How Can We Apply Ideas About Gender and Gender Diversity to Support Children We're Working With?

Question

Answer

Shared Goals

Julie Nicholson:

Let's think about how can we apply some of these ideas about gender and gender diversity to support the children that we're working either directly with or on behalf of. The first idea is so simple and yet so absolutely profound. It is the importance of relationships. We already talked about why we get into the work we do, how we love supporting children, and how we want all children and families to thrive. So central to our work is creating an environment where children feel safety, feel respected, and feel a sense of belonging. We know that consistent, supportive, caring, attuned relationships are the most important thing for all children, end of story. 

What does attunement mean? Dr. Peter Levine and Maggie Kline talk about how when you attune to a child, you help that child feel felt. That child feels that sense when you are in their presence and when you are talking to them that nothing is more important in the world than who they are at that moment in time, not who they should become when they change this or that, but who they are at that moment in time in the classroom, program, or during your home visit. They feel that you're attuning to them, accepting them, bearing witness, supporting, and seeing them through strength for who they are. You are showing them such respect by focusing on them so that they feel felt, visible, and acknowledged. That's where we give children that sense of you belong in this world. We're so happy you're here and we are 100% with you and supporting you.

If we're going to bring a sense of attunement to our relationships, one thing we have to let go of is worrying and wondering about if a child likes to put on skirts, what does that mean for them in the future? Is this child transgender? Are they going to be? It is not necessary to think about these questions and worry or wonder about them. Our responsibility is to make sure that child, no matter who they are and how they show up, feels respected, supported, and have a sense of belonging and that attuned excitement and engaged attentiveness that we are giving them. Focusing on the here and now is the number one thing we want to start with.

Self-Reflection

We also know that all work and all change starts by first tuning inward. If we want to change our practices in the classroom, change the way that we set up our curriculum, or how we engage with families, first we have to understand how we're showing up. Remember, it's not just about what our intentions are, it's about our impact. We encourage you to start by asking yourself some questions to reflect on who you are and what your beliefs are and what your experiences are around gender. Our book, Supporting Gender Diversity in Early Childhood Classrooms: A Practical Guide, goes through an audit tool that has lots of ideas and questions, but I'm going to share a few here.

• How did you learn about gender?
• What gender norms were you taught about what it meant to be a boy or a girl or to be gendered in your family and your community?
• What was expected of you?
• How did those gender norms benefit you and how did they hold you back?
• What feelings come up for you when you think about changing your thoughts about gender?
• Are there things that you love about your gender?
• Were there times that you felt really affirmed and you've felt a sense of belonging in your gender?
• What are some ways that society has hurt you or the norms have limited you and left you feeling like you weren't seen, you weren't validated, you weren't acknowledged around your gender?

There are many things that you can do by looking around your classroom and asking yourself questions. The audit tool goes through these questions and more. How do you arrange your classroom? Are you looking at your bins and making sure that clothing bins are not labeled by boys and girls which reinforces that binary? What about cubbies? Are you separating by the gender binary and if so, can we think of another way of doing that? Does your school library have books that represent diverse people of all types, including diverse genders? Do you notice how you use gender throughout the day and catch yourself if you're asking children to line up using boys and girls as ways to separate or transition or to represent and talk about children? On your family intake forms, do you use gender-neutral language like family members instead of mother and father? Do you allow families, parents, and family members to name and express their child's gender in their own language? These are just a few ideas of ways that you can begin to do that auditing that brings your awareness to how you're reproducing and talking and socializing gender and how you might want to do things a little differently to be more inclusive.

Connect with Children and Families

Nathanael Flynn:

Another piece in this work is connecting with families. We wanted to start with you and then think about the relationships in the children's lives because young children aren't alone. They have a context. All of us have a context, but the family context of young children, in particular, is so important and so impactful. Think about building those relationships and building trust and be ready to create contexts within those relationships to have vulnerable conversations. I think that's such a core part of early childhood education. Many of us have built up skills of how to make those precious moments of pickup and drop off into so much more.

When it comes to the vulnerability, joy, and creativity that can be gender, it's helpful to think about those relationships and the expertise that you carry. It can be a voice for giving people space to be seen and heard and loved for who they are. Sometimes that is telling the story that shares your joy and their curiosity and creativity, sometimes it's sharing pictures of their joy when they're dressing up, and sometimes it's just finding moments to have conversations about the hard things that happen.

We also have the power within these relationships to make space for all of us to be ourselves. One of the stories I've heard a lot is about restricted play, whether that's parents asking that kids not be allowed to play a certain thing in your classroom or saying they'd never have that at home. Some things I hear are related to gender, such as the idea of asking that girls not be allowed to roughhouse or climb trees but their brothers are allowed to do that. It might be vice versa discouraging boys from cooking, playing with dolls, cleaning, and all of those daily care things that we all deal with in our lives one way or another. We can be there to have those conversations about how doing these things is a part of being ourselves. Children are exploring and mirroring what they see. They're getting a chance to try things out and that's okay. Both it's okay, this doesn't mean something about them, and it's okay if it does mean something about them. Building relationships where you can have conversations that help parents attune to, connect to, and see their kids is so crucial to this work.

