Adorable Kid! :)

Julie Deardorff talks about her son and how he's grown over a year. He does "normal boy stuff" such as playing with legos and liking trucks, but he also likes the colors pink, yellow, and purple. Deardorff's son is fond of princess among other "girl things" and his parents don't mind. A problem arose from the boy's choice of Halloween costume. He wanted to be a princess.

Although his parents did not oppose his liking for stories of Cinderella or Snow White, they were afraid that their son would face public humiliation due to his preference of costume. Neuroscientist Lise Eliot says that it is completely natural for young boys to be attracted to feminine things and that children do not develop their judgemental-ness until the age of four and the Deardorff boy was three in preschool.

Basically, young children begin to learn the "rights and wrongs" of their society at an extremely young age. They are influenced by many cultural factors about gender norms and they quickly catch on that any individual who breaks the supposed rules is subject to humiliation. Like the parents, I wish we didn't have to learn about the boundaries of gender, as it only restricts an individual from being who they truly want to be. I believe these borders are more blurred than before, and going along with Eliot, that the next generation will tolerate a more distorted division between what we believe to be masculine and what we believe to be feminine.

Every Day...

I found myself thinking sociologically walking right out of first hour. I walked down the hall to see several kids in various locations of the hallways alone. These are kids I see every day, alone. Sometimes I even see them at lunch by themselves. It just so happens that whenever I see these individuals they are walking slowly by themselves, lost in thought. No one else seems to notice their loneliness, they just notice they're in the way and these kids slowly start getting pushed more and more towards the walls of the school.

I know that their lives are nothing like Genie's but they definitely seem isolated. When I happen to see them far off, I find myself wondering about why they never seem to talk to anyone. I think about who their generalized others are and how the concept of looking glass self plays a role in their lives. Perhaps parents or older siblings are who they trust most and they don't mind what others think. My ideas probably aren't too far off.

Dinner Time

I found myself thinking sociologically when I overheard a comment a girl made about another's nightly routine. For the sake of following along, we'll say girl A made the comment about girl B's routine. Girl B said that she usually had dinner at 8 p.m with her family. Girl A's reaction went something along the lines of a very dramatic stop in the hallway, not minding the rushing traffic of students, and exclaming at the top of her lungs that that was "so weird" and "your family should eat at 6 like mine."

Immediately, I noticed both culture shock and ethnocentrism. Girl A's reaction displayed both emotion relating to a different culture and a statement implying that girl B should do things in the way that girl A does them, leading to the ethnocentric remark.