Image credit: that is not my daughter’s room, this princess furniture is from here.
I don’t usually write about my own personal parenting guidelines.. or maybe I do, I’ll have to review some of my older posts, but anyway I don’t think I do and that’s the important element of this statement because… well, I don’t want to come off like I think there are rules for being a feminist mother. Just as there is a spectrum of personal definitions for people’s feminism so too is there a spectrum of ways to incorporate feminism into parenting. And besides, I’m still relatively new at this parenting gig and you know how the parents who get on their high horses are just crying out to be bucked off.
But a comment on one of my previous posts has nudged me along to set out my manifesto of sorts on feminist mothering for my toddler. This is me muddling along, working it out as I go, not saying this is how everybody else should do it but keen all the same to hear how you’re doing it.
- I dress her in a variety of colours and I also buy quite a lot of that cutie-pie pink stuff because I can’t resist it, reminds me of my rave days, but I’m ok with it as long as there are some other themes in her clothing. And if I ever have a son I will dress him in a variety of colours including cutie-pie pink too and what’s with boy’s clothing, either dull or loud? Fortunately she loves yellow so I don’t feel too bad about my contribution to the pink brainwashing exercise. I try hard not to bind her in girliness - to scold her for messing up her clothes, to dress her in restrictive clothing, and I also try not to care about the fact that this adorable t-shirt has just been covered in paint, because I am a sucker for cool but expensive t-shirts.
- We’ve actively encouraged play with dolls and she is besotted in them so now we have hundreds of the damn things and it is a fight every morning before work to narrow down the ‘babies’ who will be coming with us today. I think playing with dolls has given her an opportunity to think about anatomy and also to role-play elements of her life. She has practised skills like putting on socks with her dolls, going to daycare, and doctoring them. Before she was very vocal we could tell a lot about what happened during her day at daycare by watching the things she did with her dolls. I couldn’t recommend dolls enough and I am always giving dolls as presents to other people’s little boys.
- After learning about Montessori we bought her quite a few ‘home toys’ – like a kitchen and grocery set, washing line, and a broom. The theory is that ‘home toys’ allow them to start learning life skills and that much of what a child wants to do is become accomplished at the things you’re doing. Lots of these life skills are actually good ways of learning scientific concepts and developing dexterity, though I resist the idea of glamourising housework too much. The washing line has been great for learning how to use pegs which is great for hand to eye co-ordination, and we also use the washing line to hang and dry her paintings. The kitchen and grocery toys have been great for things like learning to organise herself, and skills like measuring, counting, memory and pouring. Throw some play-doh into the mix and she will play with those things for an hour at a time, which allows me to go back to mainlining the Internet.
- We also have puzzles and Lego and a train set and a farmyard and a doll’s house and blah blah blah. I particularly like toys that allow open-ended play. My, my, don’t I sound knowledgeable? Hah. Whenever we get toys for her I try to make sure the boxes and catalogues are thrown away as soon as possible because they tend to be very gendered and I don’t want her to be thinking kitchen sets are for girls and train sets are for boys. I try to play truck games with her as enthusiastically as I do farm yards but I have to admit that I find trucks really boring. For Christmas this year we have included an interesting looking truck in her Santa stocking so maybe that will make me feel better about all her dolls.
- We’ve grown her hair long and it is beautiful but it takes a lot of brushing and tie-ing up to keep it clean and untangled. When I’ve found myself getting short with her for being unco-operative about this I’ve reminded myself that this has been our choice as parents, not hers, and our desire to see her with beautiful long hair shouldn’t hinder her. When she gets particularly difficult about having her hair brushed I’ve started offering a haircut to her and to our relief she declines.
- I really avoid princess stuff. I despise Disney princesses particularly and have quietly donated any Disney princess gifts she’s received to charity. I feel guilty about doing that because it seems ungrateful to gift-givers (though hopefully they never know), and also because why should little girls living in poverty be sentenced to this crap but I can’t stand waste. I take Rose’s point in her comment on this post here and I understand that princesses are very seductive to little girls and that there is possibly something good to be retrieved from them. And so this is my thinking, I will keep princesses at bay for as long as possible knowing that they are a force more powerful than me and that they will one day find their own way into our house. By that time, hopefully she will be at an age where I can talk to her about what I do and don’t like about princesses.
- I never ever allow any discussion in front of her about her body type, women’s body types, diets, body hatred, or fat in general, although recently I’ve been thinking about how to discuss fat and thin with her. I read this site to try and stimulate ideas for me from a political perspective. I still haven’t decided how I am going to talk about fat and thin with her. I’m extremely concerned about body image issues for girls. I talk lovingly about her body, but I more often than not comment on how strong she is or how long her reach is, and of course sometimes I talk about how much I love this foot or this tummy of hers and that I could just eat them up.
