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 Panda Family in their $18 Value Village Victorian mansion, currently undergoing electrical renovations.
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.
Same family, no clothes. Well, they are animals after all.
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.
Pandas doing All The Things.
On the other hand, the baby twins were easy to tell apart, because they’re posed differently. I didn’t think it mattered, until I noticed that Baby Boy Panda kept getting into a lot more trouble than his twin. The boy twin is posed in a crawling position, while the girl is sitting still. Naturally, the mobile twin ended up in story lines that involved crawling up to the top of the fridge, or out of the tub, or around the car - he was an active character. The girl twin instead would sit quietly in her high chair, in her crib, in her stroller, etc - a passive character. Pretend play with these two toys just naturally evolved that way, because that is how the characters are depicted. Boy = motion; girl = not in motion.
Family music night. Baby Boy Panda is crawling off, while the girl sits sweetly in her swing.
But I digress. This is a blog post about clothing.
The other day I was cleaning out the basement and I found all the panda clothes. I brought them upstairs and we dressed the pandas up again. But something was different. Now, Mommy and Sister Panda had a harder time participating in all the activities that they had always done - their clothes weren’t appropriate for hiking or swimming, or even playing at the playground.
The proper attire for tea time.
Brother and Daddy could still do all the active things - they were wearing pants and shirts. But the females’ long dresses restricted their movement. More to the point - they restricted my imagination, and the kinds of situations I could create for them. The clothes changed my perception of their abilities.
Sister Panda probably shouldn’t get that fancy dress dirty in the sandbox.
And it wasn’t just the type of clothing the pandas were now wearing. As an adult, I recognize that I’ve been socialized to associate pink with girls and blue with boys. But I hadn’t realized that my kids had also developed those same deeply ingrained associations. Then, for her third birthday, my daughter received some additional baby panda clothes, which fit both of the twins. She put Baby Girl Panda in blue overalls and Baby Boy Panda in a white layette set.
Baby Girl on the left. Baby Boy here on the right in the stroller, with Sister Panda standing behind.
This is what happened next:
My daughter finally solved the problem by taking the clothes off the pandas, telling her brother - firmly, again - which panda was which. I watched as my son, seeing them without their clothes on, realized that his sister was right - he recognized which was which by their shape and not by the color of their clothes. He even said, “Oh yeah, that’s right. I forgot that Baby Girl Panda sits up.”
Two boys? Nope, boy and girl.
The takeaway from our panda dress-up experience is that clothing matters. It provides signals not just about gender, but about ability, interests, wealth, status, cultural background, taste, personality - in other words, clothes do a lot of the talking for us - even in imaginary situations!
We can say that it’s the inner person who matters, regardless of what we wear. That is of course true, but it’s both naive and facile to say that it doesn’t matter what we wear. And that is why having choices when it comes to clothing is important. We know that it’s important enough that there are charities dedicated to helping people dress appropriately so that they can secure a job.
The source of all the trouble. Solution for pandas? Take the clothes off. Solution for real life children? Give them clothing options that allow them to express themselves as the unique human beings they are.
If the clothing worn by genderless toy pandas can immediately affect my perception of them, so much more so the clothing on our unique, developing children. Here at Princess Awesome, we strive to create clothing options that speak to the personal style and interests of girls who like skirts and twirling but who also are interested in dinosaurs, adventure, science, and math. And we’ve learned that it’s important - not only so that girls can express themselves uniquely, but so that other people can more accurately perceive who that girl wants to be seen as.
