The Girl Inside
My daughter, Eve, walked into school last week so excited to surprise her teachers and friends with her new short haircut, which “looks just like Grandma’s.” She came home heartbroken because several kids made fun of her for looking like a boy. She looked up at me with confusion and innocence and said, “But grandma doesn’t look like a boy”.
After further discussion, she shared with me that one of the girls making fun of her has also told her that she doesn’t want to be her friend. “Mommy, the only time she lets me talk to her is if I tell her that her clothes are pretty.”
My daughter is five.
I realized very early on that letting my twin daughters discover their own likes and dislikes ironically required an enormous amount of intervention. It turns out that by default, they are offered a limited view of their universe and I’ve found I must constantly make efforts to widen and balance it. It started when they were infants. I could’ve filled my registry with the “girl versions” of every product because, well, there are girl and boy versions of every product. “Girl” often means pink with flowers, hearts and rainbows. “Boy” often means blue or primary colors with sports paraphernalia, robots, dinosaurs, and other animals. Everything comes in boy or girl color palettes and designs. Not a fan of pink, it wasn’t a hard decision to try to surround my daughters with products, décor, and clothes that didn’t favor one color over another. And it felt important. I suspected then, and I’ve more than confirmed now, that “girl colors” and “boy colors” serve nothing more than to assign a gender to products and toys. And unless they relate to a child’s genitals, products and toys do not need a gender. Teach a girl that pink is a girl color and do you know what happens? Things that aren’t pink, aren’t for girls. And pity the boy who decides pink is his color of preference, or wants to play with a pink toy.
I had a lot of help exposing my daughters to a wide variety of play items. They have five older cousins (two boys and three girls) and we received all their toys second hand — including a giant dollhouse, an enviable dinosaur figurine collection, Legos of all colors, animal/dinosaur/robot/princess puzzles, a dress-up collection that included the finest princess attire as well as Elmo, Spiderman, Buzz Lightyear, a fish and a pumpkin. It was all going great in our little bubble of non-gender-assigned toys until PreK. At pick-up, Lily was crying because there was a birthday party and the parent handed out dinosaur puzzles to the boys and My Little Pony puzzles to the girls. She wanted a dinosaur puzzle and asked her teacher if she could have one instead. The teacher told her that they were for boys. As we were leaving, I noticed that there were extra dinosaur puzzles, so I said, “your teacher is wrong (yup, not the last time I said that), you can take one of the dinosaur puzzles”. This prompted a little boy in her class AND her twin sister to say, “That’s for boys!” Lily was confused and hurt. On the other hand, her sister Eve, a consummate collector and follower of rules, was excited to be sharing news of this new addition to her repertoire of “Pre-K Dos and Don’ts”. I swore under my breath (and then over my breath) and quickly decided to use this as a Teaching Moment. I put it to back them — “So what makes a toy just for boys?” We stared at each other for a few moments and then began to laugh. Of course, there are no toys for just boys or just for girls! That’s the silliest thing we’d ever heard! Or should I say, the silliest thing we continue to hear over, and over, and over again.
Those early conversations really stuck with Eve and Lily and at five, despite being called out on many occasions for playing with “boy toys”, or hearing others chastise boys for playing with “girl toys”, they are always the first to tell their friends that toys are for everyone, and dress-up is dress-up. If a boy wants to dress like a princess, of course he can. They proudly sport their rolling suitcases with dinosaur images (categorized under “boy’s suitcases” on Amazon) to Grandma’s every Friday night. This year for Halloween, Lily was Batman and Eve was Wonder Woman. When a friend said to Lily, “Are you Batgirl?” she looked at him like he was crazy and in an “Are you blind?” tone, said definitively, “No, I’m Batman”. Duh.
