I’m fairly attuned to the perils of forcing my child to fit a preconceived gender paradigm, down to the clothes she wears. T-Bop gets labeled a boy on average three times a week (and we don’t go out that much) for no other reason than that she doesn’t wear pink. Red, blue, green, yellow but unless your baby girl wears pink, you might as well paste a football on her shirt and sew some cargo pockets on those husky jeans.
Frankly, nothing could concern me less. I figure the more chances she has to not be treated like a fragile princess, the better. Sometimes, most of the time, I don’t even correct the mistaken party. Which is why it was surprising that I was guilty of the divide mentioned in Lise Eliot’s Pink Brain, Blue Brain. I didn’t want T-Rex to get dirty.
I realized that every time we played outside I was taking the baby out of the way of everything that might get her or her clothes dirty. I was worried about the clothes (which is weird in itself) but mostly something deep inside was telling me my daughter shouldn’t be dirty. I started to wonder if I would be treating a boy the same way. I remembered my friend Seeca telling me about her son’s love for mud and sand, playing in leaves and rolling around on the ground. So what was my deal?
It was easy to correct my anti-dirty issue. But it did make me realize how difficult it is to not hinder who our kids are going to become through our actions. One of the examples in the article (about the book) is how mamas underestimated the slope that their 11 month olds could crawl. The boys were expected to be adventerous and tough (more slope) while little girls are being trained to be cautious (less slope). The nurture affect is so deep that the reason boys may develop slower is that we expect them to develop at a different rate. Crazy!
Eliot also talks about making sure little girls have jigsaw puzzles, legos, and computer games that set them up for good math and science skills. Even more important is allowing little boys to show emotions and to be involved in art and music. Here’s a great quote from the end:
“Whatever you do is what your brain will be ‘wired’ for,” says Eliot. “So anytime we see an obvious difference between men and women, or boys and girls, ask yourself: how did they spend their time over the past thirty years to make their brains so good — or bad — at certain skills?”
Makes you pause, eh?



Celebrating is an important part of our family tradition. For both Jacob and me experiences and quality time far outweigh the importance of presents. This birthday, the last in the 20s, we headed south for our first weekend away from the baby. What made this weekend even better was that J had no idea what we were up to. I even packed his bag for him.












