This morning was the first time I have ever felt any anxiety at all when leaving my daughter off at school. Aside from maybe the first time I left her at the church school when she was one, this morning was new for me.
My daughter isn’t like all the other girls her age. Her preferences are cars, planes, (used to be trains), construction, and anything at all that she can build with. Dolls and dressing up? Not so much. She has a doll, but it doesn’t get any love whatsoever, poor thing. I was thrilled when at the beginning of the summer she said that she wanted to try ballet and tap. She’s struggling over wearing tights, but other than that, she absolutely loves it. And she’s pretty good, too.
I have finally been successful at getting her to watch some Disney princess-type movies with her. The order she’s seen them so far (her choice as I own a bunch of them); Mulan, Brave, Pocahontas, Frozen, The Little Mermaid, and recently, Aladdin. She has some awareness about the other princesses and their names; between me, her school friends, and ballet class, she doesn’t have much choice. I have been used to the Cars and Planes movies playing all the time, and she loves action ones like Bolt, Big Hero 6, and the Lego Movie. She is a spirited kid with an engineer mind and I have never felt any concern for her and her amazing personality. Until this morning.
On the way to school, she was going on about her costume and how she can’t wait to see what all her friends are dressed up as. I asked if she had talked with any of them about what they were dressing up as and she started to fill me in. Her boyfriends in the class whom she plays with the most will be anything from Darth Vader to a Transformer. Then I asked about what the girls will be dressing up as: Belle, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Jasmine (although I think she made that last one up). All a common occurrence just like last year when I had two dozen Annas and Elsas come to my door.
Out of nowhere, I started to get nervous…for her. She’s one of the youngest in her class at barely over 4 years old. She has already been to a few 5th birthday parties and nearly everyone in the class will be 5 before May when school breaks for the summer. I have personally witnessed some of the older girls in the class being cliquey at school and parties. At 5??!!! Good Lord, it’s going to be a loooong road for this generation. The good thing is that Sugar Bee doesn’t seem to mind. She notices….she’s a noticer that misses nothing at all…but she goes on about her way and finds someone or something else to play with. She’s confident at four. It’s the future that worries me.
This is the costume that she picked out of racks of them at the store:
She has loved fire trucks since she was teeny tiny and that love has never left her. She’s wearing the hat that my cousin gave to her when we visited his fire house in Ohio last month. She’s very proud of herself and loves her costume. She wanted me to put “dragon makeup” on her so she looked like she just finished fighting a fire. I told her we can do that on Halloween. She’s so creative and is always acting out rescues with her Hot Wheels and Matchbox cars, along with all her larger police and fire vehicles. She even wanted to bring her three fire rescue cars to go with her costume!
My ramblings and slight anxiety are about my parenting. Face it, we all know kids can be mean and ostracizing. And normally, I would have never given this a second thought for her since she’s just in pre-K. But I have seen it starting already, mostly with the ones that have older siblings that then gather the ones that will be “the followers.” I just keep shaking my head, thinking, “Already?! They are only FOUR and FIVE!”
Have I taught her enough yet to make her confident about her choices? Will she be able to defend her thoughts, likes, and preferences when questioned, or worse, bullied? I could never have imagined that I would have these thoughts before elementary school; 2nd or 3rd grade was the first I really expected to have to even worry about this stuff. On the way home, I kept imagining the girls in class telling her that she’s wearing a “boy” costume. Women are firefighters, too, dammit! And it’s not like they wear a different outfit than the men to do their job.
This is only the beginning for me. For her. I’m sure I’m overreacting and that nothing like this is going to happen today. If it does, I only pray that she retains her confidence with who she is and what she likes, and that she talks with me about it. I am sure that we will face this eventually. I never want to see her spirit squashed. Looks like I will have work to do before she hits public school.
*****UPDATE***** So I went to the second half of her class party to observe and she was incorrect on a lot of the costumes…surprise, surprise. She’s four. Clearly she was the only girl in a neutral costume, but she told me that everyone said to her, “Hey, Sasha! I love your firefighter costume. It’s really cool!” I’m taking that one for what it is because even if it’s not true, she clearly felt good about herself and that’s what matters most. Watching the class play in the big room inside because it was getting yucky outside (and who wants to mess up a costume on the playground?), I could see that she does have more in common with the boys than the girls with the way she plays. I watched her try to break in and participate a few times with “the” group of girls, but with no avail. I plan on talking with her about it at some point, once I can find the right words to help give her the tools that she needs. Wish me luck!
that their house is aligned with the interests that their child has. Your particular home with a little girl in it might be all full of pink, princesses, play kitchens, and dolls, while mine is full of construction machines, trains and tracks, and matchbox cars. What I don’t think people ponder very often is what it might be like to have a daughter that is not princess-obsessed, one that everyone sees as less “normal” than others. People talk to me in public and assume that my kid knows the entire score to Frozen. I sometimes comment that she’s more of a Cars kid, other times I just smile. When your child’s birthday came around and you asked them what kind of birthday party they wanted, perhaps they picked a gender-appropriate (whatever the hell that means) theme. My daughter enthusiastically declared that she wanted a Dusty party. It just so happened that the second Planes movie was coming out two weeks before her birthday weekend. Good timing for her and a great time was had by all.
