"That's not a firefighter. That's a woman."
Mon May 14, 2007 at 08:40:13 PM PDT
I've written in an earlier diary about how determined I was to raise my 2.5-year-old son gender neutral. (For those interested, he's still wearing only pink and now insists he's a girl.) He showed a strong interest in trucks from an early age, and I grudgingly gave in to toys, clothing, and books with a truck theme. I come from a family of firefighters, and once his interest in fire trucks was documented, he got several gifts of books about firefighters. I was disappointed that some of them were old-fashioned, such as The Little Fire Engine about Fireman Small and his men. However, the old-fashioned books still had cool sound effects and pictures of bright red trucks, and my son wanted to hear them frequently.
Last week, we were reading a book that recently came as a gift from one of my firefighter uncles. On one page, there were a group of several firefighters, and one of them was a woman. My son pointed to her, and said "What's that?" When I told him it was a firefighter, he disagreed with me, and said "That's not a firefighter. That's a woman." I explained that women can also be firefighters, but he disagreed vehemently and absolutely would not be convinced. If you have or have ever had a 2.5-year-old, you can imagine how this conversation went.
I started to feel queasy. We've been so careful to raise him in a world free of gender stereotypes. We shield him from television, and he's with a parent nearly all of his waking hours. We make sure to balance our own use of pronouns when speaking of people in different professions. We realize at some point he'll need to enter the "real world" and will be exposed to stereotypes, but we figured the later he learns them, the less ingrained they'll be. Yet at just 2.5 he's already made up his mind that firefighters are men. We know that he must have gotten this idea from his books, and I'm regretting not screening them more carefully and following my initial hunch that some of them were too stereotypical.
So we've decided to attempt a re-education campaign in our house to balance the stereotypes he's already started to learn from books. Yesterday, we walked past a firehouse, and stopped in front to talk about the firefighter inside and what she might be doing. We saw her boots next to the truck, and wondered whether she had been to a fire recently. My son looked skeptical at first, but then bought into it surprisingly quickly and is now convinced there is a woman firefighter who works in that building (which may or may not be true). My husband and I have decided that from now on, we will assume ALL construction workers, police officers, etc. are female unless we are talking about a specific person who is clearly male.
Has anyone else had experience attempting to shield kids from gender stereotypes? How can we explain the fact that there are some jobs that are typically done by males and others typically done by females, even when there is no clear reason for it? I personally think most firefighters are men because most firefighters are men, so I'm anxious to do my part to break the stereotypes in the next generation so there is greater balance across all professions. This is an especially sensitive topic for me since I am a teacher (and currently a SAHM) and my husband is a scientist, and I worry that our family structure itself is perpetuating gender stereotypes.
Is anyone else out there struggling with the same questions? I thought I was at least a couple years away from this discussion so I've been totally caught off guard.
