Long live stubborn, feminist lawyers! Keep at it, and wear the kid down—with any luck she'll forget all about that girly crap.
And hey, if you're *really* lucky, Gram will be into sparkly nail polish, like my 4-year-old friend Anders. And then he can explain to his older sister that "boys like pink, too."
Keep fighting the good fight.
So-called "friends", family members, and colleagues scoff at our notions of keeping the sex of our fetus a secret in order to raise the kid as gender-neutral as possible.
While searching for baby clothes, we've found it nearly impossible to find anything that doesn't scream "BOY" or "GIRL".
My daughter loves to be girly (though luckily she seems to like colors other than pink and purple). So does my son, because boy's clothes are totally boring! Maybe I just need to make him a kilt.
Hahahaha... I Luh-luh-LOOOOVED this post. I laughed the whole way through. The picture of the stubborn little girl pitted against her stubborn daddy.... loved it. Thanks for sharing this.
I'm on her side, I love pink.
First, Thank God they outgrow that phase. I hear I was into girly dresses as a toddler. Now I detest them.
Also, thanks so much for the porn , I mean link to the utilikilt & photo. Love me a man in a kilt!
I have to say, there is something to letting the child "get the pink-girly-crap" out of her system. My sisters dressed me in beautiful girly-girl hand-made dresses complete with the puffy, lacy underpants that were supposed to peek out from under the hem (how's that for attracting the pervs?)
I blindly followed that route for years until I got sick of it (the lace itched), sick of the long hair (can't do cartwheels) and went all tom boy around 9 and haven't looked back since.
Good for you in widening her horizons though; keep at it. I didn't see my first trans til I was 14! But as far as clothes go, let her wear that pink thing til it disintegrates.
It's funny, when I was really little I refused to wear frilly things (I actually screamed every time that darn cabbage rose dress came NEAR me). Then I fell for the glitz (my family described me as a 40 year old drag queen stuck in a 5 year old girl's body). Then it was back to tomboy, and finally I've sort of evened out - mixing dresses with petticoats with jeans and converse.
I'm sure she'll even out eventually, even if it takes a few years. And at least her favorite piece of clothing is a dress - it could be worse. I have a cousin whose son only wants to wear his spiderman pjs...everywhere. Which makes doing laundry difficult.
Wow, I had no idea Utilikilts were so expensive. One of my former colleagues wore them every day, and told me that he was bucking the patriarchy by wearing skirts. He's not a transvestite, he just wears kilts. Well, okay, but does that mean he's within his rights to criticize me for wearing jeans? (I'm female.)
I hope my daughter doesn't get caught up in all that gendering too early, but of course 75% of her clothing is pinkpinkpink, because we're still coasting at 3.5 months on the gifts we received following her birth. I'm going to have to find some way of expressing "girl" while she wears monkey prints, I suppose, but I'd rather she be mistaken for a boy than be forced into princess worship she's too young to approach with any reason whatsoever.
Three to five is the "dancey girl phase". My daughters had to have skirts that twirled. Mallory's had to be purple. Everything had to be purple. Shoes, hair stuff, everything. Now she is 16 and the only thing purple or pink is her hair. She is begging for dreadlocks. I can't pay her enough to wear a dress, unless there are jeans under it. The gender shit no longer freaks her out, her best friends are 16 year old gay boys who would've been beaten to a pulp a few years ago. They wear more mascara than she does.
But you have a few years and phases before that. Don't worry, by 8 she will be fighting you on bathing and putting on whatever dirty article of clothing she can find on the floor. This will last until she 12 or so. Then the bathing will be obsessive and so will the clothing selection. There will be plenty of jeans and t-shirts that make her look girly. Too damn girly. Like a grown-up girl. In too small shirts and too tight jeans.
I hear your pain. I was so disappointed when my little doll-playing, purple-is-my-favourite-colour boy came home from school and told me that dolls were for girls and that he would no longer be caught dead with even a hint of purple about his person. He is now 8, and still has an absolute horror of anything that he perceives as "girly", but we don't push. He gets to choose what he likes and wears. I'm just hoping that all of those carefully chosen gender neutral playthings, and accompanying lessons in gender equality will bear fruit when he's old enough to feel more comfortable with himself and his own gender.
