“Look mom, Kabir is pretending to be a mommy”, my then four-year old daughter pointed enthusiastically at her year-old brother, who lovingly pushed a doll stroller around the living room. He had carefully placed a toy baby in.

My first reaction: overwhelming love and my second: correcting my daughter. I told Mehar that little Kabir wasn’t pretending to be a mommy but to be a loving daddy. I reminded her how her own father plays that role. In short, age-appropriate words, I said: “Mommies and daddies both care for their children”.

She nodded. And let out another cry of joy as she saw Kabir pick up the “baby” and plant a kiss on its plastic cheek. “Look mommy, Kabir is kissing the baby just like daddy kisses me.”

I let out a sigh of relief. As any parent can relate, it is a constant battle to “correct” children. It is a struggle to maintain a balance between overly correcting them and ignoring their actions. Apart from a general world consensus on teaching kids the basic courtesies, there is a debate and a book on how to approach every other topic.

But teaching gender equality (read pink and blue) doesn’t require a debate. There are no “girl things” and “boy things” for little children. Period. The colour pink that has come to represent “girl things” like playing a princess all the time and colour blue that represents “boy things” like playing superheroes is creating a further divide in the patriarchal power imbalance between a man and a woman. Thanks to USA’s Supreme Court Justice, Sonia Sotomayor for stopping by Sesame Street to educate that being a princess is not really a job.

This divide is so deeply embedded in our products that it is a constant battle to educate kids about its emptiness. There is no pink or blue. They are simply the colours of the same spectrum. And we need to allow our kids to pick a colour of their own liking.

I encourage both my children to pick their own. When my daughter Mehar was born the summer of 2007, my husband and I decided to get her a healthy mix of age-appropriate toys, not “gender-appropriate”. For me that term is a misnomer. Over the years, Mehar got a mix of toy babies, princesses, building blocks, play balls, stuffed animals and yes, cars. My husband ignored my instructions to buy small, soft play cars. Once he came back with a gigantic remote-controlled play truck for then two-year old Mehar. She delighted in taking her stuffed animals for a ride.

Mehar is now five-and-a-half and attends full-day kindergarten. She is a lovely, spirited child. She rarely walks in the house: always on her toes, she runs from room to room. She is always singing in joy, calling out to daddy, or me or to her little brother in a loud voice even for a simple conversation. As a friend remarked once, “She is a party in a box”. My evenings are spent asking her not to use loud voice indoors, to save it, God forbid, for a situation that can be dangerous (and explaining what dangerous means).

She loves to create stuff, her study nook is always piling high with paper crafts, and discarded shreds of paper; the tiny white table is shiny with glitter and glue projects. She loves to draw: her day at school, the movie she watched, daily conversations, everything finds an expression through her sketches.

She watches fairy tale movies but has a penchant for cartoon action flicks. One moment, she will be ‘riding’ around as a knight – a play bucket for a helmet, a towel paper roll for a sword, a sheet wrapped around for armour – on her rocking horse and the next hour, she will be wearing her toy princess crown, with the ‘armour’ transformed into a dress. One Halloween, she dressed as a princess and for the last one, she was Bat Girl.

Mehar dressed as Bat Girl for Halloween in 2012 (left) and as a princess the year before (right)

I love her imagination, her creativity, carefree state of mind, the joy of just being herself and enjoying and savouring every moment. I admit, it gets a little challenging to steer her in regular life after some time, but I love the fact she has so much zest for life.

And I admire her soft nurturing side: she loves to fuss over her baby brother and is thrilled to have visitors with little ones.

Her little brother Kabir was born the day she turned three. Despite sharing their birth date, they are temperamentally different. Like all kids, they give us challenges in parenting, but we weren’t prepared for challenges Kabir threw at us.

His sharp mind works in overdrive. Mehar rarely gets into mischief, but Kabir is always creating mischief. We did what we never did with our daughter: installed three childproof security gates in the house. One gate cordons the laundry area, one guards my study and a five-meter wooden gate has been bolted into the walls to guard him from the gas fireplace and our big television (further protected from the impact of toy projectiles with a solid plastic sheet).

With Mehar, simply telling her that fireplace was hot and dangerous with elaborate scared facial expressions worked. Kabir just gave us a smirk. We thought the wooden gate would help. He defeated us soon. He grabbed his toy doctor box, put it upside-down, climbed on it, and voila, he was swinging over the security gate. I had to hide the box. He was all of 23 months then.

