New Mummy Blog: The Great Nature Nurture Battle
I am raising a little princess. A mermaid princess most days, but actually any Disney princesses will do. Belle, Snow White, Rapunzel, and Elsa of course - they all get their moment of glory.
This was not intentional. I wasn’t sure how keen I was about these princesses, all waiting in their ivory towers or golden caskets, sleeping their way through life until their handsome prince and saviour turned up. They didn’t seem like very good role models for the strong, confident and independent young woman I hope to raise.
Doing her ‘thoughtful princess’ pose [Copyright Yahoo/Claire Sparks]
Barbie, with her unattainable dimensions, offered little more hope, although it seems we are to be glad there is at least a Doctor Barbie mingling with all the ballerinas and ball gowns in the Malibu mansion.
But although I wasn’t keen, I did nothing to actively discourage these toys either. My daughter is certainly free to make her own choices about what interests her, and when I was a child I adored these exact things - that Malibu beach house was a dream unfulfilled. So it would be hypocritical to deprive my daughter of the very things that filled my head with the magic of palaces and princes and beautiful dresses and amazing, amazing hair.
I just didn’t expect it to be so soon perhaps and so, well, inevitable. She’s only two and I had foolishly assumed I might have a little more time to protect her from these stereotypes. I vastly underestimated the power of Frozen fever, obviously.
But how did she even catch Frozen fever when, until very, very recently, she hadn’t even seen the film? Yet she knew Anna and Elsa and Olaf and Kristoff and Sven and every last word to Let It Go.
Is it peer pressure in its earliest form? This mean old mummy hadn’t let her watch Frozen but, in order to fit in with her nursery gang, she somehow learnt by osmosis everything she needed to know to keep up the pretence that she, too, had seen it a thousand times over?
Or is it just because I actually can’t fight the nature/nurture thing and, like a moth to a flame, she’s simply drawn to all things princess, all things pink, all things sparkly, no matter what?
[Copyright Yahoo/Claire Sparks]
And on the flip side, there’s my son, barely one year old, and yet drawn to all things boy. Despite being surrounded his whole life by girl toys, give him the chance and he’ll go straight for the cars, the trucks, the toy toolkit. He might stop momentarily at the Baby Annabell doll, but that’s only to try and poke her eye out on his way past.
He loves loud noises and the chance to be destructive. He wants to bash and crash and roll around the floor in a way my little princess never did. She loves a bit of boisterous fun, but her floaty, tip-toed chase-me game is much less convincing than his head-down, argy-bargy I’m-coming-through-and-there’s-no-stopping-me.
Yet we have never treated them any differently from each other. We haven’t wrapped her up in cotton wool or ever said “that toy is for boys” or “girls don’t do this or that”.
Actually, I tell a lie. I did once say “nice girls don’t pick their nose, and they certainly don’t eat it” when I caught her in the act. But that goes for nice boys too. What is it with little kids and nose picking (and eating)? It’s definitely not a learned habit, so is it too, simply nature over nurture? Not exactly nature at its finest though, really, is it?