I think this is a natural and important stage as kids try to figure out what DOES matter in gender identity. Yes, Aunt does wear her hair in a crew cut and yes, male cousin does wear a ponytail, but USUALLY our haircuts do give us part of our gender identity, as do clothes.
I think her pink phase won't shock you as much as the phase you'll get in three years when suddenly guns and bad guys will dominate your life. I'm having a tough time with that one. I know I had a girly girl phase and grew out of it just fine, so I know I need to be patient with my sexist soldier-knight-bad-guy. But it is hard!
I have a strawberry/grape nerd in my house too. Although at the moment she's more of a grape/strawberry. We had a conversation two days ago about how when she's eight she will KISS A BOY *gigglegiggle* And when I asked why, she said "because I will KISS A BOY!"
Because, duuuuh, that explains everything.
Thank you for dressing her in green and showing her boys in kilts. Someday my nerd will meet a nerd like yours and the world will finally make sense. That, or explode in rainbows.
I guess I spoke to soon on the pink front... I can't wait until you introduce her to Ziggy Stardust.
Lisa V, your years of wisdom are so wonderful. I love the voice of experience.
Jim, I am laughing at you a little bit. I've been waiting for the day when Juney becomes self-aware enough to not let you dress her like a Bavarian disco baby anymore. Sounds like it's here, and it's nice to know Juney is a real girl with her own nascent opinions inside all that polyester.
My Petunia (age 4 1/2) abandoned pants a little over a year ago, and we fought about it for awhile. Then my therapist was like, 'Why do you care? Buy her skirts and dresses so you can stop fighting about it.' So now there are no fights about clothes, and I have a kid who THINKS she's a girly girl with all the dresses but digs for worms on the playground and can't get enough of superheroes. She'll probably go in many more directions before her identity is secure, but it's all just a process of testing boundaries and figuring herself out.
Also, don't you think it's odd that Juney started going through this phase when Gram arrived? Maybe this is her way of being a pain in the ass to you and differentiating herself from the new person in the house.
Fight the good fight, Dutch. Today it's clothes, tomorrow it's math and science. My sister is a child psychiatrist whose primary interest is the psychology of self-esteem in (young) women. You've got to be this stubborn this young.
Damn boys, taking all the colors AND jeans. Where do little girls get this stuff? Maybe there're some good ways to help her express her newfound girlhood. She's probably just getting a rush from being part of a group. Like, it's awesome that you're a girl, but that means (blah blah blah) and not just wearing pink. I don't know, I was really into pink and purple for a few years there, and then suddenly being boy-ee was better than being girly, and that's no good either. But I'm pretty sure Juniper will turn out fantastically, even if exclusively pink for a few years. If it helps, rainbow tends to go over well, too, and red and yellow might creep back in there.
I know it's because I'm overcaffeinated and didn't sleep enough last night, but I almost wanted to cry a little that Juney was rebelling against her radical parents and conforming to gender norms. "Won't Wood straighten her out? She's a lawyer! She's not a woman you walk all over, surely she's just a little opposed. Maybe?" I thought, until I read more (and realized, I'd probably take her approach too). ...Now I feel a little guilty that her spirit has been crushed--I shouldn't invest so much in a 3-year-old, especially one I don't know*--but now I feel a little victorious, like, HA! When she's 8 she'll start making zines to communicate all of the ways she's eschewed the rigid rules of gender stereotype. Or at least try the cowboy (cowgirls, Juney! they rule!) outfit.
I'm having a rough week and a little on the edge about gender rules imposed by society. My campus newspaper has is letting me "go" because they published a sexist and offensive tirade (in short, all women need to get married and to do so, must be a sexbot with no career aspirations or feelings of their own) and when I spoke up as a member of the staff, the female editor-in-chief wasn't going to have it. So again, investing too much.*
*Wow I'm a creep
p/s When I got on the bus this morning several boy toddlers pig-tails. It was awesome.
"One of the most annoying things about having a parent who's a lawyer is that lawyers always think they can convince you to change your mind if they just show you enough evidence."
Or spouses who are lawyers.
But at some point, she gets to choose if she indeed wants the pink thing because she's truly "free", right (I'm being argumentative, not critical)? Do you realllly want her to identify with the Utilikilt omni-pee-er?
