I don’t often post links to articles on here, as I prefer this blog be a chronicle of my own experiences as opposed to others. But Motherjones.com has an interesting article on the pink vs. blue debate and its cultural history and impact on childhood development and gender roles. It’s a fascinating read.
I say this as a father of a four-year old confirmed pink princess and a 19-month old boy who, given the choice, will always choose the truck over the doll. I’ve noticed the color segregation in Kohl’s and have always struggled with the fact that, while Norah often wore “boys clothes” as a child (and still does when we can cajole her out of her cotton-candy colored tops), Levi doesn’t have a single pink thing to his name. My wife has a strong resistance to dressing him in anything remotely “girly.” I’m of the opinion that if he wants to wear Norah’s Tinkerbell dress-up costume, he’s welcome to it.
It was an interesting and welcome read as I continue to process my thoughts regarding gender roles while raising my two young children. You may enjoy it as well.
Code Pink
As little girls go wild for pink, parents see red and marketers see green.
—Photo: JeongMee YoonWHEN MY DAUGHTER WAS BORN about a year ago, I was suddenly buried in pink. The only gender-neutral clothing appearing on my doorstep was the brown uniform of the guy delivering piles of packages containing untold yardage of powder-pink cloth: pale-pink blankets to swaddle pale-pink diaper covers, monochromatic onesies and rompers that redundantly announced “baby girl” in contrasting embroidery. (Thank God my generous gift givers did not send any of those bow-festooned headbands designed to confirm the femininity of a bald infant.)
We’ve come a long way from my early-’70s childhood. Those were good days to be an ungirly girl: I wore work boots while sharing a sandbox with the progeny of some of the authors of Our Bodies, Ourselves. In those circles, it would have been absurd to suggest that girls’ clothing be exclusively stitched with butterflies and blossoms or that boys be clad in T-shirts emblazoned with something requiring an engineering degree to build. Such totalizing distinctions were seen as defunct at best, and at worst, harmful. Yet many of the self-described feminists who had dressed their own children in primary colors and overalls were now deluging me with enough pink to adorn a Barbie convention. What happened?
Maybe they were just buying what’s out there. Kids’ clothing stores are sharply divided into boys’ and girls’ sections, with no demilitarized zone in between. Healthtex touts its toddler boys’ line as “rich with fun, rough and tough images of cars, dinosaurs and animals in vivid bright colors”; its girls’ line is “adorable with flower art and embroidery in light and airy colors.” Restoration Hardware’s nursery designs are exclusively pink or blue, as is almost all of Pottery Barn’s kids’ line. Everywhere you look, American kids appear to be waging a national color war.
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Newsweek did a story on this too–based on the same book:
http://www.newsweek.com/id/214834
The argument seems to be that peer pressure begins in the first year of life. Ergo, girls=pink & boys=blue, despite parents’ attempts to do anything otherwise. And we as parents, despite attempts to be egalitarian, carry our own unconscious preferences and prejudices.
To wit, Newsweek: “In another study, mothers estimated how steep a slope their 11-month-olds could crawl down. Moms of boys got it right to within one degree; moms of girls underestimated what their daughters could do by nine degrees, even though there are no differences in the motor skills of infant boys and girls. But that prejudice may cause parents to unconsciously limit their daughter’s physical activity. How we perceive children—sociable or remote, physically bold or reticent—shapes how we treat them and therefore what experiences we give them.”
And the cycle continues…