Gender Stereotypes

We play a major role in shaping our toddlers' mindsets. I was reminded of this last weekend when I went out with a couple. We were shopping for baby clothes and I spotted a cute white t-shirt with a butterfly pattern on the front. When I showed it to them, they patiently explained to me that boys don't wear clothes with pictures of butterflies on them. Balls, vehicles, alphabets and teddybears were acceptable. I can understand that parents would avoid certain colours for their boys (like pink) but I had no idea it extended to patterns as well. Later, when we moved to the toys section, I saw that even here they had separate sections for boys and girls. The girls' section was filled with dolls, and tea sets, make up boxes and a lot of very pink things (I was looking at it from a distance, and it really did seem like a sea of pink from where I was standing). The boys section had aeroplanes, train sets, GI Joes... generally stuff that looked like more fun. Oh, I've played with a lot of dolls in my time, but the toys in the boys section seem infinitely more exciting to me as an adult. I wish we wouldn't program our kids into thinking a certain way. Girls should have both dolls and cars to play with (and baby boys should be able to wear butterfly-print t-shirts). It might actually make the world a better place; a place where women are less bothered about their looks and could change a tire if they really had to, where men stop thinking of kitchens as a no-go zone, and aren't afraid of expressing their feelings. I'm not saying there should be complete homogenization- that would not be a good thing. But do we really need to add rules about what a baby can and cannot wear or play with when nature has already taken care of the mental programming? Men aren't from Mars and women aren't from Venus: we are all from the same planet (duh!), we are just brought up differently. Sometimes, we repeat things- however ridiculous- so often that they become ingrained in our minds.