Thoughts from a five-year-old's birthday...

[usernamenumber]

Wrap up from M's niece's bday: The Katy Perry movie was like her music: pleasant and inoffensive, at least if you don't think about it too much. Ms Perry seems like a nice enough young lady (damn... I feel old), and I kept myself humble by remembering the quality of the music I listened to at the neices' ages, but let's face it, a documentary about Katy Perry by "Perry Productions" is not a documentary, it's a feature-length infomercial.

Really though, I'm glad I did it, because when you've got a newly minted five year old, whose career aspirations include "mommy and also rock star", and her six year old sister dressed up in pink and blue wigs rocking out to music the lyrics to which they fortunately don't yet understand, it's hard to argue. M won't let me post pics, and you should thank her for that, because you would be ded from teh cutes.

Also? That was so not the worst of the weird genderfoo one experiences while doing a ride-along on a five year old girl's life. Lots of feelings about that. It's odd, and probably terminally naive, but I feel like I learned some important things about parenting (disclaimer: this is all based on general societal observations, not anything about specific parents). Part of it is the expected "ugh, avoid these influences as much as possible" stuff, but I also, unexpectedly, kind of decided I needed to chill out a bit, too.

The theme of Niece's birthday party was "princesses and pirates". There would be boys and girls there, after all, so of course it couldn't be one or the other. Without being told to, the girls did all the princess themed stuff, and the boys did all of the pirate themed stuff. Everyone got a "pirate" bandana, but the boys' had skulls and crossbones, and the girls had skulls and crossbones... with little pink hearts for eyes in the skulls (why yes, I did take one of the latter... what? Heartskull! That's pretty badass! Don't judge me!)

Anyway.

This is the important parenting lesson I think I learned from this: whatever mix of nature and nurture the boys->pirates, girls->princesses thing is, you're not going to be able to shield your kid from all of it, and you'll probably do more harm than good if you try to force it. Kids will have a time of finding their own identities, but that time is usually adolescence onward, not childhood (says not-a-child-pshychologist). I mean, if I were to ever have a kid, and that kid wanted to do a non-standard activity, I would encourage hir to do so and would get all Daddy Tiger on anyone who tried to "correct" hir, but I also need to accept that that might not happen, *and that that's ok*. The folly in trying to coerce someone into non-conformity should be obvious, but I think like a lot of people who learned fear of and disdain for "the mainstream", I kind of worry that I wouldn't know what to do with a kid who is... normal ("whatever that means" etc etc).

I just keep thinking of the images that have been going around social media lately: little girls in hot pink Darth Vader costumes, or wearing fairy princess outfits while learning to solder, and I think maybe that's the thing to aspire to.

I guess what this comes down to is: this weekend gave me a lot of thoughts and feelings re the balance between disdaining gender roles as tools of oppression, but not letting that turn into knee-jerk disdain for femininity or masculinity (though damn I still hatehatehate those terms).

Comments

[lillibet.livejournal.com]

These are good thoughts to be having.

One of the biggest pieces, for me, is that if I make a big deal about something I dislike, then it will become A Big Deal and the kid will pick up on that and I will be the one who made it an issue.

For example, Alice very occasionally expresses interest in Barbies. So far we've avoided buying her one, rather than refusing to do so. Part of the decision process there is that she isn't all that into dolls and I'm fairly confident that she wants one because it seems like something people have, rather than because she's really interested.

It's been relatively easy for us because Alice has a wide array of interests, so we're able to be more indulgent of the ones we can support whole-heartedly and let her explore the super-femininity of the princess phase at a level we can deal with, without having to cope with the obsessive single interest that many kids seem to develop.

I'm fairly amused, because Jason and I conform to standard gender roles in many ways, and Alice has turned out to be fairly neutral thus far (I said fairly--this is all in comparison to other kids we know and she did pick dark pink as the color of her new bedroom). Whereas good friends of ours who are much less conforming themselves got a boy obsessed with trucks and a girl who's all about the dollies.

All this said, I've been noticing lately that Alice is almost completely unaware of pop music, compared with other kids her age. She has no idea who Katy Perry is--I asked her--and couldn't hum a Katy Perry song to save her life. I think she might really like the music and costumes, but there are enough other messages there I'm not entirely comfortable with that I'm not going to be the one to introduce her to it. I suspect this will change somewhat when she goes to kindergarten in the fall.

[hippie1025.livejournal.com]

It has been interesting watching the gender thing start to emerge with my not-yet-two-yr-old. She spent most of her first year obsessed with cars, trucks, trains etc. We still have to drop everything and run out to the porch when the garbage or recycling truck comes by. (Seriously. No matter *what* we are doing.)

After her 1st birthday, her grandmother sent her a baby doll and a pink toy stroller. She had shown zero interest in dolls until it showed up, but immediately she knew it was a baby, and that she was supposed to carry it around, hug it, feed it etc. (And I mean as soon as it came out of the box.)

So cut to a couple of weeks ago. We are heading out for a walk, and she chooses to grab her "Baby" and a green John Deere dump truck. Baby rode in the truck as she did all sort of physics experiments on ramps. This was all self-directed and self-chosen as far as I can tell.

Yeah, I'm pretty happy with a little girl who wants to do physics experiments with her truck and her baby. ;)

[hermitgeecko.livejournal.com]

I used to bewilder my mother when I was a small child by absolutely insisting on writing stories about princes and princesses where the Official Goal was marriage and the plotline usually involved the main character going on adventures before rescuing a bride-or-husband to be. I'm not certain that the majority of the rescuees were princesses, but it may have been the case.

She commented to me in high school, "I didn't get it! I'm a card-carrying NOW member, but what did my daughter want to write about? Princes and princesses!"

The truth was, I didn't want to write about them - not at first. I wanted to draw them. Princesses and unicorns were like Barbies, only better. But the people at school said I couldn't just sit around drawing, it wasn't enough, so I had to find a loophole. Illustrating my stories turned out to be the answer - one page of writing, one page of illustration.

This led to such fascinating narratives as: "Once upon a time, there was a king named Albert, and he had six beautiful daughters. They were all princesses. The oldest princess's name was Debra. She had green eyes and black hair. She wore a white dress with red flowers on it and pearl earrings and a ruby tiara. [illustration] The second oldest princess's name was...." with a three-page snippet of story or so at the end.

The joke was on me - eventually, I got more interested in the stories and less interested in the illustrations. But it was apparently REALLY hard to watch for a while.

[neuroliz.livejournal.com]

This is one of the (some days, feels like "few") things I feel like I got right as a parent. We responded radically to the whole dominant-culture-toxicity thing: My kids (ages 22, 17, and 15) homeschool/ed. Youngest (my son) loves to cook, and his sisters are acute and articulate about gender identity, beyond even where I typically am. We resisted the Barbie thing for a while, but then let it alone - all three kids played with them and then moved on. The toy gun issue was much more of a thing for me: I will not have a gun in the house. Full stop. We compromised about water pistols and nerf guns. But my son made pretend guns with sticks, carefully saved them in his room.

Nothing about any of it is easy. Nothing. You make choices, and hope you're doing less damage than your parents did. Or at least a different kind.