And why does all this matter? Aside from the fact that putting a gender on toys is stupid; “boy toys” are more educational than “girl toys”. They are geared toward science, technology, engineering and math — STEM. Yes, they now have cute pink STEM-focused toys for girls — because, well, it’s ok to build things if they’re pink, right? And pervasive homophobia, even amongst the most liberal of us, limits boys from being able to freely explore toys that are defined as “girl toys”. A parent in my local parenting group recently posted “Does anyone know of a brand that makes dollhouses that are for boys — i.e. not pink”. I want my girls exposed to a variety of toys — especially the educational ones — the ones that ask them to build and use their minds. And if I had a son, and he wanted to play with a dollhouse, I’d hope that I wouldn’t need to disguise it in blue to make it acceptable. I never want my children to think there is some arbitrary line in “play” that divides girls from boys. Even though clearly there is.
What if our children weren’t taught from an early age that pink is for girls and blue is for boys? What if we didn’t consistently, and systematically, provide them with a color-coded blueprint for what they should like? I don’t think it would dramatically change the people they will become. But I do think it would help them to become these people without judgment, insecurity and completely unnecessary obstacles. And I firmly believe that it would help them to become children, and then adults, who are more tolerant of each other.
I once explained my point of view to a mother of two small boys. She contended that while she understood where I was coming from, she felt that allowing her boys to play freely with things that are earmarked for girls would open her sons up to ridicule. My response to her was that it is our children doing the ridiculing and it is we who are inadvertently teaching our children that these “differences” are things to ridicule.
My girls have a very sweet and kind friend, Andrew. When Andrew was four, his father confided in me that another boy’s parents had informed him that Andrew had ridiculed their son for bringing an Elsa doll to school. He shared with me that Andrew had asked him for the same doll several months earlier, but he told him no. He told him no, in part, because he did not want his son to be made fun of for playing with an Elsa doll. Now, he felt culpable and was regretting that decision. I was so impressed by this parent for being insightful enough to recognize that his actions contributed to the very behavior he likely sought to protect his son from in the first place.
It would be impossible to talk about the implicit messages we send to our children without focusing on how we approach a little girls’ appearance. When my daughters were two and started preschool, I noticed that most days when they’d walk in the door of the classroom, the teacher would say something about how they looked: “What a pretty outfit!” or “Look at that cute hair do!” I think my children are beautiful and their clothes aren’t too shabby either, but little girls have their appearance constantly pointed out to them. With this amount of positive attention related to things like hair, clothes, and appearance, how could they not associate these material things with love and success? While I succeed far less than I’d like, I try very hard not to compliment my daughters’ appearances. I also try not to compliment your children’s appearances. It’s not because I don’t think they’re cute or like their outfit; it’s because, simply put, I want them to know that their appearance is not what makes me happy to see them. In fact, when my child or any other child says to me something to the effect of “Do you like my dress?” I say “I do like your dress, but do you know what I like better? The person inside it”. And they light up. Because that is what makes a child feel truly good — not what they’re wearing, but feeling loved for the person they are.
Imagine if parents and educators made a pledge to stop making the first thing they say to a child about their appearance. Take a moment here. Imagine how difficult that would be. Don’t think so? Take a week and then come back to this post. During that week, watch and listen to how people greet little girls. It’s almost reflexive, and not dissimilar to how women greet each other except the greeter usually has an exuberant smile on his or her face. “Hi Eve, look at how cute you look!” “Is that a new dress? Haircut? Hair bow? Shoes?”. Now think about how consistent and pervasive the messages are that we are sending to our girls, messages about the importance of how they look. Is that what we want our children to think we value most in them? What if we all made an effort to stop doing it? I’m betting it would make a difference in how girls feel about themselves and, especially, in how they treat each other.
My little girl thought nothing of choosing a short haircut to try something new and look more like her grandma. And she is sad. This will not be the last time. But she’s learning what’s important and what’s not — not just to her but to others. Maybe she’ll say she wants to grow her hair out next. Maybe it will be in response to peer pressure, maybe it will be a change of preference. Either way, I’ll follow her lead. But I will also keep reminding her that her new/old hairstyle looks nice but what I like better than her hair is the person whose head it’s covering and protecting.
