Is it bad to dress our girls in pink and our boys in blue? Gender stereotypes can put pressure on our kids to conform to certain ideas of masculinity and femininity and influence the activities they engage in, their interests and ultimately even the roles they take in society as adults. Host Amelia Phillips talks to Assistant Professor of Sociology at University of Utah and author of ‘Raising Them’ Dr Kyl Myers, to find out how we can raise our kids to reach their full potential beyond gender limitations.
Below is an unedited transcript of the podcast episode:
During one of my kids’ soccer practices, each week I watch a group of about 50 boys and girls aged around five to 12 in training. Now, there’s this one child, they’re around nine years old, who I cannot for the life of me tell if they’re a boy or a girl. They’ve got long hair and a feminine looking face, but their mannerisms are more similar to my sons and his male.
They are extremely talented at soccer, but they’re also prone to big violent outbursts. The coach is routinely having to send them off the field to cool down. Now I’ve told myself that it doesn’t really matter what their gender is and honestly I really don’t care, but I just can’t help each week being intrigued by this child trying to work them out, and also trying to work their behaviors out.
This is healthy her with Amelia Phillips, according to research gender. Have been shown to perpetuate inequality and reinforce differences between men and women, rather than viewing individuals as people first and equals stereotypes can put pressure on boys and girls to conform to certain ideas of masculinity and femininity, which can potentially limit and restrict young.
These stereotypes influence the activities that kids engage in their interests and skills, and ultimately even the roles that they take on in society as adults. Yet trying not to fall into the trap of gender stereotyping is challenging, even if our intentions are there. Dr. Kyle Myers is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of.
She has a PhD in Sociology, Research’s Gender Studies has presented a popular TEDx talk on gender equality and is the author of Raising Them a book about gender creative parenting. Dr. Kyle beaming in from Canberra. Thank you so much for joining me. Thanks for having me, Amelia. Now many people feel comfortable in their gender.
So does challenging gender stereotypes mean that we need to lose or muddy the waters of our identity? Hmm. I think that that’s a great question, and I think one of the, maybe the misconceptions about gender creative parenting or the work that I do, you know, that’s related to this gender revolution is that we’re not trying to eliminate gender, right?
We’re not trying to make anybody who feels comfortable in their gender, Like backtrack and not be able to be that. I think one of the things that’s just most important that we’re trying to push is just. Just to help people recognize that there’s more to gender than a binary of being a man or a woman, or a boy or a girl.
There’s non-binary people. There’s also so much more to what it means to be a woman, right? And that there’s so much diversity among people of the same gender, and so it really. , it’s meant to be a, a loving and positive movement. Yeah. Yeah. And not trying to challenge anybody of like, Now prove to me why you’re a woman, and tell me why.
Like, that is absolutely not what we’re doing. We, It’s, yeah. It’s really about helping people think critically about it. Even if you’re so comfortable in your own gender, being able to critically and lovingly interrogate your own gender identity and ask the questions. , why do I, you know, have the behaviors that I do, the habits that I do, the style that I do?
Mm-hmm. , you know, like being able to ask yourself those questions or can actually be really fun, you know, and not necessarily muddying the waters, but can be pretty liberating to be able to explore like, well, do I do this because, I was born in the eighties and this is what girls were told to do. And so, Or in the seventies college.
The seventies or seventies, the sixties, or you know, whenever, or the nineties or whatever that just, yeah, just really, do I do these things because I was told to do them or do I do these things because they genuinely make me happy? And I think that that’s a good thing to grapple. Well, you just mentioned the gender revolution.
Talk to me about what you mean by that, and I’ve heard you talk about the alpha generation coming up, that’s people born after, is it 2010? Yeah. Yeah. What do you mean by this? Gender revolution? Yeah. Well, I think that we have seen with gender, it comes a long way and there’s been a lot of exponential growth, right?
Like if you look from decade to decade to decade, gender performances, gender, Don’t remain static throughout the whole thing. Like if we look at our mothers, our grandmothers, our great grandmothers, the way that we have done femininity or what we have been able to do has drastically changed, you know, over the centuries.
