Gender Roles?

I have never been one to think that boys act a certain way and girls act another way. I always assumed that nature played some kind of role, but deep down I figured that nurture accounted for the majority of differences in gender roles. Maybe I believed this in part because both me and my brother were never the stereotypical rambunctious boys and at least one of my sisters wasn’t really a girly girl.

But I was dead wrong. Nature can have more to do with it than I ever imagined.

One of my daughters is a self-described tomboy. She definitely has plenty of stereotypical female qualities: she is incredibly verbal, empathetic, emotional. But she also goes head-first down the slide and the snow pile. And my son is not the stereotypical hyperactive and aggressive boy; he’s thoughtful and quiet and shy. But he's also logical and loves to build. Those two children are mixed. My other daughter, however, is a walking stereotype.

If made to wear pants for a day or two, she’ll demand to be permitted to wear a skirt or dress. If given a choice of clothing, she’ll pick the frilliest, laciest thing available. When she gets dressed in the morning, she immediately runs to the mirror to check herself out. She loves to wear bows in her hair. If my wife makes herself a salad, she’ll insist on eating part of it. Her drink of preference is diet coke. She likes to dance, but only to danceable songs.

Now you might think that the above may simply be evidence of how we’ve raised her over the years and isn’t an argument for nature at all. But that’s because I know something you don’t know. My daughter that has all of these traits is 21 months old (and I am not left-handed).

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. She’s absolutely obsessed with shoes. I mean, that seems like a joke, but it’s not. If you mention the word shoes, she’ll shriek "shoes!!!" and dart to where the shoes are kept in our house and start presenting pairs to you as if you were a high-end designer or somesuch.

She fears snakes; even snuffed-animal snakes. She’ll claim she isn’t hungry and then eat off your plate. She thinks she’s entitled to smack her male relatives, but rarely acts that way to her female relatives. When I wrestled with the older kids, once she learned we weren’t serious, she still shied away from it and would only jump on the pile when things are exceedingly calm, and then would immediately call to be removed, being too dainty to get into the rough fighting. She loves long luxurious baths, but she doesn’t really play with toys in the bath. She just lounges about. She loves all of her female relatives without reservation and seems to only barely tolerate her male relatives. She'll just sit for 30 minutes and page through a clothing catalog. There is literally almost no female stereotype she doesn't address.

Perhaps the oddest thing to me is her obsession with taking care of babies. It is difficult to get her to read a book about anything other than babies. She has a stable of 8-10 babies and her main play activity is to line up the babies, put blankets on them and put them to bed, or to stack them all into a play highchair and feed them. The first time I watched my then 16 month old daughter take care of babies, it struck me as massively odd.

I mean, I’m a 35 year old man. I don’t fantasize about taking care of, bathing and feeding 34 year old men. On top of that, even if she is destined to be maternal, what if she’s right? What must it be like to have figured out the core message of life for yourself at 16 months of age! To know your goal and your probable destiny in life at that age and then …what?!? Just play out the string? How completely different and separate from the modern ideal of a life spent exploring and discovering.

I mean (assuming she really wants to raise kids as her primary life activity, which is admittedly a huge assumption), then she would have figured out life in about 1/25 of the time I've spent at it. So she's basically 25 times better at living than me. You kind of have to respect that.

We've started to teach her how to diaper her baby dolls. I mean, if that is what she wants to do when she grows up, might as well start learning early.