In our nursery, we have a four-year-old boy who likes to dress up as a girl, usually in something pink and sparkly, and plays mainly with girls. He often comes to nursery wearing his mum's nail varnish. We have tried telling him he's a boy and encouraged him to play more with boys but it hasn't worked. How should we respond?
I have to start by asking you if you would be worried if one of the girls in your nursery preferred playing football with the boys than playing with dolls. The next question is: are you concerned that by allowing him to dress in girls' dressing-up clothes and play with girls you are 'encouraging' him to be gay? It would be very simplistic to think that you could either 'encourage' or stop a child from becoming gay just by regulating the toys he plays with or the clothes he wears.
Children usually begin to have a sense of their own gender around nine months. This is when their testosterone starts to kick in and boys begin selecting louder and less subtle toys than girls. At two, children start becoming much more curious about their bodies as they start coming out of nappies, and boys in particular become aware of their body parts.
At around four, boys' testosterone levels begin to soar and this is when they start acting out lots of 'macho' behaviour and suddenly become aware of lots of stereotypical things - including, for example, attitudes towards the colour pink.
CLOTHES AND EARRINGS
When I carried out a research project on men in childcare for London Early Years Foundation (LEYF), the only comments that children made about men as carers were when men wore the colour pink or earrings.
Interestingly, the idea that pink is a female colour is a fairly recent phenomenon. Up until World War One there was no preferred colour for boys and girls, but after the war pink was seen as a shade of red, the colour of battle, and was therefore the recommended colour for boys while blue was for girls because it was the colour that usually depicted the Virgin Mary.
However, during World War One blue was used extensively for men's uniforms and thereafter blue became viewed as more of a masculine colour. There are indications that the two colours were used interchangeably until World War Two. The pink triangle was one of the Nazi concentration camp badges, used to identify male prisoners who were sent there because of their homosexuality, and was meant to be a badge of shame. After the war, the tide shifted in favour of blue as a boy's colour.
It is interesting to note that research has shown that men generally are very resistant to the idea of baby boys wearing pink, whereas it matters far less to women. Regarding the little boy in your nursery, his mum doesn't seem to share your concerns as she is happy to let him wear nail varnish sometimes.
The children's comments about men wearing earrings are also interesting. Men have worn earrings for as long as civilisation has existed. Jade earrings dating to 3,000 BC have been found in Southeast Asia. Many of those earrings adorned men, not women. Modern day questions about what wearing earrings symbolises for men are rooted in phobias about sexuality and gender.
In many societies, ear piercing is done as a puberty ritual - in Borneo, for example, the mother and father each pierce one ear as a symbol of the child's dependence on their parents. Ear piercing is an almost universal practice for men and women and it is only in Western society that it is deemed effeminate.
CAUSE FOR CONCERN?
You can never rule out the possibility that a boy dressing up in girls' clothes could point to deeper problems. As a teacher, I have twice come across boys whose attachment to girls' clothes and accessories were symptoms of underlying issues - but these were, I believe, unusual cases.
The first one, David, rushed to the dressing-up box each morning and put one dress on top of another till he had about six layers. He would wear these clothes all day, only removing them when he went home. The difficulty that David presented was that he was aggressive towards the girls in the class and all the girls were terrified of being anywhere near him.
When we began to find out more about David, we discovered that his mother had grown up in a children's home and had desperately wanted a daughter. She did not want a child who would grow up and be independent of her and most of all she didn't want a boy.
When I visited their home, there were no signs that a child lived there. There were no toys and no mess visible. His mother would complain bitterly if he came home from school dirty and since he arrived each day dressed in white from head to toe, we were in trouble every day. We referred the family to the educational psychologist and support was ongoing when David left the nursery.
The other child, Patrick, came from a dysfunctional family. His father was frequently in and out of prison for violence and his mother showed little love or affection towards her children. Patrick would carry a handbag with him all day. He was so attached to it we gave it to him to keep. The only person in the family who showed Patrick love was his gay older brother, and he was Patrick's main role model.
It was important with both David and Patrick to understand the context of their lives and realise that the dressing up was just a symptom, but for the vast majority of little boys this is not the case.
STEREOTYPING
So to come back to the case of the little boy in your nursery, can I ask you why you have concerns about him? Do you know of problems within his family? Are other aspects of his behaviour causing concerns? Or are you stereotyping him just because he does not fit your idea of how a boy should dress or play? And, as I asked before, would you be concerned by a girl who was a 'tomboy'?
Do we not delight in girls who have excelled in what historically were seen as male activities or professions? By showing concerns about a boy who chooses what is seen as stereotypically female play, are we not helping to reinforce gender stereotypes? We cannot place children into homogeneous groups where all boys act in one way and all girls in another.
We know there is still a huge amount of stereotyping of children's toys and play promoted through advertising and media. Research has shown that children as young as two are influenced by what they see on television and in cartoons - for instance, male characters outweigh female characters by five to one.
We should, as experienced practitioners, offer a gender-neutral environment in our settings. This, of course, raises issues about the low number of men working in childcare and how having a gender-balanced workforce we could do much to remove this kind of stereotyping.
Sue Chambers is a senior LEYF association, www.leyf.org.uk.