Reading up on Gender-Neutral Parenting: It Started with the Clothes

I came home last night from the library with such good books, I didn't know what to start with. I ended up starting with Lise Eliot's Pink Brain, Blue Brain for the simple reason that the librarian had placed it on the top of the stack. I've read Dr. Eliot before, in her book, What's Going on in There? How the Brain and Mind Develop in the First Five Years which began my phase of geeking out with baby neuroscience books. I found What's Going on in There? fascinating, but also dense and a bit scholarly, which is why I tend to recommend Jill Stamm's Bright from the Start. It's more accessible and easier reading - especially when most your reading time is on your side while you nurse your newborn to sleep.

But in this pregnancy, as I've mentioned, I've spent much more time thinking about gender and gender neutral parenting. It started with the clothes, and me wanting to dress my unborn baby in red, and not in pastels as if my baby was actually an Easter egg. When my search for bright colored baby clothes became harder than I ever thought it would be, I started wondering why I felt like the only parent who wanted to dress their child outside of the pink-blue-last resort-yellow/green color scheme.

If only for the reason that I know the sex of our unborn child and my husband does not. It's an experiment on our part. My husband wants to be surprised. But I'm a planner and have nesting hormones taking my body hostage. Given that my son was born three weeks early and we were so unprepared, so that my husband had to run out for diapers early in my home birth labor, well, when second arrives on the scene I don't want to have to worry about clothes.


In my first pregnancy, we found out we were having a boy and between the two of us, we had four nephews and their hand-me-downs. Two of those four were twins. I can't tell you how many clothes we had. Or shoes. We didn't have to buy a thing.

And I'm realizing now, we were fortunate to have good hand-me-downs. Thankfully, my sisters-in-law feel the same way I do about not wanting footballs all over their baby boy's clothes. Most our hand-me-downs were greens, oranges, yellows, jeans, stripes, blues, reds and the like. Our hand-me-downs were covered in animals - yes, they were the kind of animals that if you met them in the jungle you'd be dead, but on baby pajamas they were cute. And they were clothes that would not be inappropriate on either sex (orange and white striped pants with a white t-shirt - that kind of thing).

Then one of my sisters got pregnant with a boy and my sister-in-law with the twins had a friend who was also having twin boys and we did what you do with hand-me-downs: we handed them down. We were also packing up our house for storage before we set out for our year abroad, so it didn't make sense to save a lot of baby stuff when we were paying for storage. I picked out my very favorite of my son's clothes - and ones that happened to be (I thought) gender neutral - and kept those. Essentially, I had a shoe box of baby clothes for our much desired second child.

And I thought it would be easy to replace them with equally free and fantastic hand-me-downs.

No such luck.

In the time since my son, or rather my nephews, were born, the clothes have changed. I got two bags of "gender-neutral" clothing off craigslist. We don't own a car, and in Brooklyn, if I go to the trouble of taking the subway over to someone's house to pick something up, I'm not going to change my mind about wanting to buy it or take it home once I get there. But when I got these bags home and opened them up? Essentially the mother had had a boy and a girl and shoved everything into the same pile. The boys clothes were camouflaged and covered in football helmets. And the girl's? I had never seen so many rosebuds, butterflies, or pink in my life. Seven and half months into pregnancy and my first bit of nausea came when looking at all that pink and all those footballs.

This will make me sound like a witch, but I hate football. I hate pink (except in small doses or next to colors like brown, black, grey, or navy.) Rosebuds and butterflies are fine - but outside where they belong.

Out of two bags of clothes I found two white onesies. I also snagged some awesome winter sleeper pajamas and white bunting that I actually love. Everything else went back into the bags to go back on craigslist.

I told my mom, my step-mom, and my mother-in-law, that I think the clothes are far more sexist than they were when I was a kid. I don't remember having my first pink dress until I was six. My three mothers agree and say that I am correct.

Indeed. Lise Eliot writes, "Unlike a generation ago, when parents actually worried about stereotyping their children, the new focus on nature seems to be encouraging parents to indulge in sex differences even more avidly...The more we parents hear about hard-wiring and biological programming, the less we bother tempering our pink or blue fantasies, and start attributing every skill or deficit to innate sex differences. Your son's a late talker? Don't worry, he's a boy. Your daughter is struggling with math? It's okay, she's very artistic."

Personally, I find this troubling. Maybe because I was raised by feminist leaning mothers, maybe because I went to college reading Gloria Steinem and Ms. magazine and Susan Faludi's Backlash without ever taking a Women's Studies class, but I'm constantly shocked by how sexist our society still is - and how even male friends of mine - seemingly enlightened and in some cases married to very strong women - still think nothing of referring to women as girls or talking about their bodies as if they were chickens to roast for dinner.  Given the disparity just in baby clothes and the current mode of socialization for kids being born today, I'm scared to think of the implications. You can buy heels and bikinis for three year old girls. Isn't that disturbing?

Eliot's writing again is fascinating -and a bit dense - (She does her research and she thinks things through) but well worth it. So far, I mean. I read the first fifty pages before passing out last night, but so far, I can tell it will be a book I refer to often, if only because she points out and demonstrates that while yes, there are differences in the sexes, but mostly, actually, we're the same. Biology-wise anyway. Everything else is essentially socialization. This makes it a book that I wish those giving us gifts would read, (I know this too makes me sound witch-y) if only so they knew where we were coming from.

This of course only increases my search for gender-neutral clothes. And I admit, it doesn't make me the most popular with my mother - who while she dressed my sister and me in reds, browns, greens, and blues is so peeved that I won't tell her the sex that she insists she isn't buying my child anything until it's born. When I say I want gender neutral clothing - even after the child is born - she tells me of the cutest rosebud outfit she found in Macy's. When I say I don't want rosebuds? She tells me how the woman she bought it for loved it. What do I tell her? Send the receipt.

My in-laws this last weekend indulged me, as we shopped for both children and I rummaged through the boy/girl racks at a consignment shop trying to find all the gender-neutral clothes. My father-in-law congratulated me on all the good deals I had found, but then said, he now agrees with my mother - nothing else until the child is born. Because apparently you can only buy so many gender neutral clothes.

I should tell them all what store clerks tell me, stay in the boys clothes. For whatever reason, the bright colors and safer things go there. Because God forbid someone dress their boy up as a rosebud.