but I can remember the shocked feeling I had when my oldest voiced an opinion that was independent of my input.  They will do that...try not to let it throw you too much.

In the end, all you can do is explain.  Honestly, when your son is a man, will it make any difference whether he grew up literally from birth with an unquestioning mindset?  Won't it be just as acceptable if he reaches adulthood with the right attitudes because you patiently explained certain things over and over?

i do not think there is a way to prevent them from experiencing stereotypes in a world so filled with them.

i agree that constant discussion will be what balances those things in the end.

I ask because my kids went through a time when they thought all lawyers were women because all the lawyers they knew -- me and two of my best friends -- were women. So that might be why your son thought firefighters were men -- if all the ones he knows are men.

I think all you can do is keep talking about men and women and different professions. He'll get it.

He's still figuring so much out, that if he lights upon a less than enlightened theory for awhile, I don't think it's too bad.  I'll bet it won't last.  A few years ago, one of my co-workers' 10-year-old daughter was visiting the office.  I was making small talk with her and asked which sports she played.  She gave me a withering look and said, "Sports are for boys."  I felt really sorry for her, but I know she got that attitude from her mother, my co-worker.  She completely bought into gender stereotypes.  She could not comprehend why I wouldn't change my name after marriage, but thought nothing of changing hers each time she got married (she was on #2 or #3 when I knew her).  Your son will definitely change his thinking, but at 10, I wonder if that little girl will ever change hers.

trying to shield him from gender stereotypes and purposely counting your pronouns and such. Everything about a society is just "in the air" - it's not just formal media, books and TV, but the people you know and how they live - every last one of them. And that includes all of us who are SAHM with husbands who work - ain't no way around that giant stereotype, which is way too complicated for a 2 year old to get the nuances of how this happens.

Plus, kids go through a normal developmental phase where they are very very attached to gender stereotypes - they are learning and rehearsing the gender roles as they see them in their world. No amount of explicit teaching will change that phase, but it will pass and then your values will take hold.

One example of this is your son wearing pink and insisting he's a girl. If I had to take a wild guess, he probably thinks he must be a girl because he wears pink, because girls wear pink, not boys.

I guess I'm trying to say, try not to worry too much. Your values and lifestyle will matter most in the end.

RachelD

My son is just starting to outgrow the phase where he was a very rigid thinker.  This phase started at 2.5  It was so bad that he couldn' accept that there were different ways to get home from visiting Nana's office and he would get very upset if I took a different route home.  He's three now and is just getting over this.  Expect some rigid thinking fo a little while.

We're very gender neutral and Ilia still comes home saying crap we've never said.  Of course, she has some "backward" stereotypes.  In her world:  

• Mommies fix things and work in the yard, daddies cook and wash dishes.
• Only girls (and our friend's 13 year old son) play sports except for basketball, which sometimes boys can play.  
• Girls can marry whoever they want, but boys can only marry girls and other boys with beards (we have a lot of lesbian couple friends, and the few gay couple friends we have are all with men with beards).  
• Only girls can be astronauts unless they're old men in black and white (this is a new one)
• Boys can be princesses (we also have a lot of trangender friends).

This is all just based on what she sees.  She thinks women can do anything.  Most of our female friends are scientists, writers, lawyers, doctors, teachers, etc.  She thinks that all men sit at home, because most of our guy friends don't have jobs or if they do, they work from home most of the time.

My sons participated in a research study yesterday that was measuring how children's eye movements influence learning.  They were looking at a computer screen to finish patterns as their eye movements around the screen were tracked.  As part of the follow-up I was told by one of the researchers that typically children who are age 3 (the age of my younger son) cannot look at something in two different ways at the same time.  Thus, they often will say things like "You can't be a daddy AND a firefighter" because they aren't able to categorize things in two different ways.  This depends on the development of the prefrontal cortex of the brain.

So, I wouldn't necessarily worry too much about it since very young children have pretty rigid thinking and classification systems.  I understand though why it bugged you; it would bug me too!

Concrete examples are helpful.  At the farmer's market I pointed to the women selling vegetables and called them "farmers".  My then-3yo daughter said women couldn't be farmers!  So we went up and introduced ourselves to one and asked about farming.  Since then, farmers can be male or female.

I remember when my 5 year old daughter played "doctor" with her 2 year old brother and told him he had to be the doctor because he was a boy, and she would be the nurse.  Yikes!  Of course, she had always had male doctors and female nurses.  We talked about how many doctors are women, including my OB/GYN and her dentist.  It wasn't too hard to convince her.

For now I mix up pronouns so that firefighters are sometimes 'he' and sometimes 'she'.  Most importantly, though I call them all firefighters instead of firemen.  Same goes for police officers, mail carriers, servers, and flight attendents.  

Oh, and we read from "Free To Be You and Me" from time to time, lol.