031: Parenting beyond pink and blue

Today I join forces with Malaika Dower of the How to Get Away with Parenting podcast to interview Dr. Christia Brown, who is a Professor of Developmental and Social Psychology at the University of Kentucky, where she studies the development of gender identity and children’s experience of gender discrimination. Dr. Brown’s book, Parenting Beyond Pink and Blue (Affiliate link), helps parents to really understand the scientific research around gender differences in children, which is a harder task than with some other topics because there’s just a lot of bad research out there on this one. I ask about theories of gender development while Malaika keeps us grounded with questions about how this stuff works in the real world, and we both resolve to shift our behavior toward our daughters just a little bit. Related Episodes Interview with Yarrow Dunham on how social groups form Interview with Kang Lee on children’s lying (yep – your kid does it too!) References Brown, C.S. (2014). Parenting beyond pink and blue. Berkeley, CA: Ten Speed Press. (Affiliate link) Taylor, M.G., Rhodes, M., & Gelman, S.A. (2009). Boys will be boys and cows will be cows: Children’s essentialist reasoning about gender categories and animal species. Child Development 80(2), 461-481. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8624.2009.01272.x Read Full Transcript Transcript Jen: 00:30 Hello and welcome to Your Parenting Mojo. We have a pretty cool show lined up for you today. So those of you who are subscribed to my podcasts by my website at YourParentingMojo.com might've seen a notification go out just before the holiday, letting you know that had been interviewed by Malaika Dower, who is the host of the podcast, How to Get Away with Parenting. And as a side note, I'll say that Malaika is interested in a lot of the same issues as I am. So you should go and check out her show and if you're the parent of a child of color then you should pause this show and go and check out her show at howtogetawaywithparenting.com right now because there are very few podcasts for this audience and hers is a really good one. So right after we recorded our episode, Malaika texted me and said, did you ever think about doing an episode on gender-neutral parenting? Does it even make a difference if I put barrettes in my daughter's hair and put her in pink dresses or if she only wears pants and I always say "yes, our neighbor is writing down his riding down the street" on her bike rather than "he or she is riding her bike." So like I always do, I looked around to see who's doing really good work on the subject by which I mean work that is actually based on the outcomes of real scientific research and not a study saying that girl babies hear about one decibel better than boy babies for very high pitch noises and that this is enough justification for gender segregated classrooms where we never let the noise get too loud in the girls classroom and I wish that I was kidding you about that, but I'm really not. So when I read the book, Parenting Beyond Pink and Blue and I found that it critically examines the relevant scientific literature on this subject, much like we do here on the show, I knew that I had to ask the author to talk with us. Dr. Christia Brown is professor of development and social psychology at the University of Kentucky where she studies the development of gender identity and children's experience of gender discrimination among other topics. Dr. Brown received her Ph.D from the University of Texas at Austin where her research focused on how and why children form gender and race stereotypes and how they u