Listen to Children

Another part of this is listening to children. We've said this in different ways, but we really wanted to call out this Diane Ehrensaft quote, "It is not for us to say, but for the children to tell." So often when we listen to children asking questions, telling stories, and wanting things, it leads to such wonderful connections with kids. For example, a child asked for braids and got to choose the color of the scrunchies. That was not determined by the adult and the child had the joy of getting access. It doesn't determine who this kid is, but sometimes it does provide an opening for a kid to start talking and to feel like their voice will be heard. As Julie said, we're not trying to determine that for them. We're trying to listen.

Julie Nicholson:

We really need to give them credibility when they talk to us. We need to listen, hear, and trust that what they tell us is something that we want to take seriously and acknowledge and believe. Many have an image of the child in early childhood and often say, "Oh, isn't it cute that so-and-so is saying...," but along with that, there's a sense of I'm not going to give it a full level of credibility. It's a form of injustice when we do that and don't trust children to tell us who they know themselves to be at that moment in time, so we want to listen and hear. When I say hear, give them that full respect and credibility that what they're saying is meaningful to them and we're going to take it with all of the seriousness in which they are and intentionality in which they're sharing it.

Share Information

Nathanael Flynn:

The other piece of this is sharing information, which is a broad category for a lot of different topics. One of those pieces of information is found in objects. I'm thinking about the child in figure 1. It's a little bit hard to see because she's looking down, but the joy on her face when she gets to put together her outfit and try on and explore and just be in the moment is wonderful. In your classroom, that can mean you have all of these gender signifiers or it can mean that for your classroom, children will limit themselves to only playing with the ones that are assigned to them, so maybe you take them out. For this particular kid, getting to make a collage of everything and feel it all was perfect. For another kid, getting to start from scratch might be perfect. For another kid, getting to have access to that tie and feel like a grownup may be perfect. It may bring out both the joy and euphoria of being a person, as well as give them the tools to say, "Hey, this fits. This is me."

Figure 1. Child playing dress-up.

Another piece of this is that there are stereotypes in the world and in our literature. Notice these stereotypes. There are stereotypes in things we accidentally say. I can think of a coworker who recognized that each time a boy picked up a bag, she would say, "Oh, you've got your briefcase and you're going off to work," and each time a girl picked up the same bag, she'd say, "Oh, look, it's your purse. Are you going shopping?" At the moment when she recognized that she'd been saying something without thinking about how men work and girls shop, she said, "I'm doing this thing and I don't want to be. I want to replace my behaviors." Maybe for her that was saying, "Oh, look at you. You've got your bag. Where are you off to?" and trying to take out the gender attribution because she didn't quite trust herself to talk about possibilities yet. That was her first step. For some other folks, it's reading a book and thinking, "Is that fair, or is that true?"

Thinking about parenting, I remember reading Eric Carle's book, Does a Kangaroo Have a Mother, Too? It's all about how everyone has a mother. We know that's not true for so many different reasons. The kids for whom that's not true are left out and don't exist by this book, so maybe we take that book out, or maybe if that book has been in their lives forever we can unpack that book and say, "Hmm, but what if we wrote a book about families? What would we want in there?" That's an example of how you can act to interrupt bias. You can change the narrative in the world. Sometimes that's in big ways, like doing a project about a book, and sometimes that's in little ways by saying, "Hmm, is that true?" or by modeling differences. When we don't do something to interrupt the bias that comes into our classrooms, we are perpetuating harm. That bias can be sneaky, unintended, and completely unintentional. We can take time to slow down to think about it and to do as much as we can to interrupt that bias and create a narrative about equity and attunement and care.

There's also an important piece about sharing information about gender diversity in age-appropriate ways. It doesn't mean you need to lecture them on the word "transgender" and what it means or the word "cisgender" and what it means. It does mean finding a book such as I'm Jay, Let's Play, by Beth Reichmuth. In this book, Jay has a skirt and does different activities. The child's pronouns are never mentioned, which could give a chance to talk about using different pronouns. Another book is When Aidan Became a Big Brother by Kyle Lukoff. This book can give you a chance to talk about children's advocacy for each other. I encourage you to look these books up. There are books out there that have stories in which kids get to talk about themselves or be themselves and they aren't necessarily within those pieces. It's also looking at books like Goodnight, Goodnight, Construction Site by Sherri Duskey Rinker and changing the pronouns.

Give kids access to that ever-expanding universe of how we get to talk about ourselves. For me, it was a thing that I had to practice, a thing I felt scared to say in the school I was working at in the time, saying we can be boys, girls, both and neither, and that it's not up to me, it's up to you about who you are. You get to tell me who you are. For me, that meant starting with my boss with that conversation before I started with the kids. It's so important to keep taking those steps. The other piece that we really wanted to highlight is to not think about this as one circle time or one diversity Tuesday or one isolated unit, but that this is a part of all of our days. This is a part of serving food. Think about all those levels of the day and where the gender binary might be creeping into your thinking, whether that's saying, "Oh, boys and girls, let's do this." A friend of mine's child said, "So, excuse me, but where do the kids go?" This is part of our whole routine, otherwise, it gets very isolated and that can perpetuate bias in young children's minds.

This Ask the Expert is an edited excerpt from the course, Supporting Gender Diversity in Early Childhood, presented by Flynn, N. and Nicholson, J.