Caroline's 2nd Critical Resource

Young children are highly influenced by the environment around them. Therefore, if your goal as a parent is to raise your child in a way that they can create their own gender identity overtime, the design of your child’s environment is crucial. An empowered child, given tools and accessible functionality in their bedroom, can express their gender in their own mental dimension when and how they choose. Simply stated, the child’s ability to navigate the room successfully is crucial to their development. For An-Lon Chen, a mother of a three year old girl, empowerment was more important than a color scheme for her daughter’s nursery. “Gender nonbinary nursery design means understanding that a child foremost wants to master her environment, and tools like step stools, faucet adapters, and railings encourage that development.” (Citation) If a child feels confident in using the different parts of their bedroom, then they can feel a mastery of it, which leads to a confident sense of self which can be associated with a gender, whatever that may be.

As Michael Tortorello states in his article, research has shown that children who lived in gender-themed bedrooms expressed more traditional views of gender. In a similar study in 2008, in the behavioral science journal Sex Roles, pictures of young children’s bedrooms were shown to untrained college students, who were asked to guess the child’s gender. 90 percent of the time, the college students guessed correctly (Tortorello). This data suggests that a child growing up in a pink, feminine-designed room would be very likely to identify as a female, and have more binary views of gender. If the goal is to avoid this binary view of gender, then the parents should steer away from gender stereotypical decorations and colors.

While those who oppose the idea of gender neutrality in a child’s environment will say that a newborn doesn’t infer anything from the fire truck pattern on the crib bumper, young children pick up cues from the toys they’re given, the words they hear, the books they read and the behaviors they encounter on the playground..This means that a girl growing up in a pink, fairy themed bedroom may look at her brother’s dark blue, utility vehicle themed bedroom as “boy-ish.” She will likely begin to associate trucks and cars with boys, while associating pink dresses and fairies with herself and other girls. “Children don’t begin to categorize their gender until the age of 2 or 3,” says Harriet Tenebaum, who studies gender identity at University of Surrey in England (Tortorello). She says that children do begin to associate hair length with gender around that age.

In conclusion, there are many environmental factors at an early age that influence a child’s perception of gender. Therefore, raising children in a gender neutral environment that doesn’t impose gender stereotypes allows a child to grow into their own idea of self when it comes to their gender. When children are given the ability to develop their own sense of gender, they are more likely to be empathetic towards individuals who don’t identify as female or male, and are more likely to not be confined by gender stereotypes, expressed via clothing styles and adult occupations.

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Tortorello, M. (2019, March 07). How to Raise a Child Without Imposing Gender. Retrieved October 31, 2020, from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/07/style/gender-neutral-design-child.html?action=click

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/07/style/gender-neutral-design-child.html?action=click&module=RelatedCoverage&pgtype=Article&region=Footer&login=smartlock&auth=login-smartlock