Kids smash Gender Roles

A lot of people here are saying that boys and girls are born with a natural gender, but that isn’t true at all. Actually, gender isn’t set ’til about 2, and if you ask a young child if it is a boy or a girl, it will often switch the answer. Once as it reaches 2 it almost always has understood the difference between boys and girls, but gender is still being set.
During that time we will often use many methods to push children in one direction or the other. For example, if you put a brother and sister around the same age in a room with their parents and give the children both the same puzzle, the parents will start to help the girl out faster and more often than the boy.
As playtime is often when we set gender roles on children, our toys show this often. Girls will get toys and play games that show submissiveness and caretaking such as Barbie, Easybake Ovens, Babydolls, and all of the games where the prince saves the princess. Boys get toys that show independence, knowledge, and violence such as army men, books, and math games (well, at least when inteligence was still “popular”). These toys tell the children what we want of them and what their functions are in life. Girls are there to cook, take care of the children, and look pretty while boys are there to fight, get jobs, and further themselves. Many developmental psychologists are starting to say that we should be mixing the toys among the sexes so that all children get the best toys for preparation in life (the babydolls, ovens, books, etc.)
The ways that we play with our children influence their relationships with others also. Boys and girls all play games that can be social, but boys play games where they connect over the game (baseball, videogames…), and girls play games where they connect over conversation (shopping with their dolls as avatars, tea parties…). When you put two boys in a room with two chairs facing one way, their playtime learning causes them to react by sitting in the chairs, facing the wall, and start talking about objects in the room. When you do the same with girls, they will pick up the chairs, turn them to each other, and talk about each other. Girls will also have the tendency to use “me too” and “mine too” as connectors in conversation, even if they aren’t true. For example, if one girl says her mother wears glasses, the other will often say “mine too,” even if her mother doesn’t. They aren’t lying for any bad reasons, they do this to have even more to connect each other.

Now, some will say that boys and girls will end up this way no matter what you do, and it is easy to believe. Due to mass media almost all cultures have the same ideals of gender roles, so it is hard to find any cultures which can disprove the theory, but there are two examples which can be used.
The first is a tribe in Africa (if I find my notes, I’ll tell you the name). In this tribe, the women are actually the hunters. Almost all girls in this tribe show the same behavior as the typical Western boy, and the boys show the opposite. This is because the tribe has been largely separated from outside cultures, so there was no one there to tell them which sex should be doing the hunting. When they decided to have the women hunt, their gender roles changed accordingly. Unluckily it is hard to find tribes such as these because the way the sexes are physically made make men slightly stronger than women naturally, so they are often chosen as the hunters, which leads to masculine males. But as with the rest of humanity, you will always get variances, and this tribe decided that females were better hunters, leading to masculine females.
The second example I can name is an experimental grade school in California one of my teachers taught at. At the school, boys and girls were encouraged to wear whatever they wanted and play with whatever they wanted (all parents were taught to be open to gender variances before the school started). During play time boys and girls would play the same sports in the same groups, and things such as fingernail painting were taught to all students to teach dexterity. While the students originally all conformed to typical gender roles, once as the gender barriers were removed, the students started to show far more gender variances. There were many masculine, feminine, and androgynous genders in all of the sexes, which is very uncommon in schools where gender and sex is taught to match.

Oh, and if you thought all of that was too much typing, I spent far too much on college and have so far learned a lot of pointless shit, so I like being able to use the rare, important education whenever I can. Although I guess that run-on sentence just killed all of my English education, didn’t it?