ILX Parenting 6: "Put Some Goddamn Pants On Before You Go Outside!" is a thing I say now

Anyways it's near-impossible to avoid gendering of interests in the U.S. no matter how hard you try, and I don't think it's bad per se to let your daughter play with make up or your son play with trucks bc like you say who wants to be the sourpuss who's discouraging their interests, but I also think it's ok to be honest and sad about how these interests are pushed on them by everything around us.

― Immediate Follower (NA), Tuesday, September 29, 2015 3:28 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah this is p much what I think. "constructs" are real, and you can wage a one-family war against them but you'll never completely win.

She likes pretty dresses, so I'd rather teach her that you can like pretty dresses and still be a lawyer or doctor or scientist (or ballet dancer or fashion designer or w/e) rather than discourage what she likes.

like your formulation assumes a) a child identifies with a certain gender and then b) associates various characteristics or products or whatever with that gender and then c) adopts (b) because they see it as being consistent with (a). Now, in the case of my son I'm talking about when he was between 1 and 2 years old. Pretty much any child development expert will tell you that children at this age do not really have any concept of gender, they don't understand what it is, they don't readily differentiate between what is for boys and what is for girls. This happens a bit later, and is driven very much by socialization, exposure to peers etc.

I can't explain why my 1 1/2 yo boy would like trains. I didn't have trains around the house. He'd never seen or been on a train. He'd never watched television. There were probably trains in some of the books we had, but I'm sure they were just one of the many other random objects that typically fill up toddler books. He hadn't been around older boys with trains. And yet he was *instantly* super-excited about a toy train. I remember it pretty clearly, it was baffling.

xp

That doesn't really square with all of the times I've seen you and G yelling "BE A GODDAMN MAN FOR ONCE" to the boy, but whatev...

lol

I do find myself yelling "act like a PERSON" more than I would like

lol

J has been fascinated by anything w/ wheels since i can remember - cars, trucks, trains, rolling garbage bins, it doesn't matter

Maybe the explanation is that as a KID, your son was excited by trains. Like this one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvpCmKUo1Aw

omg I could watch that 1,000 times.

I feel ya, Madeline. That is basically what I looked like commuting via NJT in 1998.

i fkn LOVED trains as a little tyke

my dad bought me a trainset & everything

that little girl = little veg

yeah obviously part of the problem here is using trains as a code for boys, which was not really my intention. That was just the first trad-boy thing Judah latched onto (which has been followed by other trad-boy things like construction vehicles and um the Incredible Hulk, among others - "HULK MASH!" as Judah says)

cuet

Ella's met a couple of transgender people, and she asked why these women sounded like men, so we explained that they were born with boy's bodies, but changed to girls when they were older, and now she's completely convinced everybody can and probably will swap genders at some point. like, if there's something I can't or won't do (eat peanuts, drive a car), it's because I'm a boy, but "when daddy turns into a girl, he'll be able to drive!"

My boy takes it a step further and says things like, "When I'm the daddy, and you're the son..." which haha, how could that happen? Oh yeah, gonna get Alzheimer's when I'm 50.

Ha, my blokes youngest still makes confusions like that too.

He's also recently discovered Fathers Day (long story but theyd never celebrated it til this year) and now hes decided this is a bargaining chip when being asked to do anything. ie "why should I? Its not FATHERS day. Why isnt it ever KIDS DAY mutter mutter"

haha when's international MEN'S day

In any case, whether or not we can solve big questions surrounding gender conditioning, I just feel like I see a lot of parenting blog articles where parents put SO much emphasis on something like this with such a small child, and inject so much anxiety into it, that it can't be good. "WHAT WHO TOLD YOU THAT YOU NEED MAKEUP TO BE PRETTY YOU'RE FINE JUST THE WAY YOU ARE I'M HIDING THE MAKEUP DON'T TOUCH IT"

I've probably posted this here before but: http://usvsth3m.com/post/21-struggles-faced-by-a-dad-raising-a-daughter-in-a-sexist-world

yea it is an overreaction xp

J sometimes asks to put his hair in a ponytail or pigtails "like mama" it is v cute

at J's birthday party last weekend some friends of ours brought their 5-month old boy and dressed him in this really cute pink wool sweater and my wife's parents kept making jokes about it like "don't show him the photos when he's older!!!" thinking they were so hilarious and goddamn it was so embarrassing.

my son had pretty long hair for a while, like a rocker, and we'd often get told "she's so pretty", & what could you really say but "thanks"

he also wore his sister's dresses for a while when really little b/c he wanted to be big like her. again, whatever.

otoh I had an acquaintance who once said to me that he hoped his son would be gay because gay people are better than straight people. kinda didn't know what to make of that.

I did freak out a little (internally) when K said she wanted to be a "woman lawyer." Also for a while she always wanted me to be the doctor and she was the nurse when we did checkups on her stuffed animals, but I think doc mcstuffins has put an end to that.

I really wanted to bring her to my office to meet all the "woman lawyers." Having mom home for a while and me continuing to work may be a bigger factor than any outside cultural influence.

otoh I had an acquaintance who once said to me that he hoped his son would be gay because gay people are better than straight people. kinda didn't know what to make of that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyjEAvIKD5c

otoh I had an acquaintance who once said to me that he hoped his son would be gay because gay people are better than straight people. kinda didn't know what to make of that.