- I try and point out older girls doing active and rambunctious things, like skateboarding. Lately Lauca has become fascinated by weddings (probably to spite her parents because we’ve deliberately chosen not to get married) and so I’ve pointed out brides whenever we’ve seen them, too. I asked her if she would like to get married one day and if so whether she would choose a boy or a girl. The first time she chose a boy but since then she’s been choosing a girl, I hope one day there really is a choice for her.
- I don’t have commercial children’s TV on and I hate to say that because people’s uppityness about TV gets a bit annoying to me. One mother told me proudly that they don’t own a TV, don’t buy magazines or newspapers, and don’t have the Internet on, although they do listen to the radio. Each to their own, but I asked her how they found out about the news and she said if it is important enough someone will tell us. But much of the important news won’t reach you unless you search it out. World news and news that questions mainstream thought has to be sought out with some effort. And anyway you can’t be culture-jamming if you don’t know about the culture you’re trying to jam. So personally I’m in favour of TV, even junk TV. But having watched commercial children’s TV since becoming a mother I’m shocked. The intense consumerism and sexism feels like snorting a giant line of fuck-your-brain-up. One day my daughter will really, really, really want to watch some commercial children’s TV and when that day comes I intend to have us both ready for some critical thought. In the meantime I vet DVDs (and books) very closely for sexism and crappy values.
- We try not to value either girly or tom-boy behaviour over each other in her. We do a pretty good job teaching her how to pick up a caterpillar without hurting it, how to use a screw driver to install a hard drive (my god her father was pushed to the limits of his patience watching her wield a screw driver around his computer, I’ve never seen his eyes so wide and white), how to put hair-clips in her hair and how to mix up a cake. Her father is a lot better than me at role-modelling tasks as non-gendered; he is both the cake maker and the mechanic in our household. I was a little ashamed to hear Lauca tell my mother the other day that we should “wait for Daddy to get here because he fixes things, not Mummy”. Ouch, does she have to be so damned observant?
Reading this list I see that we come across as very indulgent with her; we buy a lot of necessary things shit. It is true, that’s my dirty secret, I have a way to go in beating my consumerist streak but much of what she has is second-hand or hand-me-down … oh, and some over-priced oh-so-educational stuff that I just fell in love with. And she is very good at entertaining herself for long periods of time with the right toys and you know that ability is considered holy in our household. We’re working on us living a simpler and more sustainable lifestyle and I’m reading those blogs of yours with your guilt-inducing inspiring stories of green living.
When I look at the disney princess stuff my biggest problem is that it tends to be so proscriptive… girls don’t, princesses don’t. These are girl colours. This is how you keep clean. Must. have to. Everyone else.
That I do have a BIG problem with…also the sneaky subtext of entitlement too. (I want…more stuff! I give the orders! I am more special than you!!)
you sound like a really balanced, committed parent to me. good intentions, flexibility and some inspirational ideas about extending play…
I buy a lot of shit too. Even though she’s inherited obscene amounts of stuff from her older siblings and my friend’a teenage children.. I buy stuff that fires my imagination. Fishtank foliage for fairyland. Secondhand tiny espresso cups and glass ramekins so I can have fun when I serve her meals. A miniature cauldron to put in a toy castle. I figure its money I’ve earned doing the crappiest of work and I want some pleasure in spending it.. sure its nice to have paid bills. But buying this stuff is nicer…
I buy a lot of stuff too. But I figure if I buy it for myself, it’s a bit hard to say no to my children. So I try and be consistent, at least, which means rarely saying no to books, and trying not to buy too much junky stuff (easier said than done).
Our dress up box for our two boys has fairy wings and witches dress ups as well as train drivers and pirates, but they do prefer to play with trains to dolls. In fact the doll behaviour you describe with your daughter was the kind of thing they used to do with their trains at the same age – acting out stories from their day with different characters.
Sorry, rambling comment, great post!
Thank you for hating Disney princesses. Sometimes I feel so alone.
My mother struggled so hard with these issues when my brother and I were little. She tells me that she wanted to padlock my brother’s nappy so that no one would know his gender and would therefore be forced to treat him as simply a little person.
She also strongly discouraged me from wearing pink and this backfired, naturally. However, she also spent a huge amount of time teaching me to question the gender roles bestowed on me or the characters in my books or television shows. I remember counting how many times a teacher would pay attention to a girl or a boy in my kindergarden classroom and going home to report to my mother than the boys received attention when they were ‘naughty’ and the girls received attention when they were ‘good’ and being asked how I thought that might influence them in the future.