When my oldest was four she would only wear red and black. Why? Because according to her those are "the colors of evil". That's what I get for enrolling her in a Catholic kindergarten. 
My favorite album as a kid was "The Chipmunks Go Around the World." When the Chipmunks visited Scotland, they saw a parade of bagpipers wearing kilts, which prompted this, one of my all-time favorite exchanges:
Simon the Chipmunk: David, why is that man wearing a skirt?
David: That's not a skirt, Simon, it's a kilt, part of the national costume of Scotland!
Simon: David, why is the man who is wearing a skirt, squeezing an octopus?
Good luck with getting Juney to change her ways. It's an uphill battle. And just wait until she's in girls' sizes (7 and up) and they don't even make child-appropriate clothes anymore because the same line of clothes being worn by 2nd graders ALSO has to appeal to early adolescents, who of course want to look like high schoolers. Maybe you'll have better luck with your thrift stores finds.....
I think children just get to an age where they want to be contrary, and Juney has arrived. When I was very little, my mother was an avid thrifter & would come home with vintage Polly Flinders dresses. At some point, to her chagrin, I decided that I would only wear pants.
I remember that my mother laid out a red and white flowered dress with a yarn belt for me on 'picture day' in kindergarten. She left it on my bed & snarled against my protests, "I am coming back upstairs in 2 minutes and if you're not wearing that dress I am spanking you!" (slightly less enlightened lawyering than yours.) Well, I put on green cotton pants with a white stripe down the side and a tee-shirt, & then slammed my bedroom door shut and pushed my bookcase up against it. When my mother came upstairs and pushed the door open, the bookcase flipped over and emptied onto the floor. She says I climbed atop the ruins of my books, crossed my arms, and hollered, "I am not wearing a dress!"
so yeah, good luck to you.
Dutch, I assume you're wearing those utilikilts to show that you are against gender-specific clothing. (We want pics!) Congrats--its the perfect example for Juney. Also, surely you're buying Gram a few pink sleepers and dresses. We wouldn't want little Juniper to think that only girls wear every color/style of clothing. Equality of the sexes, baby! (Hmmm....is it
self-expression or forced neutrality?)
In kindergarten I only wore dresses, apparently. I outgrew it - so will she.
My four year old boy loves all things princess and frequently wears skirts and dresses. Last week he wore his ruby red slippers every single day. I can send pictures if Juney needs more convincing. He takes ballet classes and wants to be a ballerina. We had the same issue with preschool. The mantra in our home is that there is no such thing as boy colors and girl colors. Everyone can wear whatever color they want. We recently found a couple of pink shirts for him to wear and he has never loved anything so much. My 14 month old daughter wears "boys" clothing and PJs which makes my mother crazy, though she doesn't have a problem making skirts for her grandson. I should also note that like you my husband is the stay at home parent and my heart soared when I came home one day and saw my husband painting my son's toenails with clear sparkly nail polish as a reward for a successful potty day. What is not to like about sparkly nail polish?
be glad the second one is a boy. we have two girls and my husband is fighting a losing battle of pink and purple in our house.
i'm team wood on this one, too- let her do her thing, figure out her gender identity and peer issues like we all did at some point and move on. i'm making a mental note to pay attention to when she *really* gets into the argumentative phase with you at 7 or so...poor jim.
we're trying to convince the pnut that her baby brother is a boy (no! baby brother is a girl!) like daddy and grandpa. she's having none of it.
p.s. the phrase "hot beef injection" is one of my husbands favorites. so thanks.
Yeah, it's a phase. Most likely. But of course some girls just are traditionally "girly". You can't say for sure until they're out of college.
I absolutely vetoed all pink items when we found out our Charlotte was a girl, because I was so paranoid about not raising her in a pink box of prefabricated femininity. She's now 3. Pink and purple city. Mermaids, fairies, and unicorns are her metier. She won't listen to any songs sung by male singers because they're boy songs. Only girl songs are acceptable. I think there's something about the age of 3, particularly with girls. They're all about gender differentiation for some reason.
