Not long after preschool started, the second someone would see her, my daughter, just like her two sisters before her, would immediately rip off her sweatshirt as if she were Wonder Woman, exposing her cuteness to be admired by all. Everyone wants to be admired, right? That’s human. What isn’t OK is for girls to funnel so much of that desire for attention and admiration, for success and achievement through their appearance. My God, the training starts young.
So this is my third daughter that I’ve been through this pre-school/ dress obsession metamorphosis with. I’ve tried so many things: not putting them in dresses which led to tantrums. (These kids are smart. They know what’s happening. No one is going to take away the spotlight.) I tried deflecting comments from grown ups which can lead to awkward silences and confusion. I tried having adult conversations with my daughter that there was no way she could understand.
Then, something amazing happened. My washing machine broke down. Unable to wash many clothes, I let my daughter pick her favorites and made sure to keep those clean. When my daughter wore the same three or four dresses, her VERY favorites, over and over for three weeks, her teachers, the other moms, everyone stopped telling her how cute her dress was all the time. People started thinking of other things to say when they saw her in the morning. Truly. And my kid is still thrilled to be in her favorite duds; she hasn’t figured out that she’s got to have variety to get the same people to ooh and aaah. Hee hee.
This is the first tactic that has ever worked for me. So here’s my suggestion: let your daughter pick out her absolute favorites and keep them in a tight rotation. People might feel sorry for your kid, wish she had more clothes, think you’re a bad mom, but this is all good. It further inspires them to come up with other ways to make your daughter feel good. People are not trying to hurt your daughter, their intentions are good; they just want to be nice. I think that may be why this strategy works so well.
This morning my five year old went to her food shelf, got out her plastic pumpkin tub of candy, ate half a Crunch bar, and then asked for a bowl of Cheerios.
They love getting dressed up for Halloween and they love the idea of getting candy, but the actual candy is no big deal. Every year, the “day after,” I am eternally grateful to be free of the fights and power struggles that can accompany Halloween candy.
I created Pigtail Pals in honor of my daughter, Amelia, named after Amelia Earhart, when I was looking for a cute outfit for her as an infant and could find only pink and princess. Not a single onesie in all of humankind had a little girl and an airplane on it. I thought girls deserved more empowering and diverse messages than just sparkles and tiaras.
What are your best-sellers?
This fall the best sellers have been my “Pretty’s Got Nothing To Do With It” and “Full of Awesome” designs that I just released in September. Traditional favorites are the astronaut, pilot, carpenter, doctor, military, and scientist designs. And the entire Whimsy Bee line is a hit with its colorful and imaginative designs.
It’s smart of Pigtail Pals to be a for profit instead of a nonprofit! The more successful your company is, the more you can help girls. You call yourself a “mompreneur.” What is that? Who were you inspired by?
Exactly, I want to show other businesses that this is the message parents and girls want, and that a business can be successful doing this. I want to change the way the marketplace looks for young girls. And since Dora has gone the way of the ballerina princess, there is room for the smart and adventurous Pigtail Pals designs to take over. Pigtail Pals has, since the very beginning, made donations to organizations that support girls, and we will continue to do so as our success grows.
A mompreneur is a mother who sees a hole in the marketplace for children, and creates her own product to fill that void. At the time I created Pigtail Pals, there were no other apparel lines on the market that showed girls doing smart, daring, and adventurous things. There were a couple of lines that had empowering phrases, but my preschooler can’t read, so that didn’t mean anything to her. I wanted something in pictures that would really speak to little girls. Girl empowerment is something our daughters need to be raised with, not just something they are introduced to once they are finally old enough to be a Girl Scout or participate in some of the other national programs that only focus on older girls. My girl can’t wait, she needs these messages now.
What do you teach in your workshops? What kind of excercises do you do? Can you see the change before and after or is it more gradual? Do you find parents, teachers, or kids more willing or more resistant?
I teach media literacy in my workshops – a tangible way for parents to digest and parent through all the crap that is out there. I teach how to specifically deal with the highly inappropriate birthday gift, or mother-in-law that bestows makeup and tiny high heels with every visit, or the song that just played on the radio talking about casual or violent sex. Our culture is saturated with this stuff. I find most folks are eager to learn about this, and I see those light bulb moments flash across everyone’s face about 15mintues into every workshop.
The exercises I use are just common sense stuff. For example – I take a box of crayons, and dump it out, but it is full of only pink and purple crayons. I ask the parents, if they had purchased this as a school supply, would they find something wrong with it? Would they return it to the store? I ask them what is missing, and then I ask them to close their eyes and picture their daughter’s closet and toy box. I see little sheepish smiles creep across their face. And they get it – they get how incredibly limiting choices are for girls, and that they bought into it. There is nothing wrong with pink, or purple, but when a girl’s world is full of that and only that, we need to think about what messages that sends. Childhood should be a time full of vibrant, amazing color and learning experiences.