I can only hope that I am half as good at helping Lily to deconstruct the world around her. I think that the world has actually become more restrictively gendered than it was in the seventies and early eighties, which is pretty sad.
Oh the Disney Princesses…the Disney anything! The character crap that surrounds kids is way overboard. I was in Babies R US and found cute clothes for her, but so much of it had Pooh or Elmo or Dora or someone else. I want Boo’s clothes and playthings to be character free as much as possible so that she can create her own experiences from her own imagination. Hard to do these days when everything is so specific to a character or movie or tv show. I worry about my ability to do this as she gets older, but I will try my best.
My neice received a crappy pink plastic castle as a birthday present (she’s 5) from her friends (they all put in) from her Montesorri school. How depressing is that?
She played with it a bit for a week. Now it’s in the garage. Her Bratz doll (from the Aunt Who Buys Kids Crap) lasted about a day before her mother disappeared it.
I packed away about half the kid’s toys the other day. He gets overwhelmed by the sheer number of options. I have also ditched any handmedown clothing that comes with commando motifs, they make me feel ill. I have tried to tell generous relatives that I don’t want (and the kid is freaked out by) noisy ‘musical’ crap, but they don’t listen. His favourite toys are a saucepan lid (hand-me-down from my Grandma), a measuring cup, and a wooden spoon.
There’s a discussion, rather long, on soulemama http://soulemama.typepad.com/ at the moment about wooden toys. Apart from the expensive German options, I’d also suggest craft markets as places to locate your local gentleman or lady hobbiest making good toys that aren’t so dear.
I want to teach him that when people tell him he can’t do something because it’s ‘girly’ or ‘totally gay’ that it’s probably not such a bad idea. My brother (and my partner) both got weird when my nephew was given a stroller and baby doll. Despite the fact that they hold and nuture real babies, and push strollers. They didn’t see any conflict there. We’ve got a long way to go.
eek. “Probably not such a bad idea” should be ‘not such a bad idea to do it anyway’. How I teach him to do that without getting beaten up is the question.
actually I’ve disappeared a few disney princess things .. though not for all the noble motives I see here.. I hate them because they are crappy, they feel nasty agaisnt skin and they are weirdly coloured… and when the sun hits them they smell evil. also the sight of my child tottering along on miniature red plastic high heels with fluffy blobs on top made me cringe.
I’d rather see the kids flitting around the garden in my mother’s old negligees from the sixties… then it looks like ‘play’… not this shrinky dink neatly fitting plastic extravaganza that restricts movement. Ugh.
I don’t like buying disney ‘character’ things..but that’s just a personal preference – and having been the poor relation in my family for so long, mostly i take what’s been given and say thankyou. So I’ve gratefully received some seventies disney sheets and a dorothy the dinosaur quilt cover. she loves them, they wash easily and since my house is decorated in ‘early chaos’, they don’t actually look terribly out of place.
Kate, the ‘weird and totally gay’ thing became a real problem for us once they hit school… I guess it depends on your community but in mine we hit a major wall of gender expectations and gendered toys. We tried to address it by cultivating an ‘at school’ life and an ‘at home’ life, which sort of worked for number two child, but number one child was just not ever going to fit in. Eventually I had to take her out of the school.
It was a baptism of fire. but she really is her own person now.
ah, yes, a feminist mom raising a daughter…sounds awfully familiar to me. the challenge, however, will be the day she discovers and gets mad at you for giving away a disney princess. then the feminist in you will have to determine: do i talk her out of it because they sicken me, or do we talk about the pros and cons of princess living in hopes that she will agree with me, or do i just let her have it because, being a feminist, i’m okay with women making their own choices.
serahrose: you can also hope like hell that because they are such badly designed toys she will get bored with them really quickly and move on.
rose: thanks for that idea. I guess I’m more concerned about high school, which is a long way off (we’re going to first birthdays at the moment!). Where we live now the schools are pretty good, but they’re not perfect. Some of my friends went to our local school and managed to be out and proud though, so I guess they are much less homophobic than others.