It was different with my boy, who wore purple patent leather boots for most of his 3rd and 4th years, with lots and lots of jewelry. He sang in a choir and did theatre rather than soccer. And you would not believe how many well-meaning people outside my family and friends would have hushed little tete-a-tetes with me about how I would feel when he someday turned out to be gay. (Including my gay stylist and the gay choir teacher.) Now this would have been totally fine by me, as they were always surprised to find out, but that is neither here nor there. At least here in the midwest, most people find it hard to see outside old-fashioned gender identities, even the gays! And they will project that onto your kids no matter how cool or enlightened you and your circle of friends and family are. All you can do is live what you believe and trust that your kiddos will work it out.
Now that kid is 13, and will only wear shirts with skulls on them, and the same damn pair of ridiculous baggy black jeans EVERY SINGLE DAY. And so not gay. But still sweet and sensitive and kind and arts- rather than sports-oriented. (Which - DUH - is where all the girls are!) They figure out their own balance between what you teach them is ok (or even awesome!), and what they pick up in the world as they go along.
This was hilarious....one of my favorites!
My theory is that all girls go thru this nasty pink/purple phase at the appropriate ages of 3-8.....if we let them be during this time, they outgrow it and move on......if we supress it they end up cheerleaders in Bring It On.....
My oldest is 19 and dresses like a bag lady, so far I am right!!
My almost four year old will only wear dresses (but, interestingly enough no tights: she wears them over pants) and they are usually pink or flowery and kind of conservative. Thank goodness for thrift stores so I don't have to pay full price! She loves pink. She decided this on her own. She doesn't play with dolls or any other "typical" girl stuff instead is really into dinosaurs (mostly carnivores she'll tell you).
Maybe if you can get comfortable with pink clothes, she'll ease up on the boy/girl thing---Find some images of super-feminine ass-kickers and she'll soon tell you she loves pink because it can be a strong and beautiful color, not because it is the opposite of what boys wear. Maybe...
Man, I've been going through the same things with my 4 year old daughter. Somewhere, around the age of 2, she picked up the difference between "boy" toys & "girl" toys. She honestly thinks she can't play with them just because she's a girl. No amount of arguing with her will work, either. Girl is stubborn. I really wanted to be able to raise a daughter who knew ( & wanted) that she could do anything, be anything. I guess I'll just have to wait a little while longer for the logic part of her brain to develop. Until then, it's back into the trenches I go!
Why so worried? In trying to free Juniper of pink's oppression, aren't you merely enforcing a different kind of oppression? You said it once yourself: "You can keep on trying to be a cool parent, I suppose, but your coolness just becomes another form of tyranny." If women are liberated now, they should be free to wear dresses. Even pink ones.
So I say let the kid wear what she wants. Ultimately, don't you want her to be herself?
H doesn't go to preschool, so he's not been forced had his peers shove him into a gender identity box yet. He has long curly blond hair and likes a princess dress as much as any of his female friends do. Lately he's been asking "Is this for a boy or a girl" about certain things, mostly about some toy jewelry out of the dress-up box, I usually just shrug and ask him if he likes it. If he says yes, then I say something like "then I guess it's for you." He seems satisified with this so far.
I'm expecting a baby girl in a few weeks, and have found the strict gender assignments for baby stuff perplexing. I added two cream colored onesies to my baby registry, one printed with frogs, the other printed with teddy bears. Gender neutral, right? Well, my registry lists these items as "bodysuit - boy". I guess animals aren't suitable for girls.
And @ the commenter who suggested that obsession with pink dresses will lead to hating math and science, let me just say that I coveted and wore tutus, "twirly skirts" with crinolines, and pink dresses as a child, and I now have a PhD in a scientific field. And I wear jeans.
i don't think i ever wanted to read through so many comments....cool post
Oh, she is so normal. I was totally opposite of my oldest as a kid. I don't make her wear pink or paint her nails. She for some reason, has decided this for her own. My son loves blue and boy colors. It is weird how they decide things for themselves. Without influence. You just go with the flow.
Heehee.....I am with merseydotes. I knew the day would come when Juniper would veto your clothing choices, and this post had me laughing the whole way through. I have a daughter Juniper's age and one four years older. The battles don't end. I side with Wood. Let her wear her pink dress every day. Or better yet, buy her more.
show her pictures of gladiators and roman senators in togas. men in dresses! that'll rock her world!
