How Dare They Tell Me I Cannot Be A Princess?

When our daughter was young, I was the stay-at-home parent, taking on the stereotypically female roles of cooking, house keeping, and grocery shopping, while also engaging in such stereotypically male things as yard work, building things with power tools, and being a sports fan. Having been educated as a behaviorist, I simply assumed that my daughter, raised in this way, with parents assuming non-traditional roles, would grow up without having internalized many of the gender role ideas of former generations. In fact, I was quite confident she was more likely to be what we used to call a "tomboy" than anything else. I strived to make sure she had both cars and dolls, avoiding such extremities as Barbies. On a day-to-day basis I tried to keep her attire gender neutral and, in fact, took it as a sort of compliment when strangers admired my "little boy."

Upstairs in our loft, girls were playing castle, surrounding themselves with dolls, stuffed animals and purses. When I asked them if I could play I was told I would have to be a prince or a king.

Before she was 3-years-old she had rejected her overalls, telling me firmly, "Girls wear dresses." When I pressed her about it, pointing out that, in fact, the majority of girls and women in our lives wore pants, she simply said, "You're a boy. You don't know about girls." Before long she began agitating for long hair, while adding crowns and tiaras to her daily repertoire, something she only gave up when she hit kindergarten in her K-12 school where dresses (and tiaras) weren't the style of the older girls, and therefore not the style of the younger, although long hair remains the standard.

I don't know if I failed her or not in all of this, but she is still "all girl" on the outside. That's where the stereotypical girl ends, however: this young woman, from this father's perspective, is a complex, one-of-a-kind human being who seems to feel free to embrace and reject gender roles, at least those of which she is aware (there always remains the issue of the gender roles to which we all unconsciously adhere). She doesn't seem to feel trapped by them, which, I think is the lion's share of the goal.

Under the loft, a pair of boys, pretended to be plumbers, repairing damaged pipes.

As a teacher, then, I see this same pattern coming at me in waves year-after-year, as the 2-year-old girls adopt the frilly dresses, while the boys don the yellow construction-worker helmets. As for me, I horse around with gender roles, pretending to be a princess or joining a game as the mommy, but the kids aren't buying it, laughing at me or sometimes even angrily telling me, "You can't be a girl, you're a boy." Some even command me to "stop!" as if the whole idea is too unsettling to contemplate.

And here I am a big, mature adult who thinks he knows himself, who can even predict how the children will react, yet who still feels a pang of rebellion, a flash of anger, each time the children tell me what I can and cannot do. How dare they tell me that I cannot be a princess?

I know I always open myself up when I write about gender. The last time I did the words "chauvinistic" and "misogynistic" were thrown back at me. But, you know, it's an unavoidable subject when you're a preschool teacher engaged in a reflective practice. I suppose some people read what I write and feel like I'm trying to tell them or their daughters or sons what to do based upon their gender. Believe me, I understand; I don't like that any more than you do.

Tomorrow I plan to write about gender again, this time about some new developments regarding boys and guns.

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