Kabir defeating our purpose of installing a security gate to guard the fireplace and TV. He used a toy box to climb and hop over the gate

He has used “tools” from his toy collection to open turn and twist door locks and has perched his chair on top of a regular chair to try and open the security latch on the main door. All this when he had just turned two. Light on his feet, one doesn’t realize when he disappears quietly. One moment, he is playing next to you and the next; he is trying to loosen the grip of the security gates.

So after three security gates, endless childproof locks throughout the house, we keep an eye on him – constantly. As the main home-stay parent, it’s a challenge for me to leave him unattended even for a bathroom break. My dear daughter steps in for that purpose. She has instructions to yell if he manages to get into mischief before I can make it back.

But I love him just the way I love my daughter. I melt when he replies, “me too” to my “I love you” and giggles uncontrollably when I grab him from pulling stuff off the shelves. I love the way he makes my disappointment evaporate when he runs around laughing saying, “no mumma”, when I try to stop him from taking shots at side lamps with his toy trucks. It’s hard not to lose temper when he uses the strength of his arms to launch his toy rocket ship into the air that eventually misfires and drives holes into walls but his innocent and loving hugs after time-out make me forget the perforated walls in the house.

My friends say, “Oh, he is just being a boy”; I reject that. That is drilling gender differences into the impressionable minds of our children. And what exactly “being a boy” means? Climbing walls? Opening latches? Spirit of adventure? How is this experience tied to one’s sexual organs?

Kabir loves books, cars and babies. He is enthusiastic about life and loves to experiment. His mischief is actually a sharp mind that can analyze situations and find a way out of them. He is not aggressive or violent, he doesn’t hit anyone. He has a strong frame for his age (he is now two-and-a-half) and doesn’t realize his strength that inadvertently causes damage when all he is trying to do is “launch” a rocket ship.

The only toy he takes to bed with him is his favourite yellow and green truck. It is not the most comfortable toy to sleep with, but he doesn’t relent. I simply remove it after he sleeps.

Despite causing mischief and vrooming his car toys all day long, he has a soft side to himself, that of a nurturer. Of all the toys scattered on the living room floor, there is only one kind he doesn’t throw, or use as a projectile: toy babies. I am amazed at how gentle he is with them. He caresses a toy baby, as if it was real, feeds it with his own sipper, wraps it in a sheet and puts it to bed – in his own bunk.

Kabir enjoying “being a daddy” at big sister’s kindergarten class (left) and sleeping with his favourite bedtime toy – a truck (right)

I recognize his potential and I love his nurturing side. By classifying what he does with a toy baby, as a “mommy thing” is a dangerous proposition. By doing so, I will tell my son that it is wrong and unacceptable for a man to be the nurturer and at the same time, I will tell my daughter that a woman’s identity is limited to being the nurturer.

That will discourage her spirited attitude, especially outdoors, where she climbs trees and pick flowers. Not a single day goes by when she doesn’t come back home with muddy clothes. She loves to venture outdoors and every school recess; she is collecting rocks, and leaves with her knees in the wet grass or mud. Her backpack is always teaming with the dirty, heavy collection, and it is not unusual to find a rock or two in her pants pockets.

“She is such a tomboy,” said one of my friends and I politely disagreed. Years ago, when people referred to me as one, I took pride in the term. I thought it was cool to do “boy things”. As a thinking adult, I recognized, being adventurous and spirited is not a “boy thing”. We all have different passions and ways of life. There are no “boy things” or “girl things” for little children. Society classifies our behaviour in constructed gender roles and today, as a mother of two young children; I strongly reject this socially-constructed ill concept. It only undermines our children’s true potential. It makes our girls feel limited in the role of nurturers and stifles our boys’ natural role as nurtures.

We socially program our boys to feel ashamed of playing with dolls and babies and then we complain, when as adults, most reject their roles of nurturers – as loving fathers.

When we give an environment free of gender-bias to our kids, they themselves reject the floating gender stereotypes. It happened with me while watching the 3D version of The Lion King in a movie theatre with Mehar. Her gaze fixed on the screen, munching popcorn, she innocently inquired in her usual loud voice, “Mom, when will I be the King?”

People sitting in the row ahead broke into giggles and I hugged her and said, “Anytime love, anytime, you have the potential to scale any height.” I was proud she identified with a role that had power attached to it and not with a usual submissive side-role assigned to a woman.

At the same time, I don’t want her to reject her future role of a mother or my son to reject his ambitious, adventurous side and focus only on his nurturing side. I want them both to live a balanced life, where being a nurturer comes naturally, just the way nature intended. And what they do with their lives professionally will be best done when it’ll stem from the spirited-self within.

Categories: Gender Equality, Parenting

Tags: Bat Girl, boy things, car, girl things, Halloween, Parenting, pink and blue, Princess, Sesame Street, Sonia Sotomayor