Megan, I didn't equate wearing pink dresses with hating math and science. I am applauding Dutch fighting back against "I can't because I'm a girl..." statement. IMO, it's best to nip this in the bud early on, and I clearly remember my parents taking the same tactic (I once told my father I could only be a nurse, not a doctor, and got the same response from my dad as Dutch depicts in this post). It's one thing to "go with the flow" when your kid is expressing a preference, it's another to take a stance against the "I can't because I'm X".
Incidentally, girly girl, lawyer myself, thanks.
I told my father I could only be a nurse because that's a girl job and doctors have to be boys (where in tarnation I picked this up, I don't know). My father found my little sister and I playing "nurse" with the Johnson and Johnson medical kit. When asked, "well, who is the doctor for this poor doll patient," he heard the "only boys can be doctors" answer and...well, incontrovertible evidence that girls can be doctors followed ad nauseum (we're desi, so this isn't terribly difficult to procure).
Sorry to not make that clear in the above comment.
Same thing happened to us. My daughter had never heard of Barbie, didn't care about pink, and would play with anything prior to preschool. Things quickly changed.
Can I send your daughter a Disney princess doll?
ah but you see that if you try to convince her not to wear the pink, she will want it even more. my one daughter has been raised with the same toys as her three brothers yet her little eyes light up when she sees the disney princesses or barbie. it pains me that she loves them (at least they aren't bratz dolls) but i know if i fight it, i'm doomed to excessive girly-ness. actually, i am anyway. shit, there's no answer except our kids will do whatever they want no matter how we feel about it. stubborn damn creatures.
Wow, it's happening all over. I could quote that discussion verbatim. I argued vehemently with her about men wearing dresses/skirts. Eventually, she insisted I take it back. Then she cheerfully said they could wear them in their houses. But perhaps not in our house.
I tried to draw the discussion into the arena of moral v. social don'ts. Men don't, as a rule, wear dresses. This is true! But, men do sometimes wear dresses and this is OK.
She would have none of this.
I am so curious to know what's going on. I want her to explain it. Does she need some super sharp distinction between men and women? Why is that? Is it confusing if men and women are too much alike? Why does it matter so very much? Does the Christian right have some kind of brain wave they are directing at preschoolers? Where does her data come from?
It got even worse. She told me "Mens don't cry. Only womens cry. Mens are brave. Womens are not brave." Crazy me, I have to win this argument with my three year old. So I collar all these unsuspecting random men in a parking lot to ask them if they cry. They shamefacedly admit to it, most saying "Well, sometimes. Everyone cries."
The look on her face cracked me up. Basically, it felt like the look she will give me when she is a Fox News loving undergraduate and I am her Marx spouting parent. It was sort of a 'OK, I'll humor you for now, old woman. But don't think you can change my mind.'
I know it is just a phase. But that look! That "say whatever you want, mom, I have my sources" look. I loved her for it. And I was also a bit afraid.
nice trainspotting insert. love that movie
better that any C%@^ in the world
Boys can be this way too. My son is about the same age as Juniper and will not wear brown because, he claims, "Brown is NOT a color."
Your writing is so good that my blog may commit hari kari later today to deal with its feelings of inadequacy.
My four year old will only wear dresses too, although they don't have to be pink. Let her do this. Please let her. Part of what feminism was originally about was supporting all of our choices. She can play and run and leap and take over the world in a pink dress too. And the less you fight this the faster it will be over. As my mother used to say, this too shall pass. And you may even find you miss it once it does (then again maybe not .
Interesting the defined differences that Juniper picked up at school, because so far, I've felt that day care has let the girls and boys in my 2 1/2 year old's class be more gender free in that the whole range of toys is there for them to play with. So girls with no trucks at home might have some truck fun. And boys with no dolls at home are free to baby them. I wonder how much influence teachers have on promoting this gender neutrality.
Anyway - I can't believe I felt bad for Juney's crushed defiance at the St. Patty's parade when I totally agree with you! Is she reformed now?
Love this post.
We wrote to the Utilikilt folks asking them to please make them in kid sizes. Looks like they haven't done so yet, too bad. We could have used the beer gut sizing for Shmoo as evidenced here.
Oops, the link didn't work. Here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/715...@N00/126027868/
Awww, cut the kid a break! It's perfectly okay to be girly. It's a shame if you think being girly equals being weak. Femininity is OKAY. Don't shame her into thinking being a girl is not okay. She's learning what femininity means FOR HER. Not for her dad.
