So, as you may know by now, I have a four-year-old. He goes to childcare two days a week, but otherwise my husband and I mind him at home.
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Replying to @fozmeadows
He's very good at socialising with adults, but (as yet) struggles a bit when socialising with other kids - we're working on it, but:
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Replying to @fozmeadows
One consequence of this seems to be that, even hanging out with other kids, he doesn't seem to have picked up on social gendercoding.
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Replying to @fozmeadows
At home, he has the option of watching Netflix on an old iPad - he gets to pick his own shows, and gendercoding has never influenced him.
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Replying to @fozmeadows
He'll happily watch My Little Pony or various other girlcoded shows as well as a whole range of boycoded or neutral stuff, no problem.
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Replying to @fozmeadows
He's never veered away from pink or especially gravitated towards blue: all the colours are represented in his clothing & toy selections.
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Replying to @fozmeadows
Which means, in combo with his obliviousness to seeing/hearing that stuff perpetuated by other kids, that he doesn't parse TV gendercoding.
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Replying to @fozmeadows
One of his fave shows right now is the Angry Birds cartoon series, which, like Pingu, has no dialogue beyond noises. Gender is visual only.
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Replying to @fozmeadows
So whenever he sees this purple queen bird, who the internet tells me is called Gale, he just thinks it's a boy.pic.twitter.com/OnFyhNBguq
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Replying to @fozmeadows
By the same token, he'll often refer to the blue or red or black birds as girls - it varies from time to time. But I absolutely love it.
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Because the show has no dialogue! There's literally no reason why the purple bird can't be a boy or the red bird a girl bar gendercoding.
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Replying to @fozmeadows
And while I'm sure that, at some point, he'll start absorbing some of the dominant view, the point is that it's demonstrably not innate.
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Replying to @fozmeadows
Right now his idea of "what boys can wear" includes purple, pink, sparkly tiaras, winged eyeliner and capes, because why wouldn't it?
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