Starting in the toddler years, children will start to identify themselves as a little boy or a little girl. As children grow up, we just blindly accept these gender roles, as they become part our lives. Society seems to simply accept these gender roles that coincide with the sex of children, but people never ask why? The activities that children participate in, the media that children see and the influences of parents and particular cultures contribute to our definition of gender. Children are given these activities such as playing a sport for boys or dressing up as a princess for girls to teach them about our gender roles. But later in life we don’t see adult males and adult women needing to conform to these stereotypes. As children move into
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Almost all boys from an early age start to play t-ball, soccer, football, and basketball and sports becomes a way for them to make friends. Katherine Pollitt explores the social implication of sports and dolls in her essay “Why Boys Don’t Play With Dolls”. She asks the question of mothers, “That if their sons wanted to spend the weekend writing up their diaries, or reading, or baking, they’d find it disturbing? Too antisocial?” (556). The mere thought of their sons wanting to do some non-masculine activity is “disturbing” to mothers and parents as a whole. Gender and how children identify themselves can now be reduced to sports vs. dolls instead of looking at the whole interests of a person. It has become a slightly easier for some girls and boys to break these typical gender roles. Girls participating and excelling in sports have become more normalized and it can be a bonding moment for fathers and daughters. One contemporary example of a girl who broke this stereotype was Mo’Ne Davis, who played for the Tawney Little League Baseball Team in the World Series this summer. Mo’Ne was a pitcher for the baseball team and she was widely accepted by her hometown of Philadelphia and the rest of the country. She became a sensation and definitely broke the gender stereotype of girls not being able to play baseball. Looking ahead to the future, will children be more inclined to be like Mo’Ne Davis and participate in sports for both boys and girls or will society keep it’s same gender
Almost all boys from an early age start to play t-ball, soccer, football, and basketball and sports becomes a way for them to make friends. Katherine Pollitt explores the social implication of sports and dolls in her essay “Why Boys Don’t Play With Dolls”. She asks the question of mothers, “That if their sons wanted to spend the weekend writing up their diaries, or reading, or baking, they’d find it disturbing? Too antisocial?” (556). The mere thought of their sons wanting to do some non-masculine activity is “disturbing” to mothers and parents as a whole. Gender and how children identify themselves can now be reduced to sports vs. dolls instead of looking at the whole interests of a person. It has become a slightly easier for some girls and boys to break these typical gender roles. Girls participating and excelling in sports have become more normalized and it can be a bonding moment for fathers and daughters. One contemporary example of a girl who broke this stereotype was Mo’Ne Davis, who played for the Tawney Little League Baseball Team in the World Series this summer. Mo’Ne was a pitcher for the baseball team and she was widely accepted by her hometown of Philadelphia and the rest of the country. She became a sensation and definitely broke the gender stereotype of girls not being able to play baseball. Looking ahead to the future, will children be more inclined to be like Mo’Ne Davis and participate in sports for both boys and girls or will society keep it’s same gender