9 Responses
Carissa
This is the first comment I’ve ever made on a blog… I read a lot of various mommy posts to find solace most of the time. I have a (nearly) three year old boy. I never found out the gender when I was pregnant, and so he ended up with both girl and boy clothes. Up until 18 months when everything became too small, he would wear whatever was cute and comfortable… and because I couldn’t bear to cut his wispy curls, a lot of people thought he was a girl while we were out and about. Now that he is older, and is very opinionated about what he likes to wear, I let him choose. We have a We Rock the Spectrum close to our house, which is great fun and has a lot of dress up clothing. The first time he ever tried dress up, he chose a Sophia the First purple dress, and asked me to put it on him. I did. He had fun twirling and spinning, then realized that he couldn’t crawl around or hop on his knees on the ground so he got up and spun some more. The first time I actually took him to buy shoes, he chose two pairs of Minnie Mouse, and one pair of Thomas the Tank Engine to try on… I asked him which were most comfortable, and based on that, not the lights or characters, he chose the Thomas shoes. I was ready to get the Minnie ones though because he loves Mickey and Minnie (and the Minnie ones lit up). At this young age, children don’t understand gender in the way adults do. I wish they made more neutral clothing available here in the US. I do get frustrated when I go shopping with him for something and find tons of girl stuff and only one or two options for boys…. my son loves stars and the moon… how many leggings do they have out there with stars all over it and nothing but an astronaut or spaceship T-shirt for boys? But the fact is this company has a specific purpose…. to bring more versatile options to girls. And I respect that! Heck, I wish they made more mommy gear… I would like to look dressy but have the accessibility of pockets in more of my skirts. I got stopped in the street during a vacation in Seattle while I was walking with my hands in my one pocketed skirt, with a girl exclaiming,“OMG, your skirt has pockets!!!! Where can I find one!?” The pockets were large enough to hold my large smart phone, a snack for my toddler, and some random treasures the little guy found during our day. Kudos to you, and trying to close that gender gap…. (oh yeah… TRY to find a boy baby doll out there that isn’t over $50…. or at least clothes for one. Premie clothes were even too big, I tried)
Erin Reilly-Sanders
I liked that this post touched on a lot of my concerns with gendered activities and clothes. Some of my friends and family members don’t seem to get the importance of these little things which makes it really nice to know that I’m not alone. My particular current pet peeve is that the majority of characters in books, stories, and on TV seem to be male. In response, I do a lot of gender reassignments when we read- after all, half of the people and animals out there are female, right? (with the exception of cows, chickens, and (eusocial) bees, at least the ones outside the hive, which are all female) I have generally have complaints with clothing that is aimed exclusively at either gender. When my daughter was a baby we typically chose male-gendered clothing because of the bright colors and cute (non-lipsticked) animals. Unfortunately as she got older we found that boy clothes tended to be drab and boring, without the extra bits of design that made girl clothing interesting. Now we generally go for things from the girls section on the more non-gendered side but we also have a bit of everything. Not sure where I was going with this ramble but gender can be limiting to all children so I’m happy when we can start taking close, critical examinations of how gender roles pop up in aspects of our world.
Valerie
Sarah,
You could put your boy in the girl clothes. :)
Megan
The other commenters need to realize this article isn’t pitting boys against girls as to who has it harder to find clothes that correctly reflect our abilities and personalities as human beings. All genders struggle, and as a society we must work together to break down stereotypes associated with what we wear and focus more on WHO we are.
Al
Sarah – I think what you are highlighting is how misogyny and sexism hurts ALL of us. Toxic masculinity defines “manhood” and “maleness” so narrowly that despite situating males above females it limits both men AND women, as well boys AND girls…
Barb
Your SON is marginalized and ignored?? Our society is too focused on girls?? LOL! I wish we lived in a world were we were “too focused on girls achieving their dreams”.
Sarah Higgins
I appreciate the point being made, but this is once again a company that is focused on letting girls ‘express themselves’ while boys continue to be marginalized and ignored. When my son was 9 months old I searched for a holiday outfit for him. I found hundreds of dresses for girls his age, but I struggled mightily to find even ONE dressy outfit for him for Christmas. Target sold boy and girl elf outfits that year- the girl outfit was tunic, leggings, and a hat, whereas the boys outfit was a printed t-shirt – that was the entirety of the offering for boys because after all why should boys have fun clothing that allows them to show personality. When my child was 2 I wanted to find him a Halloween shirt at Gymboree. I literally had to search for over an hour to find a shirt that did not have a skull, skeleton or monster on it. As I searched I took inventory and found that that they had 26 shirts (yes 26) for girls none of which had a monster, a skull, or a skeleton. Our society is so focused on helping girls to achieve their dreams that they forget boys have dreams too and marginalizing them to promote girls is unfair to boys.
Christine
Loved this.
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