Oh yeah, yeah. From much more rigid, you know, in the sixties and you had the stay at home woman, and if someone went to work it. Oh my goodness. So shocking for a woman to work. There’s been a lot more relaxing of those boundaries. Oh, big time. Like in just a, in just a matter of a few generations, we have gone from women not even being able to vote to women being leaders of nations.
Yeah. There’s been exponential growth that has happened when it comes to what people. Can do because of their gender, because of their sex, because of their body, because of whatever roles, you know, our, our cultures have decided, um, people need to perform. But also as far as the gender revolution goes, the way that I’ve been thinking about it is just, Even in the last decade, it’s been really incredible to see how a, a different level, like this acknowledgement of non-binary people, right?
More affirmation and love and support for transgender people and just more acknowledgement of gender diversity and, you know, the, the normalization of they then pronouns, like that’s come such a long way in even just a few years. The visibility. Gender diverse people in media and music and the news. And so it’s just been really incredible.
And what we’re seeing with younger generations, younger, you know, adolescents and children, is that they’re really distancing themselves from a lot of gender stereotypes. And I think that comes in part because a lot of them are being raised by millennial parents or have Gen Z siblings or cousins.
There’s a lot of people who are pushing against gender stereotypes and really trying to fight for gender equality, and so it gives children just so much more freedom to play with gender and not be so restricted to binary norms of what, you know, like might typically be thought of as being stereotypical for a boy or a girl and what’s appropriate for them.
There’s a lot more flexibility in play, and so you see a lot more kids saying, You know, I, I’m trans, I’m non B. I’m a tomboy, right? Like I’m a boy who loves ballet, and that all of those things are valued and celebrated. Well, let’s talk about your interesting journey, cuz you are leading the way when it comes to this.
When you fell pregnant, you and your husband, Brent, decided to raise your child without an assigned gender or gender creative parenting as you’ve called. Instead, you would wait until they were ready to assign themselves a agenda. I just find this wild. Whilst many have been very supportive of your decision, you also received your fair share of criticism.
Can you tell me about that? Yeah, yeah, So my child Zoomer was born in 2016, and so for the first four years of Zoomer life, we, we used they them pronouns and we didn’t use words. Daughter or son, we just used kid or baby or zoomer. And we were just really giving zoomer the space to explore gender and let us know what their identity was and the pronouns that they wanted to use.
And around ER’s fourth birthday, he told us, like, I love he him pronouns, you know, And he identifies as a boy. And we’re like, That’s awesome. And really, um, of course enthusiastically support him in his own identity, but we. We have been lucky to have a lot of support and we’re very privileged, um, to be able to have, have had so much support.
Um, we did receive our fair share of criticism. I was featured in a New York magazine. Article in 2018 and it just unleashed a viral media hoop block or fluffle and, and Wow. Really, you know, I mean like the trolls came from every corner of the globe to let us know what they thought about our parenting decision, which is.
Overwhelming . It’s so fascinating in the parenting wars, how people have such a visceral reaction to something like this because it is out there. Let’s, let’s face it, it is, you know, it’s the first time I had heard of it happening, but I think it’s fantastic because it is paving the way. But even I myself, I was so intrigued by your story that I found myself sitting there like scrolling through your instar and trying to work out.
This was before Zoomer, you know, did identify. Trying to work out which biological gender Zuma was. You know, why do you think some people like me and like my story at the start of our chat today, why do we feel either uneasy or just curious about not knowing a child’s gender? Like there’s this kind of this.
Visceral desire to wanna know, is this person a boy or a girl? Mm. Why is that? So as humans, we do a lot of sorting, right? Like we’re, we’re constantly looking at things and we make so many, we make thousands of decisions a day, right? Like, is this edible? Is this poisonous? Is this safe? Is this dangerous? And we do the same thing with humans and a really big thing that has, you know, become ingrained into our unconscious thinking and conscious.
Is wanting to know how to treat people and stereotypes and bias and gender norms are so ingrained in our bias and subconscious and the way we operate in the world. We wanna look at somebody and we want a lot of visual cues so we know how to treat them. Yeah. It’s putting someone in their box Totally.
