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.