Sultanas under the carseat

There are discourses, public, private and academic, around the gendering of children. You know the ones: the discussions about how people speak to girls and boys differently from the time that they’re born, through their childhood and for the rest of their lives. The ones about how they’re treated, cared for and raised. Girls are spoken to more, cuddled, directed towards domestic nurturing games, while boys are encouraged to be tough, shrug off physical discomfort and rarely display an interior, emotional life. I think they’re valid discussions, and in fact I wholeheartedly throw my stick into the nurture not nature pile - although how closely intermeshed culture and biology are is really very difficult to tell.

Discourses about gendering children often get particularly pronounced around the choice of toys. Trucks for boys and dolls for girls, blocks for boys and fairy wings for girls. Is it any wonder that we have generation after generation of boys who enjoy strong physical-spatial skills, and successive waves of girls who believe that identity is located in surface, image and adornment?

I’d like to think that we’ve encouraged Antigone to play with anything she liked, from mud, Transformers and Lego through to squidgy balls, My Little Pony and Blythe Dolls… although she did seem to display greater interest in relating to soft toys and dolls. Very early on, before complete sentences, she had names for her menagerie, and she remembered them all. There are probably more than 20 different dolls, teddies and other soft toys at her YiaYia’s house (not to mention ours), and each of them has a name and an identity.

But if I’m really honest, if Tiggy were a boy, would I, or Patrice, or anyone else who’s had close contact with Tiggy have cooed as much, grinned as often, or responded with as much excitement when (s)he chose to hug and kiss soft teddies, or name dolls? Would little Ari - as Tiggy was to be known when we still thought she was a boy in utero - have had a posse of plastic and fur 20-strong at his YiaYia’s whose names and identities he knew?

It’s not all dolls with Antigone, though. Her current big toy franchise squeeze is Lightning McQueen, or as she puts it: ‘Light-a-ning A Queen’ (perhaps he really should be pink).