Gender Specific Books

Now, the other day I caught wind of a report suggesting that we should do away with gender specific books as it demeans our children?  Erm... excuse me, WHAT!  Let me start off by saying, who cares!  We have lived for decades with books written for girls and books written for boys and it hasn’t caused any ill effect on either sex (from what I can see).  Just because the title of a book says “Hardy’s book for boys” doesn’t mean it is going to burn the eyes out of any female that dares to peek inside.  Books are books! I don’ think it makes a difference whether they are written primarily for girls or boys.

The campaign ‘Let Books Be Books’ is part of the campaign ‘Let Toys Be Toys’ which asks children's publishers to take the "boys" and "girls" labels off books and "allow children to choose freely what kinds of stories and activity books interest them".

I get it, I understand – the idea is to remove the sections in a library which state ‘for girls, for boys’ so that the children can choose what they want to read without influence.  So if a boy with a proud, manly dad picks up a pink book about a princess with a magical pet butterfly, will he be able to read it because he chose it, or will the parent intervene and tell him that it is a girl’s book and that he should choose something else?  Where is the real problem here?  How much of it is society and how much of it is parenting? 

Society has dictated that pink is a girl’s colour and blue is a boy’s colour and we have simply gone along with it.  The same with toys, suggesting that trains and planes are for boys and dolls and doll houses are for girls.  It is one thing for society to dictate this; it is another for a parent to enforce it.

My little girl reads books about trains, farms, princesses and magical lands.  She also plays with cars, bikes, dolls and doll houses; because she chooses to and we as parents support her decision without question or suggestion of gender. 

You can remove the label ‘for girls and for boys’ but I do not think that this is going to prevent society from following a trend that is decades old.  So parents it’s up to you.  If your little boy plays with dolls, do you let him?  What if your little girl wants to read ‘the dangerous book for boys’, do you let her?  If the answer is no, well there’s the problem.