nappies, washing the dishes. Which is telling men that they should consider redefining masculinity to a certain extent... doing house work is not feminising! But caring for your female is! (Being masculine)

interesting discussion
i have boy/girl twins who have grown up obviously exposed to the same experiences and parenting- the ultimate social experiment!!!!

I firmly believe that their interests are inate from my experiences- for instance they both have the same toys to play with. Their toys were never mine or yours- it was always they are ours! Everything from dolls to cars and their levitate to those toys they feel most comfortable with- cars for my son and dolls for my daughter.

They do not have cousins that they see often enough to know what toys are boy//girl toys, nor were they put in child care or hung around with older kids that they mimic.

Their interests have formed through their own decisions and choices and no matter how many different toys they have. My son loves constructions and my daughter likes dressing up. They do play heaps together and make their own games up, but their interests whether i like it or not, are 'typically' gender based.
Now that they are at school, they obviously are influenced by other children, but still they make up their own minds what they like and dont like- and i guess that is more important that what they actually play with.
just my food for thought
odette

I have witnessed similar with my children Odette. I have to admit that despite providing mainly gender neutral toys for my children: my boys have been drawn to things with wheels and my daughter did prefer the doll house, for example and role play. The wheel thing with my boys was from very young baby-hood long before any kind of influencing. My daughter was never really interested in cars although she did play a little bit with the Hot Wheels set my DH bought her when she was 4yo. She liked the train set but not as much as my boys.

But... my youngest son is very affectionate and loves his soft toys more than any of them! He hugs and kisses them unprompted and won't go to bed until they are arranged around him "just so". And DH and I let him know this is fine :) I don't think affection should be a gender defined attribute but one shared by both. By the same token violence should not be the sole domain of either gender either. I would discourage that in either son or daughter (girls can violate in ways other than physical). What i don't like is when i hear parents promoting violence for their sons because they see it as a masculine trait :( By all means encourage your sons to be strong and physical but not in a way that violates others... athletes, for example are strong and physical, it doesn't have to be a negative thing.

ETA: Just another thought: I really don't arc-up too much about the blue/pink thing with newborns and babies. Honestly most babies look so androgynous and using the blue/pink thing as a helpful code so that little old ladies know exactly what you have there in the pram before they cluck...so it really doesn't bother me. It's not as if the baby cares. I didn't put my daughter in pink very often but I was happy to give a few clues as to what she was (florals, dresses etc). Maybe it's just me but I'd rather avoid the awkwardness of having to correct someone if they got the gender wrong IYKWIM ;)

A social experiment I saw the BBC`s child of our time episode where they put 2 twins brothers separatly into a play room with hidden camera. It was filled with a mix of all kinds of toys. One brother went and trashed everything, and threw the doll out of its cot etc. They put another boy in with him the the testosterone kicked in and he got even more bolshy.
The other twin when in the room alone played with a bit of everything and from memory was mostly interested in the kitchen/stove toys and caring for the doll. When they put another male child in with him he tried to get them to play with that game too, but they were not so inetrested and led him to a truck set or something similar, which the twin after some slight reluctance agreed to play with too.

The twins parents hadnt put them in childcare etc either I dont think. They had been in the same womb, same time, same toys and same treatment.

I completely agree that men and women have inherant differences and I have no problem with that. My issue is more with society placing restrictions on children because of gender (Billy Elliot is a good example). But my particuar gripe is the assumption of hetrosexuality. It annoys me no end. I understand that knowing the social 'norms' and stereotypes is important for children so I expect my son needs to be exposed to these but I don't want him thinking these thoughts are the 'only way' and I'm irritated that the indoctrination starts so young.

Yes, I agree again. Ren, I wrote my post and was just about to post it, but you've beaten me to it. You've pretty much just said exactly what I was going to say (and actually, you've said it much better than how I've said it) . But here's my post anyway.... (seeing as it's already written)...

Yes! BOYS and GIRLS are different and their differences should be celebrated! BUT they should be given the space to discover their personalities in their own time without undue pressure to conform to gender norms. I think the key here is the "undue pressure" bit. Personally, I think it is getting more and more difficult for little kids to resist this pressure because BOY/GIRL things (clothes, toys) and attitudes of others seem to be so ever more pervading. Or maybe not, maybe it has always been like this??? I dunno? I just really, really hope that my little boy always feels free to be who he wants to be, and that he never resists doing something he really wants to do because it's "girly" and not acceptable for a boy. Likewise for a daughter if I have one.

