[Livia]

Originally Posted by Jack_

But then boys and girls being interested in Barbie/Action Men, or wanting to wear dresses and makeup or jeans and baseball caps aren't naturally acquired tastes either, they are socialised. I'm not disagreeing with people arguing that the way these parents are going about this is wrong, they've misunderstood the concept of gender neutral parenting, but children don't 'naturally' want to or not want to wear dresses, they learn the behaviours of their peers, the media and what their parents teach them.

If you were to place a one year old child in a white room with a dress and a pair of jeans, and a dolls house with Barbies and Action Men and toy cars in two separate piles, and left them to walk up to one to dress up in/play with - taking the hypothetical assumption that they haven't ever interacted with other people their age or had any sort of guidance from their parents or the media - the chances of them going to either pile is a completely 50/50 toss up, there isn't any 'natural' instinct whatsoever - it is a toss of a coin. You put a child that's interacted with other children of a similar age, had media messages fed to them and had guidance from their parents, and they will probably go to the pile that fits the gender stereotypes they've been taught. It isn't natural though, it's learned behaviour.

I'm not sure that all gender interaction and preference is learned, so what would or wouldn't happen is purely conjecture.

While I understand having gender-neutral toys, dressing your child as a boy in the morning and a girl in the afternoon is bonkers. He is a boy. No amount of pink dresses is going to change that and I'm not sure it's helping him now, or that it will help him in the future.