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Comment by lexhaynes | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, young girls are heavily socialized to play with dolls, to play "mommy and baby" games, to push around toy baby carriages... in essence the "average" girl has been trained for motherhood her whole life.

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My partner is a girl! We had children together. She played with dolls, toy baby carriages AND mummy and baby games.

She had no idea how to bathe a baby safely, how to dress it, safely, how to hold it safely, how to play with it safely, how to clean its bum, how to put on a nappy, how to bottle feed it, how to breast feed it ....the list of things she didn't know was endless....

Neither did I.

We figured it out through a combination of trial and error ("oops, wet babies are slippery and easy to drop") parental advice and phamplets.

its not rocket science, its not easy and the "average" girl has NO insider information.

> and the "average" girl has NO insider information

Exactly. Before the baby was born, I took a (men only) course on fatherhood. It was both very funny as well as informational. Afterwards, I knew a lot more than my girlfriend. This helped me because I found out some women can get quite possessive (for lack of a better term). She'd still blurt out "I know best because I'm the mother", but I definitely wasn't ignorant anymore.

To be fair, playing with dolls and pushing around baby carriages offers extremely limited practical "training" for caring for an actual live baby.

But it still doesn't help people to actually know what to do.

If the parents can't figure out what to do, they shouldn't have had a kid. It's not rocket science. I've seen some of the dumbest people with tons of kids, still alive and kicking.

Thats a pretty big cliche.

The cliché is girls that are socialized that way. It's still overwhelmingly true that girls will have dolls more often than boys and that it will format their behavior.

Recognising that is not perpetuating or condoning it.

That also doesn't mean they have a clue on how to deal with an actual baby

Tell me the last time you saw a boy pushing a toy stroller. I see little girls pushing them every week -- starting before they are 2.

Just because things make you uncomfortable doesn't mean they are cliches.

Having worked in childcare / early childhood education, I've seen it a lot. Kids younger than about 5 or 6 don't care. The boys love to play dressup and the girls love the sandbox with the toy cars. As they get older some start to fall into stereotypical gender roles... and even then it's usually obvious that they're learning from / being indoctrinated by their parents. My use of the word indoctrinated is only to indicate that sometimes these gender roles are passively learned from the parents example, but in some cases there are parents that actively enforce / teach their kids to follow gender roles. For example, I've seen a father, on arriving to collect his son, react almost with horror to see the boy in a skirt playing in the mock kitchen.

Cliche is the wrong word. Gender roles in society are a topic that spans many disciplines and has a whole lot of detail to discuss. They are a huge thing, and you're right: the gender role assigned to girls does prescribe for them a lot of child rearing practice. That said, after seeing what some kids will do to a baby doll, I can confidently assert that such play is no substitute for actual instruction.

I completely agree with you, except on the younger than 5 or 6 don't care part. Maybe don't care as much, but studies suggest that gendered socialization starts occurring before 18 months. I think that this indoctrination is more common than people realize (and realizing that it's likely happened to you can be a hard pill to swallow). Especially in areas like mine, where most families are single income, it seems like the girls are always playing with dolls, strollers, ovens.

It makes me very sad.

But people will argue that it's innate until they're blue in the face, and use it as examples to 'prove' that our brains are sexed.

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