You’re absolutely right, except you can’t say the word “cheese” around my son without really giving him cheese! But, no, you’ve got a great point. He’s already got a little bit of play food. Imagine the space I’d save if I didn’t have a tiny kitchen in my already tiny kitchen!

I’m going to link to it if I can ever get up enough energy to write another post myself. my son has been ridiculed for being beaten up by a girl his own age, a friend’s daughter. my son is 19 months old. the critics are our sometimes horrid friends.

I want to strangle them sometimes.

A lot of kitchen things are kind of mechanical and therefore more stereotypically masculine…maybe his dad would have less of a problem with him playing with tongs or a garlic press than, um, a spatula or wooden spoon? My son hurt himself with a can opener once…can’t believe I let him play with that…but he played with it for a long time *without* hurting himself before anything happened, and it was just a pinch. More mechanical kitchen stuff: corkscrew, meat grinder, apple corer/peeler, springform pans, old-fashioned ice-cube trays with removeable ice-cube separators, hand-cranked egg beater–there’s all kinds of good stuff out there! Once “Superdad” sees how much fun your boy and his friends have with all this, the play stove, cupboards, sink, etc. may become a non-issue. Or, they may materialize on their own out of empty boxes.

I have a 7yo boy. He has long hair–we didn’t cut it until he was 2 1/2 and said he was tired of getting it in his eyes, and we stopped cutting it a year later when he said he wanted long hair again.

It’s one of the best parenting decisions we made. He gets plenty of “sweetheart”ing from strangers along with the “little man” stuff (and yes, I call him that). This makes me really happy, because boys need the loving too, just as girls need the rough n’ tumble.

He’s perfectly comfortable telling people “no, actually I’m a boy, but don’t feel bad because everyone makes that mistake because I have long hair”–doesn’t think it’s insulting to be told he looks like a girl (though he does think it’s sexist that people assume that girls have to have long hair and boys short, which is of course correct). We’ve always gone out of our way to make his clothes be as gender-neutral as possible (I’ll still buy things from the girl’s section). And yes, he had a toy kitchen when he was 2 (which I got used for about $30). Which he LOVED playing with. Now he’s moved on to loving to help with the real cooking.

I can’t urge parents of boys strongly enough to buck the gender norming that they have control over. I know I overcompensated when he was younger by actively avoiding “boy” toys for neutral or girl toys–because I knew everyone else would get him plenty of boy stuff and that way he’d have a balance. And it worked: he loves “girl” movies along with boy ones, doesn’t have a problem with female protagonists in stories, and loves cute things and flowers as much as he does legos and Star Wars. And because some of his preferences buck the norms, he’s learned (with help) how to talk to people about that.

And contrary to a lot of the worrying I got, and continue to get, he’s confident and popular with his teachers and his peers. Partly, I think, because he’s gotten the chance to explore a *lot* of things and decide what *he* likes, and has always gotten his parents’ backing on that.

I am going to get him a kitchen set when he’s a bit older. He plays with the fake food at daycare all the time, and with my pots and pans already. I just have to find an affordable not-pink one.

He loves his trucks, or anything with wheels, and has a bit of a fear response to dolls, which is puzzling. He likes balls and is big for his age–so we’re getting “football” comments already. He may be “lucky” enough to easily fit the roles that are going to be expected of him, but we’ll do our best to help him see that there’s always more out there.