My point is, everyone likes and dislikes different things, even all of us as adults, so I am still having a hard time wrapping my head around some of the 44 comments on my status update. I was struggling with my online shopping to find something that wasn’t clearly labeled “boy” or “girl,” one that wasn’t over-the-top with pink craziness or over-the-top about a character. As I shopped, I knew she would be totally fine with something that was clearly for a boy, but why should it have to be this way? Why are there no other options? That was the entire point of my post which has now led to this lengthy piece.
tea party and she will sometimes (now) pretend with me, but she mostly uses the tea cups to hold some of her cars. She has a doll, a stroller, and even a few outfits for it, but would you like to know how she plays with her doll? On the half a dozen times that she has voluntarily touched the doll, she puts her in the stroller and races around the house, chasing/torturing the dog, letting the doll hang half out of the stroller, sometimes falling out completely. Then she runs away, leaving the doll on the floor. Nurturing? Not so much. I know she has played with the kitchens and stuff at other homes and at school sometimes, but these are just not the things that she gravitates to. She plays with the cars and the trains most of the time, and is obsessed with puzzles. And I’m perfectly fine with that. I sneak peeks at her creatively playing with her cars and trains, making up scenarios and conversations. It’s the same thing girls do with their dolls or stuffed animals, just with a different medium. And that’s perfectly fine. She helps me in the kitchen (she calls it “bakering”), and although it’s usually a brief encounter, at least she shows an interest. She helps me move laundry into the dryer or laundry basket and wants to help Swiffer the floor. But one of the most exciting times for her this past week was when I let her help me change the batteries out of two toys, showing her how to use the screwdriver and teaching her what to do by herself. Her face beamed, her concentration was so focused, and she was over the moon with pride when they toys worked again. I have little doubt that she will be taking things apart in my house before she enters intermediate school. That is my child.
My problem isn’t what anyone else does as far as buying toys for their kids. Frankly, it’s none of my damn business. To think that I would want to do away with princess things or pink things is absurd. My oldest niece was princess obsessed and I loved it! I would buy all sorts of cool Disney things for her and had a great time playing with her and all her things. My question is, what has happened to toys? How have we let toy manufacturers and marketers create such a huge divide in what toys children feel they “should” play with? Why do we have this obsessive need to make things for boys and things for girls, things that are essentially identical aside from color? My child gravitates toward blue, orange and red. Those are just the colors that she likes. So why can’t we just have TOYS like we did when my generation was growing up? This was the entire point of my post (rant) on the good ol’ Facebook. How fun for you (or maybe not from what some friends say) that your little girl is obsessed with Frozen. It took me THREE tries to get through that movie with her and I really wanted to watch it, so I basically forced/bribed her into finishing it with me. She’s not much of a fan of movies with people characters…Cars, Planes, Toy Story…those are her jams. And I have so many movies that I hope I will watch with her. Someday. But that day is not today. It’s not where she is, and maybe she never will be. And that’s just fine, too. I will sit and watch The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast for the trillionth times, reciting the words and singing every score by myself. Maybe that will make it more interesting to her. Someday.
saw girl nerf guns and girl lego sets (those were mostly lame, in my opinion). I understand the point behind making things available in pink. We want to be able to offer the pink things to the girls that love pink in the hopes that they might discover something new that they may not have tried otherwise. I think it’s a great idea, but I feel that it’s gone completely overboard. Gender-neutral toys, or toys as they were called when we were growing up, are disappearing. I saw this pink tool set two years ago and had my mom get it for her. She absolutely loves it and plays with it constantly. Yes, I bought it because it was pink. But I would have bought her a tool set at some point, pink or not. Do we need pink tool sets? Pink Nerf guns? Pink Lego sets? What if a little boy sees the stable Lego Friends set and wants it because he loves horses? He has to cross to the pink aisle to the girl Legos, opening him up for possible future ridicule from friends for playing with girl toys. I was perfectly happy with my normal old legos growing up. We are perpetuating and encouraging this cycle of pink = girl and blue/orange/red/whatever = boy, and making a greater toy divide. I bet the toy companies are making a killing by offering the same thing in different colors to each gender. Why are we letting them make the rules?
The Half-Crunchy Mama 