What are your future plans for the company?
In the near future, I’m going to release a line of tee designs that show boys and girls playing together, having great adventures. Also, I’m going to build out the new line of Full of Awesome products. That blog post was such a runaway hit, it is really inspiring to me.
Eventually I want to move into toys and room décor, and I would love to open really special retail spaces.
How do you protect your daughter’s imagination?
We tell stories all the time in the car while driving around town. We create some story to act out while we play outside. My home looks like a preschool with all of the art supplies and learning toys in this place. We take lots of family adventures to educational places like children’s museums and fairs and performances. We read and read and read.
Are there books, TV shows, clothing lines or products you recommend for girls?
There is a lot of good stuff out there, you just have to know where to find it. My daughter is 5 years old, so right now we are really into the Ramona and Judy Moody books. This winter we’re going to start reading the Little House on the Prairie series. Amelia has checked out every single whale and dolphin book our public library offers. For TV, she loves Animal Planet, SciGirls (PBS), National Geographic, Diego, Wild Kratts (they have two female sci/tech assistants that rock the show), Word World, Peppa Pig, and Scooby Doo.
For other clothing lines, I really like Be A Girl Today (http://www.beagirlblog.com/) for awesome girls sports tees. And the Girl Scouts offer great tees, too.
For other products, a few other mompreneur small businesses I love to promote are Cutie Patutus for dress up clothes, Sophie & Lili for wonderful cloth dolls, and Go! Go! Sports Girls for sports-themed dolls. Every girl should have a doctor kit, a tool box, a wooden train, giant floor puzzles, and Legos by the bucket.
On my blog Reel Girl, which is all about imagining gender equality in the fantasy world, people sometimes complain that issues I care about don’t matter because the characters I write about are imaginary. Or that I am limiting imagination by imposing PC dogma on artists. How do you respond to comments like that?
“You can’t be what you can’t see.” –Marie Wilson, the White House Project. Sexualization is an enormous problem, most specifically in the media. The stats on the representation of girls in the media in a non-sexualized manner are so miniscule, I would argue this isn’t ‘PC dogma’, it is a matter of civil rights. Girls get a seat at the table.
In the past year or so, various sites and movements have cropped up to help defend girls from sexist media or at the very least, educate parents about the negative influences out there, so ubiquitous they are ironically invisible. There was Peggy Orenstein’s best seller Cinderella Ate My Daughter, The Geena Davis Institute has been doing studies and releasing statistics about the lack of girl characters in animation, author Lyn Mikel Brown and other founded SPARK and advocated for more girl balloons in the Macy Day Parade. And its great news that parents and advocates got so upset about the JCPenney T shirt and got it off the shelves. At the same time, Disney announced its not doing anymore princess movies which translates to even fewer movies starring girls since girls are mostly only allowed to star if they are princesses. Disney also announced this year that is shifting its tween programming to boy based animated cartoons. Do you see the media and more awareness about the media going in a positive or negative direction? Are there other sites or movements that you know of that support girls and girl media?
I think parents and girls need to be very aware that the media is a long ways off from them content that is fair to girls. Like I said, there is good stuff out there, but in reality it is few and far between. Disney is the very last place I would look for positive girl media. As parents become more aware and more savvy, they will start to demand products and media that reflect that. So Pixar is making “Brave”, and that is tremendous, and that will only fill our appetite for so long. They will need to give us more if they want us to keep consuming.
One under-reported issue is that when girls go missing in kids films, and the toys, clothing, and other products based on and derived from those films, both genders learn that girls are less important than boys. This is a problem with sites and orgs that focus on girls, in some ways, that continue this polarized segregation. Parents are a huge force here– they should be reading their kids stories about girls, taking them to movies with strong girl parts (if they can find any) and encouraging cross gender friendships. What do you think about this issue? Are there sites, movements, blogs that you know of or like that help educate boys also?
I have a three year old son, so this is an equally important issue for me. My colleague Crystal Smith of Achilles Effect (and author of a great book with same name) is awesome. The work of Jackson Katz is like no other when it comes to boys and media. The blog The Mamafesto writes about her son and his adventures through boyhood.
My work focuses on girls, because the crush for them with sexism and sexualization is immense, and it comes at them as soon as they are born. I don’t necessarily think it is easier for boys, but it is different. I think we need to get back to some common sense childhood. Let’s allow our kids the space to play and explore without limitations based on gender. Pigtail Pals also offers a line for young boys called Curious Crickets, meant to honor the creativity and wonder in boyhood.