Right? Yeah. Like you, you wanna see a kid, you wanna know. Okay. Like should I call. Pretty or handsome, should I, you know, see if they wanna play with dinosaurs or dolls. And therein lies the problem. We have these expectations and restrictions for kids based on totally socially constructed gender, you know, stereotypes.
And then our kids really only get half of the world. And so I think that it’s just human nature to really, you know, wanna know something and to look for cues, to be able to like tap into our script of how do I treat you, how do I engage with you, what do I do? How do I play with you? And gender is really one of those huge.
Things, right, Of like of, of how we want to treat a person. And so unfortunately, it’s one of those things where someone’s like, Well, I need to know what the sex of your baby is. I need to know so I know how to like engage with them. And that’s so unfair that like we feel like we need to have. These binary labels to be able to love someone or, or engage with them and, and that’s really what this is trying to push, right?
Of like, well, couldn’t you just treat my child like a kid? Yeah. And give them all the adjectives and all the toys and all the options. So I guess what I’m trying to understand is that curiosity or unease that people may feel, is that something. That say in the alpha generation is just not gonna be there.
They’re just, they’re not gonna care. You know, it’s, it’s a sign of our times because us oldies are still so ingrained. Mm. Is that the aim that we just won’t care anymore? I don’t know. I think that, I think generation Alpha still cares, and I think that they’re being taught to care. Our, our media is so binary.
Our culture is quite binary. They are being talked about as like, are you a boy or a girl? Instead of like, What gender are you out of? All the infinite possibilities of gender, right? Like there’s so many more non-binary kids to date, like visibly than there. Five years ago. And so just really, I think that kids still care about gender and binary gender and stereotypes because so much of how they’re being taught about the world is still pushing that.
Yeah. But I do think that these younger generations are explicitly caring less about it and like explicitly pushing back on it and like mm-hmm. , they’re the ones who are advocating for change, Right. Advocating for school uniforms to. Unisex and like everybody could wear whatever they want. Like girls should be able to wear pants and if a boy wants to wear a skirt, then he should like, Right.
Like just, I think that there’s a lot of advocacy that’s coming out of these younger generations, which is really incredible. Yeah. And I guess coming from a place of fear for parents, particularly as their kids reach those teenage years, or, you know, teenage is such , such a confusing time for children.
This just gonna make them even more confused and they’re gonna make life decisions that set them up in a way. And it’s that thought process that I think parents have. Mm-hmm. that stems from a place of fear. Yeah. I get that. And I think that the fear though, can be diluted with just understanding and education.
Like knowing someone who’s non-binary, knowing someone who’s intersects, knowing someone who’s trans, like knowing someone who’s queer, like knowing people and learning their stories and seeing their humanity. Is so humanizing and I think that can really kind of help soothe that unease, you know, that like we all went through it as teenagers, we were trying different clothes on, trying different identities, like, you know, taking risks and stuff.
Yeah. And just being able to, Show up as a parent in being able to set those boundaries of like, okay, I’m your parent, and like, these are the house rules. But being able to say, uh, you know what, if you wanna wear something that like maybe I don’t love that you wanna wear, like it’s not doing anyone any harm, right?
And I can support you in that. And maybe actually kind of gently being that cushion I actually think makes kids rebel less. You know, like, yeah, he probably right and then they’ll come to their parents more like, it’s the people who feel like. Oh, my parents will kill me if they find out I’m having sex. My parents would kill me if they found out I was drinking at a party.
My parents. They’re the ones who are, the kids have fear too. Yeah. So I think kind of creating a culture in your household that’s like, I’m down to learn. I want to support you. Yeah. I want you to be able to talk to me. You know, if something’s going on can actually create a really safe space for a lot of exploration.
And kids exploring their gender can have even better outcomes because they know their. Love them. Yeah.
And I think also as a parent, knowing that we are moving into a society that is so much more gender inclusive, that, you know, it’s not like the old days where if someone showed an interest in the same sex, they might be ostracized or Mm, beaten or even worse, but there’s a gap. I’d love you to help me bridge here most of us.
Super impassioned about having more gender equality in society. You know, especially when you read stats like women are paid 16% less than men, less than a quarter of board directorships are held by women. Only a third of federal parliamentarians are women. There’s very few people that would argue with how disappointing those stats are and how things need to.
