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I’m genuinely hoping that things will be better for my children, through some active management of the environment/exposure that my kids see, especially by fostering and highlighting examples they can learn from. I’m hoping that the early exposure will provide some level of inoculation against the worst of the worst cultural gender norms. There are a number of women engineers and programmers in our family, and my wife has a ton more athletic accolades/credentials than I do. So my daughter associates her soccer league with following in her mom’s footsteps, and knows that science and computers are associated with her aunts.
As the dad, I do almost all the cooking in my home, and any activity in the kitchen is associated more with me than with their mom. My daughter has a play kitchen but she also tends to come to me to be the person to show her how to play restaurant (not sure if I’m muddling the message by implicitly leaning into the male stereotype for professional cooking, rather than the female stereotype for at-home cooking).
Of course, there are plenty of examples of people doing things more traditionally associated with their own gender, but I’m hoping that the more chaotic distribution weakens the willingness to internalize stereotypes.
So I am somewhat optimistic, somewhat hopeful, that these Gen Alpha kids will actually have plenty more counterexamples diluting the force and effect of those societal gender norms, compared to what we experienced as Millennials.
It’s definitely slowly improving, but a walk through the toy section of my store has still saddened me on occasion. And I live somewhere that would be globally considered generally “socially progressive”.
It will, but it’s also going to be pretty obvious to them after a while that the girls at school always play dress-ups with dolls at lunchtime while the boys are playing with toy cars and trucks. Kids start really getting the hang of categories, associations and social cues with language development from around age 3 and up.
They especially will notice when one kid (or worse, adult) says “you can’t play with that/them, that’s for !” Or “I’m not going to do , that’s for \s!”. Then they have to try to figure out what makes their family so different and why they aren’t like others, which can lead to some interesting hypotheses as a young child.
I vividly remember some boys objecting to singing in class at school when I was very young (6?) because singing was for girls. The teacher asked them what they thought about the most famous male singer of the time, and they uncomfortably shuffled around and grumbled as a response. It was clearly conflicting information for them, and I think it might have been the first time I encountered someone openly challenging gender expectations.
I’ve been seeing it in fashion, too, with children’s clothes not being as clearly gendered. There’s the whole muted colors/beige trend that’s easy to make fun of, but looking closer also reveals quite a bit more undermining gender norms in clothes. My daughter wears a lot of dresses (obviously a girly clothing item) with things that are traditionally associated with boys: rocket ships, robots, dinosaurs, heavy construction equipment like dump trucks and excavators, etc. I happen to have a lot of men’s clothes that use floral prints or similar design elements, and my toddler son has some of those shirts, too.
I know I have a long road ahead of me on parenting through how to navigate societal gender norms (or even other norms that don’t always make sense), but I remain hopeful and optimistic that the environment will be relatively kind and will provide plenty of role models of all types to work with, and draw lessons/examples from.
I’m not going to win every fight, of course, but I’d like to think I’ll be able to choose my battles and at least provide some guidance in the right direction, and shield my kids from the worst of the worst examples.