Serahrose: I think that a bit of both tends to work. I know that I was discouraged from owning those sorts of toys (barbies, cabbage patch dolls, etc) when I was little and came to think of them as a bit silly. I may have occasionally protested, but secretly I thought that my parents were right and that I was cooler than other girls for not falling for those trends/stereotypes.
maybe when she’s older you can show her old episodes of Australian Princess? as an insight into the complete silliness and inanity of princess life, it’s hard to beat. (then again, that show’s also a horrible reminder of our cultural cringe/inferiority complex, since the Aussie chicks all wind up having their innate egalitarianism manipulated out of them by the end of each series.)
about discussing concepts like ‘fat’ and ‘thin’, i have found it very awkward being continually confronted with “The Fat Controller” and “The Thin Controller” in the Thomas stories. i mean, i thought we were supposed to avoid potenial situations where they might start pointing out things like, “Mum, that lady’s fat” or whatever. out of all the character franchises, though, i’m glad my boy adores Thomas. in defence of my purchase of the branded stuff, he has picked up lots of useful science-related information from the shows. and the frequent building and rebuilding of his own railway system is creative, particularly as he tells little original stories as he plays.
i would’ve bought my boy a doll if he’d ever shown any interest in them, but if we pass through the pink aisle at K-Mart, he completely ignores the rows and rows of garish, alien-faced Barbies pinned to the shelves.
This post and these comments really intrigue me. I am so dedicated to finding out more about how other mothers are dealing with feminist motherhood in theory (I’m still reading and re-reading the ten questions you put up) and in practice, as you’re all describing here. I’m also intrigued by how many similarities there are between what you are doing with a girl, bluemilk, and what I am doing with two boys. Wow, so much to think about.
I was pleased to see so many other fem moms here seem to all agree that the Disney princesses are bogus.
Apparently, the boys aisle had boys ‘figures’ but on the other aisle sign, they called them girls ‘toys’–make of that what you will!
To glamorize these women who did little more than look pretty and wait to be rescued in fairytales, seems like a mistake in the long run.
What do they offer? Strength and wisdom or a passive attitude and burning desire for marriage? Lets not forget the little mermaid actually gave up her voice for a man…great!
The princesses are one facet and the Bratz and Barbies are another with their sexualized plastic bodies.
I was in the aisle at Superstore (you know, the PINK one) and seriously wanted to cry looking at all those damned pink & purple gender coded flowery boxes with micro-mini skirted hoochies looking back
All I know is that I ask family/friends not to give us hoochie dolls (makeup, skimpy clothes,etc) or princess things.
So far so good–I try to give my 4 year old daughter choices (she loves to wear pink but I also try to push other colors), but I know that if I push too hard she might rebel.
She even calls these dolls ‘gross’ now because of my initial reaction but I explain that I think these dolls either need to put more clothes on to be warmer or (in the princess case) just that being strong and smart is more important than being a decoration and just ‘looking pretty’–cross your fingers
Very beautifull colors! It made me read.
When My son was 18monthes, he loved pushing strollers. If I placed a doll in the stroller, he would throw it away. but he accepted putting a stufed monkeys. He is 4 years now, have a sister who loves dolls. he plays with her doll but will never stay more than a minute, while will play with a car for hours. My girl never played more than one minute with cars. Both of them will play cooking or eating for hours.
Advice: If your daghter wants to have a real baby, she should marry a real man
It’s really hard to keep princess and barbie stuff out of a child’s life completely. I have read all of the posts to-date and seen some of your struggles and worries, but as a substitute teacher, I have also seen the difficulties that children sometimes face in schools. Girls who bash the princesses get bashed in return, and they are excluded from play groups (often, even the ones who are not playing princesses) and although I step in and make peace for the moment (talking about differences and trying to redirect them with other activity suggestions) I know that I am only temporarily there to help. When I am not there the next day, what will they do? Personally, Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty bored me when I was a child because they didn’t do anything for themselves and were just your stereotypical dumb blondes, but with the hostile climate of some classrooms, I don’t think that ignoring the problem until it gets out of hand is an option. My suggestion (what my mom did with me) is to find the characters with good qualities and discuss them with your children. I know, it’s hard to find them, but they are there, I promise! For example, my favorite was the little mermaid. Why? Because she took matters into her own hands. She saved Eric 3 times in the movie (The ship, the wedding, and the sea witch) and he only saved her once. I think, given that she was only sixteen, she was pretty badass, and what’s more, she made her own decisions and made calculated risks to accomplish what she set out to do. Her friends were all boys, so there wasn’t as much of a girly vibe to the movie, and she was (I think) the most intelligent of the princesses. By deconstructing her character, we see that she isn’t just another damsel in distress waiting for the prince to save her, and she isn’t just another pretty face (even though that is what the media likes to focus on). By presenting the character in this way to your child, you can not only keep your values, but you can be sure that when she plays with the other girls and their dolls, she will be educating them as well. I hope this helps some of you.