Boys and Girls at Play

Posted by Eric (March 28, 2007 at 8:29 pm)

Here is a photo of a block tower I made with my son Nate. Nate is 14 and, some might say, too old to play with blocks. But I am 40 and not too old to play with blocks—or perhaps I am too old not to play with blocks. In any case, getting to play with blocks at 40 is one of the benefits of being a father, and getting to play with blocks at 14 is one of the benefits of having a father who loves to play with blocks.

I share this photo because I want to talk about boys and girls and how they play, but I have to get there by way of a visit to the obstetrician’s office yesterday afternoon.

My wife April and I are expecting our eighth baby in May, and for the first time we are going though a more or less “typical” prenatal care routine. Our previous seven babies were either born at home with a doctor or midwife, or were delivered in the hospital because of complications that disrupted our homebirth plans.

Our midwife (for Nate, Sam and Liza) was, needless to say, rather countercultural, as was, in a different way, our devout Catholic homebirth doctor. This is our first time visiting a typical doctors office for prenatal visits—a situation demanded by April’s two C-sections and our desire for a natural birth, which at this point needs to happen in a hospital.

Two things are starkly different about this new experience: the ubiquitousness of contraception propaganda materials (little IUD models in the exam rooms; a “Woman’s Health Chart” printed by Ortho Tri-Cyclen, etc.) and the glossy parenting and women’s magazines in the waiting room. (Our Catholic doctor had Highlights and CCL‘s Family Foundations and a whole mess of tattered Golden Books in his waiting room.)

At yesterday’s visit, I was treated to an article in Jane magazine about one woman’s quest to get the Catholic Church to ordain women as priests—which in its irreverence and vulgarity made the case against such a move, were it even ontologically possible.

I also found a strange piece in a parenting magazine for working mothers (I forget the title) about kids who suddenly declare their intention to marry the opposite-sex parent. Though we’ve never encountered this phenomenon, it is apparently quite common (interestingly no mention was made of any toddler proposing marriage to the same-sex parent—hmm . . .). Working mom’s were assured by the article that their child’s sudden extreme attachment has nothing to do with the fact that they’re working.

In a sidebar to the article several suggestions were offered about how to break gender stereotypes with your kids. Moms can bake a cake with their sons; dads can play house with their daughters. Or something like that.

These silliness of these suggestions reminded me of a scene this past weekend when we visited some friends with four grown daughters living at home. Their youngest is a boy, near in age to our boys, so they were well occupied throwing things in the lake, setting fires and what-not.

My girls, however, had to entertain themselves, and after a while they began to run out of steam. Then one of the grown daughters of our host brought out a box of dolls and doll things. My four younger daughters were immediately enraptured, and they were joined by their older sister when she came through the room later. They were busy with the dolls for hours.

I marveled that girls could be so fascinated with dolls. I just don’t get it. It’s plain as day that they love to play with dolls, but for the life of me I just don’t see the appeal. However, if someone had come in and dumped a box of Legos on the floor I would have been tempted to join in the play. At the very least I would have grabbed a handful of bricks to tinker around with while talking with the grown ups.

Every parent—every parent, anyway, who is not bent on indoctrinating the gender neutral ideology (“madness” might be a better word) subtly promoted by that parenting magazine in the doctor’s office—knows that boys and girls are different and like to play in different ways.

Girls will always love to play with dolls, and even if you give them a pile of Legos, they’ll quickly shape them into little people and begin to play house with them. Set boys loose with a box of dolls and soon the helpless homunculi will become the victims of target practice with sling-shots, or worse.

Try to prevent a boy from playing with guns by depriving him of toy ones, and he will learn to pretend that every baseball bat, crayon or gnarled twig is a firearm—or he will make them out of Legos.

I have never heard of anyone trying to prevent a girl from playing with dolls by prohibiting them, but girls have an wondrous capacity for making dolls out of the unlikeliest material. The dust of the earth ain’t in it. One of my sisters used to cuddle Baby Can—a large aluminum can shorn of its label which, thanks to the cruelty of one of her brothers, was revealed to contain yams. This same sister also used to sing lullabies to Baby Tractor, lain down on a pillow and gently covered with a baby blanket.

Here at the right is a photo of the dolls belonging to three of my daughers, as I found them one night when I went in to check on them. There they were, lined up against the wall nestled into three little beds. I fetched my camera to capture this cuteness.

For while I don’t begin to understand little girls’ fascination with dolls, I am all the same fascinated by that fascination, and the opportunity afforded to me as the father of five daughters to bask in that fascination is indeed one of the great gifts of my life.

That, it seems to me, is the way a father ought to relate to his daughters play—not to attempt to re-engineer it (by the way, a distinctly masculine notion to begin with), but simply to appreciate and enjoy it for what it naturally is.

And that is, come to think of it, the proper orientation to everything.

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