One way to look at parenthood is as perpetual failure. Taking full responsibility for the upbringing and socialisation of another human from birth through to adulthood means that, at some point, you are going to find you’ve messed things up.
Don’t console yourself that cheap calories and modern medicine mean your children are vastly less likely to die than they would have been in previous generations. This simply opens new realms for you to screw up and feel terrible about.
This is not wisdom bequeathed to me via innate mothering skills coded in my double-X chromosomes – if I had any skills, I would have done everything better. I had to learn it by having two babies and getting everything wrong twice. One thing I particularly wanted to get right was giving my children a “gender-neutral” upbringing. There would be no stereotypes in my home, no hackneyed pink or blue in the nursery, no right or wrong way to be a girl or boy. Just becoming a person with your own personality.
This seemed like it was going to be a very successful project, until the nail polish incident, when my son, then aged about four, asked me to paint his nails. Why wouldn’t he? He watched me paint my own, enjoying the bright colours and quiet attention of the ritual. Why wouldn’t I do it for him? I believed that self-decoration had no sex, that nothing should be closed to him because of gender. But I drew the line there. I gave him one coat of clear polish and tried to ignore his disappointment. I was disappointed too, having fallen such a long way from my principles. The idea of letting him break the boy code in such a visible way, and sending him off to school where he might have been teased for it by other children, was too much to take. So I did the work of the prospective bullies before they could. That’s the trouble with “gender-neutral parenting” – the world gets in.
In her book Delusions of Gender, Cordelia Fine describes the lengths two married psychologists went to in giving their children a background free from stereotypes. It involved, among other things, studiously equalising household labour between Mum and Dad (in the real world, women do 60% more cooking, cleaning and childcare) and censoring children’s books to correct the rampant overrepresentation of male characters. Compared to this, my chickenfeed efforts were doomed.
For children, gender is everywhere. It starts before they’re out of the womb: on parenting forums, mums-to-be wonder whether a wriggly baby in utero means they’re having a boy (it does not, but stereotypes about male activity and female passivity run deep). It’s in the clothes they’re dressed in, which influence the way adults treat them. It’s in the TV they watch, because sometimes you just need to put them in the bouncer and have a break from singing Wind the Bobbin Up, even if it does mean leaving them to Paw Patrol and the lesson that girls make up one-sixth of the population, never give orders and only wear pink.
And it matters. Nail polish is just nail polish, CBeebies is just CBeebies, and a “pretty like mummy” T-shirt is just a T-shirt – but it adds up to a rigorous training in how to be a girl or boy, which turns into strictly held ideas about how to be a woman or man. According to polling for the Fawcett Society to support its newly announced commission on gender stereotyping in early childhood (for which I’m a commissioner), more than half of those who recognised gender stereotyping had affected them said it constrained their career choices, while 44% said it had harmed their personal relationships.
We don’t know how much gender differences in behaviour are innate and how much they’re learned but we do know that much of what we think of as essential is thoroughly cultural. In some societies, women are deemed the chatty sex; in others, men. In some eras, male flamboyance has been the height of masculinity, while other periods have deemed it effete and shameful.
Whatever the shifting rules, they’re inextricably bound to social power and sexism. The stereotypes we absorb as children shape the adults we become. I failed at gender-neutral parenting, but any individual – or even family – alone must fail. The Fawcett Commission report is a chance for all participants to get it right. If we want to create a fairer world for women and men, we need to start with girls and boys.
• Sarah Ditum is a writer on politics and culture
