The struggle against gender stereotyping

Boy – get back in your box!

One sultry autumn afternoon as I sat amongst my fellow mothers singing and clapping with my infant son, enjoying the usual mother and baby experience that so many mothers cherish the world over, a passing comment made by the class instructor pretty much changed the way I dressed, played with and educated my son - forever. With a simple smile the words rolled off her tongue, in my head the children in the room parted like a mythical sea from a bible tale with myself and Noah plonked in the middle looking slightly like a rainbow threw up on us…

                “Kathleen, I look around the room and I see a sea of pink, a sea of 

blue and then Noah…”

She gave Noah a reassuring pat on the head and carried on with her chat to the class. For me it was a momentous occasion, I had (quite obviously), been more than aware of the clothes marketed towards children and their parents alike. Putrid pinks with a few flowers or some sparkle for the girls, jeans and jeans and a bit of khaki thrown in there for the boys. What I hadn’t noticed until that very second is just how much our beautiful little treasures were becoming clones of each other forced into gender specifics before they even knew what gender was. I looked at my bright, smiley little dude, awash with colour and vibrancy and vowed to make sure he stayed as unique as he was that very second. Who was I kidding? That tender moment I shared with Noah that day was no match for the commercial world he is being raised in. As much as I try to avoid the enemy that has become society’s expectations of him as a boy, this is a battle I cannot fight alone and cannot fight if it means forcing him to become an individual so much so that he becomes isolated from his growing peer group.

As Noah developed from a rug rat to a little boy he has subconsciously and consciously been exposed, more and more, to society’s expectations of him as a male. The global empire that is Disney, to me, seems the most glaringly obvious dictator of the sexes. As much as I try to limit his exposure to overtly gender specific adverts, clothes and representations I have to admit (even though it pains me) that he has been exposed and has begun to turn his back on certain activities and even colours because “they are for girls.” I often wonder how and why so many parents follow these trends - then Christmas or a birthday comes around and I watch Noah unwrap another Bob the Builder t-shirt or another Thomas the Tank Engine locomotive and I realise people just don’t feel comfortable giving a little boy a tea set, no matter how much he loves to pretend to make a brew!

I understand so many people probably think our kids have it all and where am I going with my hippy, gender-bending ideals, I don’t want to raise a generation of boys who wear dresses and girls who pee standing up. I would just like to see the children’s market as a whole make just a little room for unisex learning, dressing and educating. For the time being I suppose, I will have to continue in my fight to expose my son to as much diversity as is possible and let him lead us towards new experiences based on his raw and innocent enthusiasm rather than based simply on the fact that he is a boy and thus he is expected to follow a certain path.

Someone said to me when my son was born, “he is a blank canvas, it’s your job to pain a beautiful picture”. Little did I know at that point that our pallet would be limited and our audience – so often – blinkered to his natural beauty and expressionism. I just hope I equip him with the tools to be his own artist and his imagination as free as it was that morning we parted the waves. 

This post was gifted by Kathleen, an Ireland-based, London-born mum of one little boy. She owns a company that sells tights for boys. You can visit her at Slugs and Snails. 

#MedalMonday - 19th December 2011

Welcome to the last #MedalMonday of 2011.

Medal Monday is where we celebrate the victories of the parenting war. We say hurrah for days where we have won! Celebrate the little incidents where we came out on top.

To join in, enter the link to your blog post into the linky tool below. We will swing by, say hello, and congratulate you on being the wonderful, victorious parent that you are.

So this week will be our last of this year. We will see you back on the 9th January. 

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all!

#FailFriday - 16th December 2011

One, two, one, two, one, two!! 

Hello and welcome to Fail Friday. If you want to know more about this linky, please click here. To join in, the linky is at the bottom of this post.

We are in to our third week now, and each week we have had some fantastic stories of shoddy parenting. Last week was no exception. So hang around and prepare to be dazzled by the sheer awesomeness of parenting disaster.

Last week, our very own Sergeant J had to borrow money from her own child in order to provide her troops with sustenance. We heard how Here Come the Girls was late collecting her child from school, something we have all done, or will do from time to time. The children still have a way of making you feel like a failure though. The Real Supermum linked up with her story of her toothy mummy fail, involving swellings, ice and trusty old Google.


This weeks flag-flying failure is Life, Love and Living with Boys, whose child managed to do something undercover, and well.....you'll have to see the pics. Well done, you are indeed a BIG FAT FAIL.

If you deserve the same honour, then link up your parenting fail blog post below, grab the badge from the right hand column, and display it proudly. We will all come over and agree that you did indeed fail, but will try and provide you with all the emotional support a competent and willing soldier deserves.


Also, please do visit those that have linked up and show some love. And leave us a comment below too if you can - we love them!

We will be taking a break next week due to the Christmas holidays, but please come back on the 6th January and share with us all your Christmas and New Year fail stories. Don't forget we have #MedalMonday coming up, where you can share your parenting success stories. Assuming you've got some, you pathetic little lot!!

Know your enemy: head lice

Head lice - the little creatures who decide to invade your little treasure's hair within a week of returning to school after the holidays. They are relentless little buggers who are indiscriminate in their choice of who to attack next. 

At our house, we once spent the whole of the six-weeks summer break successfully ridding ourselves of them, only for us to have to dodge another potential attack within two days of going back to school in September. Our then 6-year old daughter caught them off a certain child of a certain family (probably) at school during the last week of term. It was the first time we'd ever had them. I hadn't even had them myself as a child, and it was awful to think of my own child getting them. We tried one treatment, which was a faff. It was one where you left it on overnight, which was a real pain. Asking a six-year-old not to touch their hair while in bed and not to roll about too much is asking a bit much. I dared not even suggest trying it on my 3 year old. 

The nanny was un-fazed. She had worked with children for over ten years. She had caught every bug going, including the hair variety. I felt a bit bad that she also caught them off my child this time too, until I found a mahoosive one in my own hair - aaaarrrrrggh! Be gone you horrible multi-legged little git! I only found the one, but it was ginormous. You could see every one of it's wriggly legs. For about three weeks, the nanny and I were continually conditioning our hairs and combing through, in a combined act of defiance. 

So the nanny went to the shops and bought a better treatment. One that you applied before shampooing. It was excellent. We did everyone's hair and crossed our fingers. The solution was Full Marks. You apply it to dry hair, leave it for a few minutes, comb through and then shampoo. Then you do another treatment a week or two later. 

It worked! Just in time to go back to school for the start of the new year. Now we use Vosene nit-repellent kids shampoo religiously, and it seems to be working. We have had no more repeat attacks. Although it could also be because a certain child from a certain family has moved to another school. I still find myself itching though whenever we get 'the note' from school in one of the book-bags.

Facts about head-lice

• Nits are the eggs of head-lice. Nits take about a week to hatch and become fully-fledged head-lice
• Head-lice develop to the colour of the host's hair - which is why they can be hard to spot (for the record, all of our head-lice were ginger, which was a bit freaky).
• They can live in any type of hair, including clean or dirty.
• They are easily spread by direct contact with others - hence why school is an excellent breeding ground.
• To get rid of them, you should treat everyone in the household at the same time, and wash anything that could be contaminated, like bed linen and towels.
• They need human-blood to survive, so will not survive for long in other places, like on an animal, or a sofa.

By Sergeant J

This is not a sponsored post. I just found the above products to be a great weapon against the wriggly hair-nit army. 

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