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Google Shopping ads rely on the product category code to decide what the product is - and therefore who should see the product and how much the merchant is going to pay Google to place an ad for it in front of that person.

If the code for the product we are selling is not available, there is no way for us to explain what the product is and who should be seeing the ad. This wastes our money by putting ads in front of people who don't need to see them. And it keeps us from getting seen by the people who do want to find us.

So, as I was assigning product category codes to our Princess Awesome products, I found out right away that we were going to have trouble running ads. I could not tell Google specifically what we were selling because the correct categories for our products do not exist within their schema.

All this rebellion comes from pushing limits and learning the “why” of things. Parenting children through learning the reasons behind the rules can be emotionally, physically, and intellectually draining. But it can also be inspiring - because occasionally our little rebels discover rules that really do need to be broken.

Pink has now become so strongly identified with femininity and in particular, being a girl, that to select something in pink is symbolic of identifying as a girl. It means that a child looking at the two shields isn’t seeing just a pink shield and just a red one, and choosing the color they’d rather have. It means that the child is saying “I’m a girl and I like this shield” or “I’m not a girl and I like this shield.”

It’s hard to dissuade her of other conclusions that she’s drawn - she’s already figured out that pink means “for girls.” This is confusing to her because she and her brothers play with dolls and tea sets and other things that come in pink boxes, so she doesn’t seem to think that the actual toys are limited to girls. There are always girls and boys in the non-pink aisles. But observational data to the contrary about the pink aisle is weak. I’m struggling with all four kids to get them to see beyond pink - which brings me to the worst offender of all...

My daughter is a little obsessed with pandas.

For her birthday last year, I bought her a toy panda family - parents and four kids. They came sweetly dressed in classic Victorian-era clothes.

The first thing my daughter did was take the clothes off the pandas. I suppose that makes sense, since, as we all know, Animals Should Definitely Not Wear Clothing. Tiny as they are, the clothes were promptly lost to the Charybdis that is the toy chaos of my basement. So the pandas went for months and months without any clothes and we just played with them au naturel.

With their clothes lost, we couldn’t tell Mommy Panda or Daddy Panda apart - they’re identical without clothes on. Same thing for Sister and Brother Pandas. That meant that all of their activities and roles were perfectly equalized, since the characters could stand in for each other with no perceivable difference.

When adults speak to children, unless they are fairly well-acquainted, they tend to look for clues to the child’s interests on their clothing. How many times have I said to little boys, “Wow! A dinosaur shirt! You must like dinosaurs”? But I don’t often say that to girls. Why? Because very few items of girls’ clothing feature dinosaurs - or pretty much anything else other than flowers and cute animals.

But now we have collected anecdotal data about the kinds of conversations adults have with girls who are wearing Princess Awesome dresses. They're different: 

If you are raising your daughter to be an independent, confident woman, chances are you’ve given thought to the clothes she wears - how to reconcile your feminist values with what stores are offering, much of which promotes a traditional view of girlhood. It makes helping girls learn to dress themselves a tricky and often daunting undertaking.  

On top of what we want our daughters to wear, there’s the equally important consideration of what they want to wear. Before my daughter was born, I swore I would never buy her anything pink. My daughter’s favorite color now? Pink.  A friend of mine was excited to have a girl to dress up in twirly dresses and lacy headbands. At age 2, her daughter is already completely uninterested in anything remotely “girly.”

So how do you clothe a budding feminist? Start with these five principles.

I was shopping at the Value Village one afternoon when my son picked up a baby doll and started carrying it around. I bought it for him, thinking it would be fun and possibly even helpful to have him play with it before his sister arrived a few months later.

Ha.

The doll spent the next 15 months as a bludgeon. Picked up by one foot, whirled around a few times, and then brought down solidly on the head of one’s brother, it was a far better weapon than most other toys - hard enough to produce a solid whack, but too soft to cause actual harm. I finally hid it in the stuffed animals the day it went flying through the air and nearly took out a lamp.

Last week was the first time my daughter’s new Cars Busy Dress went through the wash. I was in my sons’ room putting their laundry away. The Busy Dress was near the bottom of the basket underneath their clothes. I was about to walk out of their room to go to hers when my eye caught sight of the car. Instinctively, I reached in the basket and pulled the dress out, all ready to put it away in my sons’ dresser - because it was blue and had a car on it.

What the...what?? What just happened? I helped MAKE that dress, and I made the mistake of assuming that because it was blue with cars, it belonged in my sons’ room.

Halloween is coming, and it’s got me thinking.

I’d like to conduct a thought experiment. Will you play along for a minute?

Imagine that there is a new superhero in popular culture that is all the rage.

Imagine this superhero is male and wears a spandex suit of green and a shimmering cape of gold.

Over the next few weeks, while our Kickstarter is running, we'll be featuring guest posts and interviews with a variety of women around a variety of topics related to Princess Awesome.

Courtney Hartman has truly created an inspiring company in Jessy and Jack.  Based in Seattle, Washington, Jessy and Jack is dedicated to making this world a better place for children.  Their absolutely adorable designs breathe life into a child's wardrobe with vibrant colors and happy characters - like my kids' favorite, Emily and Ernie (moose and dog!). Jessy and Jack uses 100% cotton and water-based inks, affirming a commitment to caring for the environment our children will inherit. The company gives back by donating a basic t-shirt to charity each time they make a sale.