"well they're certainly better than YOU" would've worked as a rejoinder imo

Apologies in advance for waxing philosophical and being pretentious, but I had this realization today about parenting, about something that makes it simultaneously so amazing and so fucking difficult for me: parenting frustrates nihilism. When I was childless, and even moreso when I was single, it was so easy to retreat into meaninglessness, even take comfort in it. But having this small, developing person there all the time, constantly observing you, listening to you, watching you for cues, asking you questions that have to do with what the world is and how to live in it, and it creates this weighty and almost burdensome feeling of responsibility in me. Changing diapers and packing snacks and dressing toddlers feels like the easy part compared to this, it can be done by rote. But never feeling like you can just have a true fuck everything moment, because this little person is watching you and feeding off of you and needs you to provide some kind of ballast in the turbulence of being so small and fragile and limited in understanding. Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by this.

Hadnt thought of it in those terms, but that is very true

Time to get a sitter!

yeah I forgot to mention that the other one is only 4 months and won't take a bottle right now, so that kind of precludes sitters for a little while.

feeling that October 3 post a lot, man alive

Apologies in advance for waxing philosophical and being pretentious, but I had this realization today about parenting, about something that makes it simultaneously so amazing and so fucking difficult for me: parenting frustrates nihilism. When I was childless, and even moreso when I was single, it was so easy to retreat into meaninglessness, even take comfort in it. But having this small, developing person there all the time, constantly observing you, listening to you, watching you for cues, asking you questions that have to do with what the world is and how to live in it, and it creates this weighty and almost burdensome feeling of responsibility in me. Changing diapers and packing snacks and dressing toddlers feels like the easy part compared to this, it can be done by rote. But never feeling like you can just have a true fuck everything moment, because this little person is watching you and feeding off of you and needs you to provide some kind of ballast in the turbulence of being so small and fragile and limited in understanding. Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by this.

We suddenly have a lot of garish plastic around that plays music and the 'hail to the bus driver' song is on everything so I constantly have in my head Ralph Wiggum going 'he steps on the clutch and the toilet goes flush'

SHUT UP!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55EoLTC0SdY

I hear "la cucaracha" from all our noise making plastic shit but it makes Cecil dance so I'm into no matter how annoying it is.

Also the gendered playing is so weird - my mother in law is visiting and bought him some Legos which are too tiny now but we put together a car like wheeled contraption for him. He immediately started pushing it around and making vrooming noises which blew my mind.

I assume this comes from the older kids at his day care but it's still weird to me how quickly he picked this up.

K loves playing with dinosaurs but mostly lines them up and has conversations with them, none of the roaring or stomping stuff.

Are there any other NYC or NYC area parents on ILP? This school shit is so complicated and daunting and we're still a year out from Pre-K. First of all, K's preschool doesn't have a Universal Pre-K (i.e. free pre-K), and apparently (we did not know), you get preference at a UPK if you're already enrolled there (same is not true for the UPK's at public schools).

Then it also turns out the neighborhood school, which we moved here for, is ridiculously overcrowded. They are running EIGHT 25-student kindergartens now and probably don't have the space for all of those kids to move through the rest of the school without cutting K in the future. And it's apparently very test-driven and "factory" like according to parents we've talked to, even though it's rated well. So then there's G&T application -- a whole other clusterfuck -- or certain special application-only public schools that are way out of our neighborhood and would mean insane mornings. Or there's moving to the suburbs, or IDK, finding some private school that gives financial aid? But I doubt we'd qualify and I doubt there's much in the way of "merit scholarship" out there at her age. IDK, fuck.

sympathies to you dude, i am not in NYC but our 3yr-old just started preschool in a large urban school system (boston) and shit is very very overwhelming, we happened to get SUPER lucky (ironically) due to J's special needs/autism diagnosis/IEP which got us a spot in a great school and allowed us to avoid the daunting lottery system. best of luck to you and your kid, this is like the main topic all of our friends are talking about right now and it is the main reason a good number of people in our neighborhood move out of the city. it can work well for some though.

Yeah not NYC but Chicago, which as you may have heard, has some issues with its public schools so while I have no advice, I can definitely sympathize.

We don't live in a place near as big as you all, but I hope you find comfort in that this shit happens all over.

here in the ring around Paris school shit is also complicated, further complicated by our being fairly recent arrivals, and my son's middle school has been off/on strike for the last three weeks, which is both hilariously French as well as a mix of shitty and awesome for/from the perspective of my son.

It's so fucking crazy. We had one parent suddenly pull his kid out of our daughter's class and we had no idea why. Then we ran into him and asked what happened, and he said his son was now at ____ instead, but he wouldn't really give us any detail on why. Then we found out that place does have a UPK, and I have a feeling he did it just to get the preference next year. Suddenly we're wondering if we should do the same, but the thing is last year we pulled K out of ____ because we didn't like their twos class, and she's basically happy where she is now. So IDK.

Another parent reportedly got upset with H for even suggesting we were going to try to send K there for UPK, like "DON"T YOU KNOW THERE'S A PREFERENCE!" as though we were trying to take her spot.

DC's universal PK is a godsend

I did not know that a toddler's feet could get so stinky.

For those who don't know me on Facebook, this happened:

*awful noise*
Me: Do we need to change your pants?
Michael: *knowing smile* no
Me: didn't you just poop?
Michael: It's not my problem.

True story

looool