Anyway, it's just a phase. Just wait until she reaches 15 and only wants to wear black.
if it is any consolation, my son broke my heart by refusing to wear striped shirts for three years. i love stripes!
Entertaining reading but I'm with Wood. Let Juniper be Juniper. You don't have nearly as much at stake in what she wears as she does.
Toddlers are notorious for being very black and white in their conceptions of gender--it's a wierd artifact of the fact that gender constancy is in process. That's not to say that having a more fluid concept of gender as a preschooler is a problem,but some of them can be downright hostile when confronted with our complex notions of gender and the like. Good luck! Hey, at least you can make Gram wear any thing taht strikes your fancy for the next couple of years.
"Part of what feminism was originally about was supporting all of our choices. She can play and run and leap and take over the world in a pink dress too."
As long as she doesn't think taking over the world is a "boy" choice. If all the girls are just "happening" to "choose" to end up stay-at-home moms and all the boys are just "happening" to "choose" to be corporate raiders, I must admit I'm not going to be OK with that situation just because it is supposedly a matter of "choice" (emphasis on the "supposedly") and we are supposed to blindly respect everyone's "choice." I guess I have to just put it out there and be the bad guy: I don't buy the "choice feminism" thing. (Of course I don't even consider myself a feminist. I'm an equalist/humanist.)
But if it's just a matter of a pink dress, then sure, fine. Sometimes a pink dress is just a pink dress. I like pink just fine myself. Especially on guys.
P.S. Land of Nod's website used to have a section with Girl toys and Boy toys. (To their credit, they had kitchen supplies in both.) I wrote an outraged email, b/c that's just how I am. I'm not joking - I was so horrified. Anyway, I just checked and they don't have that gender division anymore! Hooray!
i've been psuedolurking for a while now...but i have to say this is the best post i've ever read here.
no offense to wood, really, i hope she takes this as a compliment: but, writing like this? tackling these topics? it gives me hope for the state of MANkind. and i mean that in a totally gender-specific way.
When my daughter was about two and a half she, too, decided that the only acceptable clothing for her was pink or purple dresses.Luckily for us, she expanded her dress colours, but still often wore dresses up to and throughout Kindergarten.
You'll be happy to know that in Grade 1 the girls don't wear dresses anymore. It's all jeans (granted sometimes with girly appliques) and t-shirts. And I wisely bought her Haight-Ashbury t-shirt in an acceptable shade of purple, thus making her both girly AND anti-establishment.
Sad to say you won't win this battle with Juniper, but she will grow out of it in a few years. Her wardrobe is going to go straight pinks/purples for a while, but she'll eventually get those primary colours back in rotation.
I often wonder how I'll handle raising a girl, as my daughter is now north of 1. I'm still at the point where I have a hard time thinking outside the "onesie, socks, shirt, pants" box when selecting her wardrobe for the day.
On the plus side, I have been introduced to tights, and I now even know to put on the thicker ones when it's cold (pat, pat). Also, I occasionally put things in her hair to keep it out of her eyes.
I know I'm not yet up to your level of wardrobe complexity-- I bow to your wisdom and experience.
"Instead of letting her grow out of this, I seem intent on proving that I can be more stubborn than her. The fact is, I don't like my daughter thinking there's something she can't do---or wear--- just because she's a girl."
Like picking out her own clothes?
It's a phase, she'll outgrow it, if you want to be such an awesome dad overthrowing the patriarchy, let your little girl be herself and express herself. At her age, the whole boy things/girl things issue is pretty much "This is for boys, this is for girls." EVERY child goes through that phase. It's normal, it's healthy, and it doesn't have a political agenda.
hi guys, next time I'll paint the target on my back a little bigger, so EVERYONE can tell I'm actually trying to make fun of myself. I had hoped this post communicated that I understood the foolhardiness of trying to bend the will of a 3-year old, but I guess a few people thought this was a serious meditation on gender among the preschool set.
jim, a lot of people did understand i think - you can resign yourself to juniper's pink passions,but "despair"
at the loss of the fun in choosing her every outfit. i loved the post and loved that juniper was able to dismiss diane keaton and katherine hepburn as an "older" thing.
