This morning I was pretty disappointed, sadly not surprised, to read the TV show 'Family Feud' thought it appropriate to label particular types of jobs as male or female. Female jobs (according to survey questions posed to 100 Australians) included cooking, cleaning etc. You get the picture. While the answers are obviously disappointing, it is more outrageous that the questions were asked in the first place.
Having spent the last few years at work promoting women in engineering and women in leadership, I may be hyper-alert to gender stereotypes. However, it doesn't take an expert to realise that exposure to these stereotypes starts at birth. Girl babies are marked pink, boy babies are marked blue.
Right from day one with my daughter I committed to minimising the pink in her life. We hadn't found out the gender so everything we had before her arrival was unisex. However, as soon as the 'New Baby Girl' cards started arriving, I realised I had my work cut out. Everything was pink. Everything! It's not that I don't like pink. I do. I just also like green and blue and yellow and I don't think it's necessary for a girl to be labelled a girl by putting her in pink all the time.
As I was reading about this Family Feud debacle, J was playing with her gears toy. I was feeling pretty proud, thinking she was bucking the stereotype - doing some science. Right on cue she looks up and says, "Mummy, I need help putting in the yellow flower". So she calls the cogs flowers. That's ok, they do look like flowers. I hope the boys call them flowers when they grow up too.
Thank goodness school holidays are over. The last two weeks have seen our usually serene and quiet parks tormented by older children running and screaming and scooting and doing all normal things that you would expect of school age children. This is great for them but kind of stressful for the rest of us.
It's not just that the parks are super busy and the little ones get pushed around and miss out on their turn - it is the unforeseen influence the older children have. My daugher, like most toddlers, is a copier. She watches, she learns, she attempts. This school holidays has therefore turned out to be extremely hazardous for her. When she sees someone climb across the top of the money bars, she thinks she can do it too. When she sees someone climb on top of the tunnel which is already three metres high, she thinks she can do it too. I try really hard not to discourage but some things are just ridiculous. She has never had as many accidents as the last two weeks. Of course she is fine. She's probably even all the better for this new found sense of adventure, but she is looking a little worse for wear with bruises and scratches from head to toe and I'm pretty sure I am looking more haggered than ever.