But what I believe some people struggle with is bridging that gap between these sorts of figures and gender equality as adults. And if that’s actually related to whether we dress our little girls in pink or our boys in blue. Mm. I have to admit that after Lockie was my first born boy and when Charlotte came along, I reveled in putting pink ribbons in her hair and all that sort of, Can you help explain how those two are inextricably linked?
Sure. So gender socialization is really critical to how we become shaped as humans. And so we can see these, I like to call it in like kind of the example of like breadcrumbs. You know, like I can see these breadcrumbs. Maybe these adulthood outcomes and like women being paid less and then you can creep back and see these crumbs back into childhood.
Yeah. So one of the things with gender socialization and childhood is the toys that kids are given. And toys are actually really critical for children to learn skills like life skills, right? Like whether it’s fine motor skills, whether it’s empathy, whether it’s spatial awareness. Yeah. And so the types of toys kids have can really.
Influence the types of interests that they’re going to develop and then essentially the type of careers that they have. Yep. And so if boys are given the robotics, the engineering, the computer coding, like all of these Lego bricks, then of course they’re going to meet more likely to become. Engineers because they had these building blocks to kind of set up this interest for them.
If girls are always given kitchen sets and dolls for like, we can’t be surprised if they’re going to go into early childhood education or, and all those things are good, right? Like it’s, oh, it’s, it’s fine for girls to. You know, wanna grow up to be early childhood educators and boys to be engineers. Yep.
But a way that we can hack this is making sure girls also have the chemistry sets and the robotics toys, and that boys also have the dolls. And because it, it actually helps give them some well rounded. Yeah, life skills and then sets them up to be able to see if they have some potential talent, you know, that they can then really ignite.
And so there’s, there’s all of these different things that I can see absolutely linked to how we treat children and teenagers. And then, you know, either how they’re either hindered or set up for success in, in specific area. Yeah. That’s so fascinating. And it’s funny with my daughter, Charlotte, who in researching today’s episode, I was thinking, Oh, I think I’ve done a pretty good job, You know, and I live in a very sort of inclusive environment, even though she does wear a bit more pink than the boys.
But then I was trying to put together a mountain biking team that included Charlotte the other day. I realized that there were absolutely no girls in her vicinity that had a mountain bike. It needed to have gears for this particular mountain bike. And I realized that, oh my goodness, there’s no girls around here.
I’ve got 15 boys names, but no girls volunteered to join this mountain biking group. And I thought, well, there you go. Like even in a progressive society, it’s all the boys that were out. Mm. I wanna touch on violence against women for a moment because evidence shows that levels of violence against women are significantly higher in relationships where there are more rigid distinctions between the roles of men and women.
Mm. In fact, what I find fascinating is the Early Childhood Australia submission into the Royal Commission into family violence. Highlighted the important role that the early childhood sector plays in preventing violence against women. Hmm. And that’s through building awareness of gender stereotyping and encouraging respectful relationships in young people in preschool.
And the school environments as well. What are some of the other benefits of a more gender equal society? That’s a great and huge question. Um, but you know, it, it, there’s so many benefits, right? Like, I can’t see any downsides of a, of a more gender equal society, right? Where people are given respect, where people are, um, celebrated for wherever they land upon the gender spectrum.
However, they wanna identify that opportunities are given to everybody, that if somebody has a baby, Is a new parent. It’s not just a birthing parent or a mother who gets paid time off that that dads are supported in that and that they can take the time to, to bond with their child and if they, you know, really wanna be a stay at home parent, that they’re supported in that too.
So I just think there’s just so. I see no downsides of a gender equal society, you know, to be able to help people really meet their potential and, and live the most like authentic and fulfilling lives possible. Um, with, with respect, you know, with, with each other. I mean, I grew up in. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, which is known as the Mormon Church.
And it is an incredibly binary, or it was, you know, when I was being raised in it in the eighties and nineties. It’s a very binary culture. And I was taught from a very early age that my destiny was to marry a man and become a mother, and be a homemaker, and that I should be completely fulfilled by that.