In response to Liz from Law School and the Land of Nod, gender division thing, don't you hate the Tonka ads, "boys are built differently," which yes, literally, but why you would only market trucks for boys, I don't know.
Funny post, but the fact is you did feel as though you needed to have a say in her choice of clothes. I remember my daughter telling me once when she was younger that sometimes when she hugged me she didn't feel like I was hugging her back. I didn't get it until recently, but I'm afraid that maybe she was right. I love my children fiercely, but too often when they were growing up I didn't take the time to really see them, to strip away the girl/boy/cute/crabby/stubborn/blue eyes/smart...whatever labels, and just appreciate and get to know their spirits. As they get older and become teenagers you have no choice but to do that and what a rude awakening that can be! But if I could go back in time, I would be sure that when I hugged my children they knew that I saw them for who they really were and that they were being hugged right back.
Oh Carol, I hate Tonka those ads. I sent them an email and their response was basically "our marketing department has determined that this approach works".
"The thought of missing out on a conversation with some wee fairy folk was too much to bear, so she relented and let me put a green dress on her. When we arrived at the parade, I couldn't believe my good fortune."
When I read this line I thought that she'd be in 7th Heaven if she knew real 'wee folk' are coming to Detroit in late June. Our organization, www.lpaonline.org will have their annual conference in Detroit and your blog has been instrumental in my not continuously saying "why the hell Detroit?".
What a great post!
Ironically, girls have more clothing options than boys. Pink dress? Great! Pink soccer cleats? Wonderful! Denim jeans and cowboy boots? How cute! Baseball cap? Love it!
Boys, on the other hand, are strictly limited by the primary colors. Wouldn't it be wonderful if more people weren't freaked out by a boy wearing pink? Or if Tonka's marketing didn't work? As a mother of both a boy and a girl, I'm more worried about the sexist limitations placed on my son. I mean, girls can be "girly" or they can be a "tom boy", or anywhere in between. Boys, not so much. Is there a male equivalent of a "tom boy" that isn't derogatory?
Yes! I love this post. My daughter is same age as Juniper, born in the same week. i know what you're going thru. I agonized through Fall and Winter when she refused to wear anything but 2 dresses & crocs, no socks, or jackets or longsleeves. She finally expanded to 3 skirts, but right at the coldest of winter. We had dressing battles that took up to 45 minutes. My entire office started "jeans Day" to show my girl that everyone wears pants. One coworker said it was going to be her new year's resolution to get my girl into pants. Finally, I realized that I had raised her to make her own decisions, and that control and independence is right on developmentally, and that my need to pick out her clothes was something i had to release. It's better now, and luckily it's getting to be warmer. And she did put on the jacket when it got cold enough. once i stopped trying to get my way, she started coming around.
Oh and i got her to wear those baby legs leg warmers which I learned about on your site, which became my thing. ok, if you want to wear a dress, then you have to wear Stripys or Dots (striped leggings or polka dot ones).
heatherw, I believe freedom of dress is one of the areas that would fall under the term "metrosexual", although there are a growing number of people turning that into an insult, so who knows?
As long as society only allows boys a preset range of clothes they can wear without ridicule, I don't think there will be a truly neutral term for this.
oh man. there's not much you can do to stop this phase, but god it's annoying as hell. my daughter grew up in a house full of her brother's trucks and trains and tractors and still preferred pink my little ponies and princesses. of course I was just thinking today that I can't remember the last time my now 7 year old daughter mentioned a princess. she could care less now and wears whatever she damn well pleases -- sometimes dresses, often pants, any color of the rainbow. and it's a beautiful thing.
Dutch, This is a seige I hope you win. It's also very entertaining to read about. Maybe you could try some pastels or purple to give yourself a break from the ubiquitous pink. It's funny, I didn't get in to pinks and girly cloths until Law School. Let that be of some hope to you - she'll eventually grow out of the pink.
omg, you had me rolling in laughter! Don't worry, she will grow out of it. Our lint catcher in the dryer used to stay pink from all the pink crap she wore. Now, she doesn't want to be "prissy" and vehemently refuses anything pink. Which, is what both her grandmothers buy her.
I thought I would pass along this article in the Guardian:
http://
lifeandhealth.guardian.co...2268921,00.html
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