Both of my children enjoy and thrive in cross gender friendships. These are crucial for the socialization with the opposite sex in their tween/teen years and beyond. We try to find positive media that equally respects boys and girls. My kids will see my husband wash dishes and fold laundry, and they will see me wrestle with the dogs and use tools and run my business. It is all about balance.
In the monochromatic girlworld of mass-marketing, how do you protect your daughter’s imagination? As Peggy Orenstein writes in her fabulous book Cinderella Ate My Daughter, this is her major concern as a parent: How do you help these girls to remember that pink isjust one color in the rainbow? With the limited, repetitive roles for girls in movie after movie and too many books, how do you keep showing them that there are infinite parts they can play?
I make up many stories for my kids, as does my husband. The problem is I want to brainwash my kids but not too much! As my kids’ mom, I obviously, already have an enormous amount of power in their lives. The stories my kids tell me are often derivative of the ones I’ve told them, sometimes too much. When they get stuck like that or continually repeat the same story, I try saying something like: She always takes that path and it doesn’t work out for her so well, what do you think she would do now instead? Maybe she gallops off on a dragon’s back? Or hides under a rock? Runs so fast she flies into the sky?
I would love to hear some suggestions about how you protect your daughters’ imaginations.
After reading ReelGirl’s ‘Notes to the babysitter‘ post on my ‘let them eat cake’ (for breakfast) approach to feeding my three daughters, Babble.com’s Madeline Holler blogs on strollerderby:
No bad food, no bad food, no bad food. Come on! Oreos are bad food!
But, she’s got an open mind:
I remember when my daughter was 3, a child development expert talked about how important that kids be able to have a food shelf that they have unfettered access to. I tried it, but (1) we lived in a super small place then, too — couldn’t spare a low drawer in the cabinets and (2) I copped out and put “good” crap in there that she wasn’t all that jazzed about (which I’m sure was exactly my plan!).
I know I need to share my kitchen, my shopping list and my food, and let my kids drive their own eating. We have very little junk in the house and lots of fresh stuff, which they like. Sure, my kids rave about junky sweets, etc., but they also ask for fruit to snack on, don’t blanch at whole grain pasta or bread and one even orders up lentils whenever she gets to pick what’s for dinner. All good!
So it’s really me who is in the way. I’m not particularly worried about eating disorders — whether or not I change my ways — but I think it can’t be anything but infantalizing for older kids to have to ask if they can have a popsicle. It’s got to start sometime. It might as well be now.
Like every parent, I’d love to see into the future and know if I’m making the right choices for my kids. All I know is that my decisions about food feel right for our family. Our meal times are peaceful, my kids eat lots of ‘healthy’ food, and are adventurous eaters. (My seven year old’s absolute favorite food is kimbap– do you know what that is? Read about it here.)
For me, it comes down to this: Can you imagine being told what to eat? And how much? What if you were in the mood for a crunchy salad but someone forced you to eat roasted chicken? What we choose to eat is so personal with many factors involved including how hungry we are, what we ate last, if it’s hot or cold outside, the list goes on. How could anyone possibly know what you ‘should’ eat but you?
I suppose following someone else’s orders about what to eat is exactly what a diet is. But could that be why we’re so screwed up about food? Because since day one we’ve been trained to have no clue how to listen and respond to our own bodies?
I’ve always loved to, but I also felt like it didn’t matter as much. Writing about politics and culture is important. If you write about ‘issues,’ you can use your writing to change the world. Or try to. Making up stories might be fun but what’s the point?
Then I had three kids. Of course, I read my daughters stories, watch movies with them, and also, TV shows. I witness how the stories they listen to shape their imaginary play, how they dress, who their heroes are, the language they repeat, the art they make, and their own creative writing.
In her best-selling book Cinderella Ate My Daughter, Peggy Orenstein writes extensively about children’s brain development, how babies don’t come into the world with fully formed minds that we, parents, are just supposed to observe and discover. Their brains are constantly being formed, rapidly growing and changing as they take in language, pictures, adult reactions, and all kinds of stimuli. Neurons fire in reaction, neural pathways are formed, and connections are created, assimilating the outside world to create the internal one.
So I’ve got to wonder: How might kids’ brains (and then, of course, adult brains) be different if the stories they were exposed to weren’t so dramatically and predominantly shaped by men?
If you ever doubt fiction is important in forming our deepest reality, beliefs, and actions, look at the most influential historical novel of all time: the Bible- not known for its female authors or kindness to women. We’re still fighting wars based on these ancient, repeated, and recycled stories.
One reason the stereotypes in kidlit are so sad is because we’re supposed to be experiencing fantasy, magical worlds. Yet, what we see, way too often, is the same sexism, depicted in cartoonlike proportions, that exists in the real world.