And that kind of comes into what you were talking about. Earlier here of like these rigid distinctions that like I was never encouraged to go to college. I was never encouraged to find a career or a passion. Mm-hmm. , like, I was just always told that my, my duty on this planet was to just be someone’s wife and mother.
And for a lot of people, of course, being a wife and a mother are great parts of their identity, but to be taught for decades. Yeah. But that’s what your worth is. That, that that can be really problematic for girls and women to be able to feel like that they have some agency. Yeah. And. Form their own path and decide whether or not they want to be in a relationship or whether they want to be in a relationship with a man, or whether or not they wanna have kids.
Mm-hmm. that doesn’t have to make them more or less valuable, which is really powerful. Yeah, absolutely. You’ve gone to the extreme as far as. Choosing not to assign a gender to your child, do you think you can still be promoting and encouraging an equal gender society, but dressing your girls in pink and your boys in blue?
Like is there a sort of a happy balance where you can still revel in that, but be supportive of this gender revolut? Well, I think people, right? Like there can be people who assigned a gender to their child, but I think just because you assign a gender to your child doesn’t mean that you’re also assigning only half of the clothes.
Like I, I think a lot more girls need to be dressed in clothes that are marketed to boys because they tend to be more durable. They tend to, you know, actually be more conducive to climbing trees and going around and yeah, like by all means, if, if a girl likes to have a bow in her hair, fantastic. But I’d also.
Parents to say, Why don’t you put your son in pink? Why don’t you, you know, go shopping in the section that’s marketed to girls, and like, maybe you could put your son in a shirt that has a sparkly unicorn on it. And, and if parents start to bristle and feel uncomfortable about that, like, sit with that Right.
And really grapple with that. Yeah. Is this because you’re afraid that if you put your child, your, your boy in some sparkly leggings that he’s gonna be gay and a, We have no evidence that actually like dress. Ch boy child and clothes that are marketed to girls have any impact on his sexuality, right? No.
If you’re gay, you’re gay, you’re gay. Uh, but, but being able to grapple with that of like, why is there this homophobia in childhood? Like, what is it that makes us so uncomfortable? Like the idea of a boy who might have, um, characteristics that are. Often more attributed as like feminine or girly when there’s so much freedom for girls to cross this arbitrary boundary of into boyhood.
Mm. Or like things that are, you know, kind of classified as for boys. Like they’re really, for us to have an equal society, there has to be as much Yeah. Encouragement, permission, celebration for boys. Crossing this arbitrary line over into things that are, you know, considered girly. That is such a good distinction.
And I had a real life example this morning when I sent my five year old to preschool Angus, and he wanted his hair plattered like his sister, and he had three little plats in his hair. And my eight year old came up and said, You look like a girl. And I, I said, Excuse me. Especially after knowing, I was chatting to you today and I said, That’s really disrespectful.
And he said, I didn’t mean it in a bad way, I’m just saying you look like a girl. And, and I had this, but do you see that as a negative thing? And he was like being defensive saying, No, I don’t. I don’t. But I do think that it did come from a place of teasing. Mm mm-hmm. . And I thought, gosh, he’s only eight.
And I thought we were being pretty good . So Well, and you can be being good. I’m sure you are being good. It, it comes from all angles. Yeah. Like I, I am like one of the pioneering trailblazers of the gender creative parenting movement, and I still have a kid who’s like, so is short hair, short hairs for boys.
Right, Right. Because the media is teaching us that. Right. Like their peers are teaching us that teachers every book character. Like there has to be more diversity in what kids look like. Yeah. You, you know, to be able to go, like if your son, if your eight year old had, has. Dozens and dozens and dozens of boys in his life with long hair who are, who are braiding it.
He, he wouldn’t be drawing that distinction as much. Right. So it’s not so much about you, it’s the fact that just culturally we’re moving, but we’re not moving fast enough. Mm-hmm. , you know, to be able to teach our kids that. No hair has no gender. Yeah, clothes have no gender. You just get to do whatever you want.
Well, let’s talk about some of these top tips for avoiding gender stereotyping that we as parents can do, either unconsciously or consciously. What? What are some of the things that we can do or be aware of with our families? So I think one of the biggest things is just letting kids play with it all.