When DSS was about 3-7, he loved soft toys, kissed everything, picked flowers and was very gentle, he loved helping and cooking and very often would pretend cook... we neither encouraged or discouraged this behavior... he wanted to wear jewelry at one stage (bracelets) so he had a friendship band (remember those :)) didnt want to wear girls clother or play with dolls though (his choice)

Now at 10 he is a boy through and through, a friend asked him to draw a picture (she is an artist) of something nice, instead of a ben10 alien that he always draws, he said 'like what' so she asked for a flower... he drew a really nice flower, but then added a bee hive and a swarm of bees that were attacking someone that was going to pick the flower!!!
he remains gentle and loving, but will also rough and tumble and loves building with his Dad and would never think of doing anything that could be deemed 'girly'... but still loves cooking - but then so does his Dad.

We wondered though, if his early behaviour was a result of spending more time with his Mum than his Dad and not having that male influence all the time, but he was in family day care with other kids that came from 'nuclear' familes and she had a few live in partners at times so probably not.

Also he has grown up aware of same sex relationships as DH uncle is in one... we never really sat down and explained it, he just knew that "harry" lived with "steve" (not real names JIC) just as i lived with his Dad... he grew up accepting this and has never really questioned it.

*meh* kids will be what they want to be and its not up to us to either stiffle or encourage certain behaviours (well obviously there would be exceptions to this if they are being overly physical/rought etc). Don't force them to do something they don't enjoy - let them try it so they gain the experience but don't flog a dead horse if they don't like it. By curbing certain behaviours we are only passing our own predetermined ideas onto them and not letting them form their own.

I suppose I have the benefit of having both genders, so there is a mix of play items in our house. From what I have observed over the years at playgroup and then preschool, children aren't defined by the toys they play with. We have friends that have 5 boys and every single one of them would go beserk over a doll or a toy pram if they saw one simply because it wasn't something they saw and got to play with everyday kwim? Same applies for girls and 'boys toys'. Granted they do play with them differently (my eldest DS plays with the girls' pram like it was a formula one racing car and the girls will play 'house' with action figures and dinosaurs) and the way they play with them comes back to their gender and their personality, but kids love toys and if you put them in a room full of toys they will look at and play with all of them, but how they play with them is essentially defined by personality I think.

But toys aside, it is hard in the wider community to stay consistent with what ideally we would like to instill in our children - whether it be gender neutral clothes/play or gender specific. Although retailers and manufacturers are starting to change their 'traditions' as well - pink shirts for boys etc, polly pocket matchbox cars for girls (which my girls adore LOL), beado's being marketed to both genders etc, so it is becomming easier without our children becomming stigmatised.

Hi,
I understand what you mean, Ren. I have a DD and although she does wear girly things, I am glad when she is a little tomboy-ish. She does love dolls. But she also loves cars and soccer balls. She kicks them thrugh the house. When it comes to climbing, she's as tough as they come, keeping up with boys muhc older than her. And she's only 13 months old. I love that.
I also love that she can be tender and loving.
In my opinion, at this age there aren't all that many differences between boys and girls yet. But when she grows up, I think I will see more of it. There are also lots of differences between girls and girls or boys and boys.
I want her to be her, I don't want her to feel like she has to conform to what others think about her.

My personal pet peeve is something else: body image and food (especially because she is a girl). I have myself suffered from eating disorders for almost a decade, and I am hellbent on breaking the cycle (she denies it, but my mum has issues with body image herself and I don't call what she does a "healthy relationship with food). So it really gets to me when people make stupid comments about little kids. DD is actually on the skinny side (90th percentile in height, but 70th percentile in weight I think). But when she recently had a bit of a growth spurt, my FIL said to her: "Gee, you're getting fat" WTF? I lamost blew my top! Funny thing is, he's very overweight.

Actually, I think there is a thread in this :-) Might have to start one of my own rather than hijacking yours.

Unfortunately you can't control what everybody around you does and your children are going to be exposed to these things. All you can do is to foster their independence and self confidence so that they feel free to disregard outside pressures that they dislike. It sounds like you're doing a great job at this.

All the best, Saša

Oh, and DD also often wears unisex clothes. I used to HATE pink and used to swear if I ever had a daughter that I wouldn't dress her in pink. But unfortunately it really suits her ;-) Pale skin, blue eyes, blonde hair... So I have made my peace with this colour and she has a few pink things now.

She also often wears blue (and all other colours) and people often refer to her as a little boy. But then again, she can be wearing pink pants and some people still say "he". It doesn't bother me, though.

And DD regularly pashes another girl. I just think it's cute and if anyone would dare to make a comment that implied that anything sexual was going on there, I would bite their head off!

Saša