What would our world look like if most great artists, film directors, and novelists were women? And had been for thousands of years?
Here’s just one modern example of how reality shapes fiction and fiction shapes reality. Every year, Forbes Magazine does a survey on the richest imaginary characters. This year, the list includes tycoons like Scrooge McDuck, Richie Rich, Smaug (the dragon from J. R. R. Tolkein) Bruce Wayne (of Batman) and Mr. Monopoly.
Of the gender gap on the list, Forbes‘ Michale Noer writes:
“There are 14 male characters on the list and one female character on this year’s Fictional 15. Sadly, that’s not unusual. There are always women on the list, but too often, only one.
The highest-ranked woman ever was ‘Mom’ from the television show Futurama, who placed fourth in 2007, with a fictional net worth of 15.7 billion. Lara Croft, star of the Tomb Raider video games and movies has appeared on the Fictional 15 three times since 2005. There have never been more than two women on the list in a single year.
Our fictional reporters- the best in the business- have worked hard to rectify this gender imbalance, even breaking the Fictional 15 rules against folkloric characters (the Tooth Fairy appeared in 2010.) But the gap persists.
Some female characters are perennial candidates. Miss Havisham, the well-off spinster from Great Expectations, is considered every year and dismissed on the grounds that she simply isn’t rich enough. And at every fictional story meeting, someone is sure to nominate one of Disney’s princesses, usually Snow White or Ariel. One problem here is that you need to infer their wealth from the fact they live in castes and wear fancy dresses. They aren’t known for being rich within their fictional worlds the same way as C. Montgomery Burns or Bruce Wayne.”
Forbes‘ Caroline Howard gives this explanation:
“Why so few? The answer is quite simple: a small pool of candidates. For some reason, authors, screenwriters, directors, and comic book artists haven’t been creating many ultarich female characters. that is equally true for writers of yore, present and those tackling future or fantasy.
Kind like the real world. Look at the Forbes Worlds Billionaires list. A paltry 1.5 % are self-made women- 19 out of 1,210. And if we include heiresses and widows, that makes 103 ladies, or just 8.5%.”
Obviously, a crucial step towards ever achieving gender equality is imagining what it would look like. Does anyone know what that would be?
Science Magazine reports on a new study that shows alcohol affects women’s sleep more than men’s.
It’s long been known that alcohol can deepen sleep during the early part of the night but disrupt sleep later in the night, something called the “rebound effect.” But there’s been little research into how alcohol’s effects on sleep may differ in women and men.
This study included 59 women and 34 men in their 20s who consumed either alcohol until they were drunk or a non-alcoholic beverage before they went to bed. Researchers then monitored the participants’ sleep.
Women who consumed alcohol had fewer hours of sleep, woke more frequently and for more minutes during the night, and had more disrupted sleep compared to men who drank alcohol.
In my own life, sadly, it’s true that alcohol radically affects my sleep. And because I love sleep more than anything, I’ve practically given up wine. I blogged about my experience with drinking and sleep here, “No Wining, It’s Bedtime” on Drinking Diaries, a great site that “serves as a forum for women to share, vent, express, and discuss their drinking stories without judgment.”
Science show that fertility and movie offers drop off steeply for women after forty. The baby-versus-work life questions keep the writer up at night. She has observed that women, at least in comedy, are labeled “crazy” after a certain age. The writer has the suspicion that the definition of “crazy” in show business is a woman who keeps talking even after no one wants to fuck her anymore. The fastest remedy for this “women are crazy” situation is for more women to become producers and hire diverse women of various ages. That is why the writer feels obligated to stay in the business, and that is why she can’t possibly take time off for a second baby, unless she does, in which case that is nobody’s business. Does the writer want to have another baby? Or does she just want to turn back time and have her daughter be a baby again?
Thank you Tina Fey for being smart, funny, and beautiful. Who knew a woman could be all 3? And did I mention, she’s a mom?
Fey is also right on about producers. I’m really beginning to feel (partly because of this blog) like there’s little significant difference between fiction and non-fiction. Before I felt like non-fiction writing really mattered. But the fantasy world shapes our reality, what we expect, and what we hope for, which in turn shapes our fantasy world again. If women can find ways to get their stories out there– as producers, writers, publishers, whatever– the world will change.
Obviously, a major part of the challenge for girls is that there is so little diversity in kids’ media. Even the princess who only wants to find her man wouldn’t be bad if she were one of many role models. I guess this is why we always talk about diversity. It’s important; it’s everything.
So, after each of my reviews, I’ve decided to add a few discussion questions. Hopefully, the addition of questions will highlight the critical thinking aspect to reading, watching, and playing; that it’s interactive, not passive and that’s really the whole point.