Mm-hmm. and giving kids the opportunity and options and choices to be able to be exposed to it all. You know, like you can dress kids who are in different genders in the same clothes, like hand me downs. Yep. And so I think that is a really important thing of just like how you’re teaching your children about these codes.
Um, I think that that’s just a really important thing. Just listening to your kids narrating counter stereotyping is so important, you know, with, um, being able to, the counter stereotype is just exactly what it is, Right? Like reversing a stereotype. Yeah. And so being able to say, Daddies are so good at taking care of little babies because so often dads are thrown under the bus as being like second, you know?
Mm-hmm. secondary, these like hopeless parents, and that’s just not true. Yeah. And so I think being able to counter stereotype whenever you can, and also. Really check your language of, is it binary? Is it like, are you saying boys and girls, or are you saying, you know, hey friends and, and kids to be able to include the space for, um, gender diverse kids and non-binary kids.
So there’s, I mean, I, there’s just, Oh gosh, I could go on and on and on and on, you know, about things that we can do. But I just think the first step. Is just letting yourself wake up to seeing gender stereotypes. Yeah. And like what you’re doing and, And I think a lot of people doing it just like see that, because once you start seeing it, I’ve actually found that it’s kind of like this domino effect and you can’t.
Unsee it, you know, of like, why is everything, why are bedsheets so gendered? You know, why ? Why is kids toothpaste gendered? Like, starting to ask those questions and then being an advocate for, you know, getting companies to. Change it. I think that books are really interesting. We read so many books to our kids and Googling some more gender equal books, particularly the modern books out there, would be a great place to start as well.
Cuz then at least you can see that behavior modeled or maybe even challenging some of the classics that we’ve read. Yeah. You know, cuz I love reading the classics to my kids. But you, you do realize that there are some crazy stereotypes in there. Oh, definitely. You could maybe challenge that as well.
Definitely, definitely. And, and getting kids on board with, like I ask Zoomer a lot in, in play, play is such an incredible opportunity to teach kids about gender diversity. And so even in just play, you know, we’re playing Lego and. and I’ll grab two girl Legos and go, And these are the two mommies and this is their baby.
Right? And so you can start to normalize same sex partnerships. You can normalize a woman, fire chief. You can normalize, you know, like a man. Preschool teacher. And so play is just a really cool opportunity and with books being able to like, we actually see, there’s just all of this evidence that there are so many more male characters in, in books and they’re also like way more often the the hero or the protagonist.
Right? Oh, I know. I’ve read that study. It’s so scary. Yeah, and it’s, and so being able to sh, I don’t think we need to be hiding this from our kids. I actually think getting them involved going, Oh, you know what? There’s a lot of he, him pronouns in this book. Could we maybe make the spider use she her pronouns?
And then maybe the fox uses they them pronouns, you know? And then, Yeah, and then you’re just kind of getting your child on board to just like normalize the fact that we can’t always be having this. Male superiority bias of defaulting to he him all the time. And I think it, it that really helps rewire kids’ brains to be much more, um, gender inclusive.
Finally, Kyle, for a parent who wants to reduce that amount of gender stereotyping in their kids’ life, what’s the one kind of parting message you’d love to leave with them that will hopefully have the most impact? Mm. My advice, I guess, is just to really come from a place of love instead of fear. Um, when it comes to gender stereotypes that we’re really trying to raise healthy, happy.
Children and being able to follow their lead in an affirming way and, and really support them in what their interests are, even if they run counter to what you were hoping their interests would be. Mm-hmm. or hoping that they’d have your interests. That just really coming from this place of support and love is so critical for children’s mental health and self-esteem.
And I think at the end of the day, that’s really what we want. Yep. As parents is we want our, we want our kids to feel healthy and happy and loved. And so I think that that really encompasses everything around gender stereotyping and gender identity and expression of just really helping your kids navigate this.
Awesome. Huge. Never ending buffet, of gender and really follow their lead to what? What makes them happy. I love that we’re celebrating the individuality of the child rather than trying to put them in a specific. Box or stereotype. Yeah. Thank you so much, Kyle. Thanks, Amelia.
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