Next week my sweet baby boys will go to school for the first time. They are 4 and will attend our public school district's half day pre-k program. My one son, Lucas, is so very ready. He is incredibly social and is looking forward to making friends.
He is what one often thinks of when they think of boys. He loves to climb and jump off of things (even though he is afraid of heights). He loves trucks and construction equipment and Star Wars. We have however tried to not feed into too many gender stereotypes while raising our kids. We haven't been perfect and our home is mostly filled with toys that would traditionally be thought of for boys but we also have things like a toy kitchen, a teapot set, dolls and a Peppa pig dollhouse that our other son absolutely adores.
I can't say that it's because of this, but we are cautious not to tell our boys that certain toys and certain colors are for girls, so when asked what his favorite color is, Lucas might tell you "all the colors of the rainbow". He has pink and purple leopard print slippers that he picked out once and that he loves because they are "beautiful". He also has a couple of shirts with glitter or sequins that he found on a clearance rack after the 4th of July and that he loved because they were shiny. So it didn't surprise me when I stumbled across some backpacks online and he told me that he wanted the one with the butterfly. It was pink and purple and clearly made with girls in mind. It was also far too small to take to school and he already has a small backpack, but had I been in the market for buying one, I would have absolutely purchased him that backpack because pink is just a color and butterflies are beautiful.
My fear as Lucas heads off to pre-k is that he will express his love for all the colors and things that are beautiful and that it won't be long before another child will tell him that those things are for girls because that is what that child has been taught. Lucas is a child who has a strong will and personality but is also sweet, sensitive and easily influenced by others. I so desperately want to keep my children innocent for as long as possible. To spare them the judgment of others and the boxes that we are all too often placed into. Kids are so authentically themselves at 4 and I so want to preserve that in them so that they will grow into authentic adults, but we all know that kids are shaped by their peers, for better and for worse, and that we all raise our children differently, much in part based on how we ourselves were raised.
I know I can't shelter him from the boxes that society has built and that tell him what things are for boys and what things are for girls, but I do hope that I can continually remind him that it's okay to be who he is. That is it's okay to like all of the colors, it's okay to have emotions and express them. It's okay to cry and that he doesn't have to be "tough" because he's a boy. That it is okay to be authentically himself, a lesson I'm still trying to learn as an adult.
