The Gender Trap: Parents and the Pitfalls of Raising Boys and Girls

Introduction: “Glamour Babies” and “Little Toughies”

1 Introduction “Glamour Babies” and “Little Toughies” Slogans emblazoned on baby bibs marketed by a leading retailer tell a striking tale about the gender expectations parents face as they outfit their daughters and sons. “Glamour Baby,” “Daddy’s Princess,” “Born to Shop,” “Diva,” “Hot Babe,” and “Pretty Girl” adorn the girls’ bibs versus “Wild One,” “Little Toughie,” “All Star,” “Rebel,” “The Boss,” and “Trouble Maker” for the boys. An equally gender-marked array of shirts is produced by major companies. One store features tees for sizes six months and up announcing , for girls, “Little Angel” and “I’d Rather Be Shopping with Mommy” and, for boys, “Little Bruiser” and “Play All Day, Rock All Night.” Another store offers apparel sending similar gendered signals, this time in summer styles for preschoolers: “Poolside Princess” and “Beach Beauty” as opposed to “Shark Attack” and “Danger Zone.” Almost always the styles for girls are in shades of pink and the boys’ the requisite blue. When my twin sons were born, and throughout their early childhood, I avoided stamping them with these gender labels, selecting clothes and toys I considered neutral. Why be trapped by other people’s expectations and assumptions, I reasoned, when one can follow one’s own path? That turned out to be much easier said than done, as eventually I faced a dilemma perhaps familiar to many readers. One day my spouse, having picked up our children at their kindergarten after-school program, reported that he had arrived at the school to find one of our sons sitting alone on the floor quietly crying. When his father asked what was wrong, he choked out that no one wanted to play with his kind of trading cards. Five years Introduction 2 old, my son and his twin brother had been asking for combat-oriented trading cards wildly popular with young boys at the time. I had objected to the cards’ emphasis on fighting, typical of boys’ peer cultures in the contemporary United States. My son replied that all the boys had these cards. I thought I had found a clever compromise when I told him he could bring some other kind of cards to play with at his after-school program, and sent him off with a brand-new deck of standard playing cards. He immediately discovered that these cards held no interest for his peers, leaving him alone to wonder why. Before this incident, I was pleased about my efforts to discourage gender-typed activities for my sons and gratified that they had wide-ranging interests unconstrained by traditional gender expectations . On that day, however, I thought hard about the price they would pay if they could not participate in the peer culture of their fellow boys.1 I soon relented, buying each the trading cards they wanted. This was but one in a long line of careful calculations I had made about their expression of gender in relation to the class- and race-specific gendered culture of their white, middle- to upper-middle-class environment. As a parent I had significant power in making those calculations, but my actions were inseparable from my children’s own desires and the social world around them. Parents do not act alone in shaping their young children’s gender. The children themselves, plus a host of other factors including schools, peers, television shows, teachers, and video games, influence the process and do so in ways inextricably linked to the construction—and constraints—of race, class, and sexuality. This book focuses on the role of parents in constructing their children’s gender, exploring their thoughts, the attributes, interests, and behaviors they accept or discourage for their sons and daughters , their motivations for engaging in actions that reproduce or resist gendered outcomes, and their awareness of their own role in these processes. Although focused on parents, my analysis also emphasizes the context in which parents act. Many other studies have documented that parents of young children often behave in ways that encourage gendered patterns, reproducing gender as a social category in their selection of toys, clothes, and activities as well as their styles of play and emotional expression. Most of these studies rely on check-box survey questions or observations of what parents do in experimental situations, treating parents in isolation from Introduction 3 the broader social context and assuming that the motivations for their actions are either unconscious or based on their acceptance...