Raising Children in a Gender-Specific World

by Martha Kempner

There’s no denying it at this point.  My child is a girl.  A very girly girl.  She’s three-and-a-half.  She hasn’t worn pants in over a year (since she stopped letting me pick out her clothes).  She often wears a ballet skirt over or under her dress, prefers heels, loves earrings and necklaces, always has her nails done, and steals any of my makeup she can get her hands on (her application process is unique and results in a bizarre war paint look).  When she entertains herself, it always involves numerous outfit changes, and lately she’s taken to creating her own clothes.  Whether it’s by hanging scarves off the back of dresses to make a train, wrapping fabric around herself and taping it with duct tape, cutting the straps off a summer dress to make one “with no straps and no sleeves,” or layering skirts to make one that goes “all the way to the floor,”  the kid knows what she wants and uses the resources at her disposal to make it.  Fancy Nancy has nothing on Charlie.

I’m not sure how this happened.  I worked hard not to ascribe too closely to gender roles.  None of her baby gear was pink.  She had dolls and cars from the very beginning.   And her father was even more adamant about it than me.  When we moved to our new house, I found a fantastic, hand-made Persian rug that I wanted for her room.  He flat out refused because it was pink and to put pink in a little girl’s room was far too cliché.  (So I bought it for my own office, nothing cliché about that.)   Hell, we even gave her a boy’s name. 

She doesn’t get it from emulating me.  Sure, I own the make-up that she sneaks off to her room, but I almost never wear it.   I own numerous high heels but even Charlie will tell you that I only ever wear them to meetings.   And while she carries a purse (a small, black Kate Spade that used to be mine) to school every day, I prefer to shove things in my coat pocket or use a backpack.  

I don’t blame my mother-in-law who, having raised only boys, bought Charlie her first tutu and set of costume jewelry.  I don’t blame my mother who bought the first package of plastic, dress-up heels that my husband declared stripper shoes and unsuccessfully attempted to banish from the house.   And I don’t even blame the nanny who was with us until Charlie was two and spent much of the day reapplying her own lipstick and sharing it with Charlie.

It’s possible that I blame the stores that segregate everything from clothes to toys to bikes to books by gender.  Or the Disney corporation, whose ingenious repackaging and ubiquitous marketing of the “Disney Princesses” is hard to avoid and includes only some of the animation studio’s heroines—specifically, the ones who want little more than to wear a dress and dance with a prince. Couldn’t they have added Mulan as a princess?  After all, she single-handedly saves China.  But, as Charlie will be the first to note, she does not wear a dress that goes all the way to the floor.   

In truth, I don’t really blame anyone.  There’s nothing wrong with being feminine.  As long as you know that it’s one way—not the only way — to be if you’re a girl.  What worries me is that as of yet, Charlie doesn’t seem to have figured that out.   I get it, three-and-a-half year olds like rules.  They are working very hard to make sense of the world and having rules about how you should act, look, and dress helps them do that.  That’s why when we watched men’s figure skating it was impossible to convince her that one of the competitors was a boy even though he was wearing a sparkly outfit and make-up.

I think my role as a parent at this point is just to challenge these rules gently.  To tell her, when it comes up in conversation, that some boys like to wear make-up and lots of girls don’t.  That Prince Charming may have saved Snow White, but Wonder Woman often saves the whole world.   That ballet, soccer, tennis, and football are all things that boys and girls can do if they want.  That what you do and what you are capable of are not determined by your sex or gender.

When I was about eight or nine, my father got a consulting job writing a paper for a large pharmaceutical company about comparable worth.  The topic was dinner-table conversation in our house for many months and the conclusion was that women should be paid as much as men for doing the same work.  I remember a cartoon that was tacked to the refrigerator.  It showed a boy and a girl who were about one or two looking down each other’s diaper.  The caption read:  “Oh so that’s why you make more than me.”  The take home lesson for me was that women could do anything men could do.  (In fact, I always imagined myself as a pioneering woman, like the first to graduate law school – despite the fact that I was generations too late.)

I’m sure that ultimately Charlie will learn this lesson as well.  She’ll learn that she can express her gender in whatever way she wants – not just the way Disney suggests.  She’ll learn to respect others regardless of how they express their gender.  And, she’ll learn that gender is one part of who we all are but does not have to define us.   If she learns all of this while wearing a pink tutu and sparkly lip gloss, so be it.