Reflections on Reading “Pink, Blue, and You”
Erin Jacobs
Pink, Blue, and You! by Elise Gravel is a beautiful, colorful book geared toward a pre-k to third grade audience. Upon seeing the age range, I thought this would be a perfect book to introduce my four-year-old to concepts of sex and gender stereotypes and get her thinking critically in an developmentally appropriate way. Before reading the book with her, I decided to do an initial read-through so I could prepare myself for the conversations that I would spark in our reading. My first impression was that some of the pages would be a perfect landing spot for my child and others could be too advanced for her to comprehend. But primarily, I grappled with this challenge: when do you introduce the concept of harmful stereotypes to a child who isn’t aware that they exist?
A main focus of this book is highlighting and questioning the stereotypes that some toys, clothes, jobs, and actions are for boys and others are for girls. But I don’t raise my child with those expectations; she has always played with both trucks and dolls, and knows she can be both tough and sweet. Many more parents are raising children this way now than when I was raised in the 90s. And so, as our children grow, I’ve heard other parents struggling with the same question: by introducing concepts of gender stereotypes (or racial, ethnic, linguistic, etc…), am I unknowingly planting the seeds of those beliefs into my child’s brain that weren’t previously there? I struggled with this before introducing Pink, Blue, and You! to my child, and wondered how she would respond. But I dug into my own values and landed on this realization: my child will be exposed to gender stereotypes in the world despite my best efforts to shelter her from them. In fact, she already has been exposed to them in nearly every place we go, though she may not have made conscious connections to what these expectations mean yet. And more importantly, I would rather my child know about the stereotypes that exist and be armed with the knowledge and skills to stand up to them, than continue to allow her to be blissfully ignorant until she is “old enough” to fully understand.
In our reading together, I wasn’t surprised that when asked if certain toys or activities were for boys and others for girls, my daughter seemed confused. “Why wouldn’t I play with trucks or dinosaurs? My friend Nico likes to dance and he’s a boy.” We have been lucky that in most spaces my child has spent time so far in her life, her grown-ups have shared our values of a gender-neutral upbringing. But this doesn’t mean it’s not still important for her to hear that there will be some people she will meet who won’t see things the way we do, who won’t share our values, and to practice what to do or say when this happens.
What surprised me the most about this read-through with my child was that I assumed the section of the book about gender identity and pronouns would be too complex for her to understand. I thought it would be a great first exposure but that I wouldn’t hear about the concepts again from her for a while. But the very next day, over her bowl of cereal, she informed my husband and me that sometimes she feels like a “they” and a “she” at the same time, and that she would be thinking more about that. These concepts may sometimes seem too advanced, too complex, or too premature to introduce to our youngest learners, but our children are more capable than we could imagine. They are listening, they are learning, and they are grappling. The best we can give them is a safe space to explore these ideas and an armor of love and self-worth strong enough to stand up to any future resistance they encounter. That’s what this book offers to us.
