When I first saw the cover of I Look Like A Girl, by Sheila Hamanaka, I thought the story was going to be about a boy who everyone thinks is a girl. Instead, I found an inspiring story about girls with big imaginations who do more than play princess. I came up with a theory that the seed for this story came from these lines:
Throw out those glass slippers.
Send the fairies to sleep.
No prince is waiting for me.
As a parent of girls, I am drawn to stories that rewrite the rescuing prince myth. However, in the context of this very poetic book, I found these lines to be the weakest, so I changed them! Send the fairies to sleep.
No prince is waiting for me.
After reading the story a few hundred times, a melody came to me and I started singing it. Each time one of my children or daycare children brought the book to me, I'd ask if s/he wanted me to read it or sing it and s/he always requested that I sing it. So here goes.
Caution: Mother Singing
We fell into the princess trap slowly in our family, and I'm partly to blame. We don't watch TV and the children didn't start watching videos until they were three, so I had a lot of control over our household cultural artifacts. And if you knew me, you'd know I'm not a model princess.
It all started innocently enough: one of the board books that entered nap/bed time rotation was a brief version of The Nutcracker. After reading the story to my daughter countless times, and explaining that the illustrations were based on a ballet, I decided she should see the ballet. Enter Grampa and his gifts of three different versions on DVD. So things are going well--the only movie we watch is a ballet, nice and elitist. Perfect. Of course, there are other ballets out there. Sure enough, we get Coppelia, Sleeping Beauty, Swan Lake, Cinderella.
Then it hits me: am I being fair to the children? After all, there are cartoon versions of Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella (and also, I will discover later, Swan Lake). Shouldn't I share those with the girls, too? It didn't feel like a cliff, but it was. After that, we were fully in the pink (okay, purple and pale blue, too). In trying to offer some kind of balance, I would strut around saying that sleeping for a hundred years waiting for some guy to kiss you is no way to go through life! But still the princess backpacks, dolls, and dress-up dresses piled up.
I Look Like A Girl is an easy book for me to love. The artwork is gorgeous, the world it creates is full of spiritual magic. I love it because it celebrates the strength of girls and the freedom to explore whatever rolls interest them. As I've said before, I've gotten a lot of mileage out of three little words, "Some people believe..." Some people believe that women aren't as smart as men. Some people believe that women aren't worth as much as men. Some people believe that a woman can't be president. Crazy, huh?
3 comments:
We attempted no tv, not getting the boy involved in mass culture thing, but he got fixated on construction equipment, trucks, dirt just from driving around town.
We then would go to the Supermarket and even there the checkout aisle has wee little versions of the things he loved.
He still isn't allowed to watch regular tv. Sunday morning is Bob the Builder, Thomas the Train time for him.
When we pick out books to read at the bookstore, he inevitable wants the latest tome about construction equipment.
We get him "The Itsy Bitsy Spider" too.
I am going to buy that for G/Son!
We have a TV but no cable, which has been very helpful in monitoring and limiting program exposure. Plus, we have a kick ass library system in Cleveland and in Cuyahoga County in general, so anything we really want to see, if it's on DVD, we can get it.
One of the best things about only having rabbit ear antennas is that we get all the basic channels (CBS, ABC, all that) but we also get PBS, so for the first four years of her life, cartoons essentially meant the PBS brand which are tame fare indeed. Actually kid appropriate level shows.
There may be plenty of Clifford the Big Red Dog merchandise available, but it's not as ubiquitous as, say, Dora the Explorer (Nickelodeon). Once at the store, I saw a Dora potty training seat. Now, why?
At any rate, the best side effect of having this kind of control over media exposure is that my daughter has remained a child longer than many of her cousins. She hasn't been forced/tricked into thinking that she has to immerse herself in shows with casts significantly older than herself (High School Musical anyone?) and begin acting all grown up.
At the same age, one of her cousins was watching Moulin Rouge and thought the courtesan characters were princesses. Thus, this four year old would climb on a table and do her "sexy dance." Frankly, it creeped me out. At eight, she is still doing "sexy dances."
My daughter, on the other hand, thinks Bratz dolls are total crap and has barely any interest in Barbies or any of that stuff. Though she is completely absorbed by the color pink.
Now, to be fair, she gets a lot of princess exposure from stuff Grandma buys (we have an enormous Cinderella-Barbie castle that was apparently too good a price for Grandma to pass up) and she's watched Sleeping Beauty and the like, but her preference is for much different fare.
Her current favorite is The Backyardigans (on DVD from the library, thanks very much) which is probably hands down one of the best cartoons I've ever seen for kids. Imaginative adventures by five animal kids with different characters taking the lead. Actually really well written music and songs (Evan Lurie from The Lounge Lizards writes the music), and it's amusing enough to me that I can sit through it with her (even repeated viewings).
There's very little princess stuff in it and the times they've touched on queens and princesses it's never been a dainty rescue-me scenario.
With her starting school this year, I've been watching her interests and what ideas she comes home from school with to see how regularly interacting with kids with TVs and much more TV exposure has affected her. After four months, she's still a kid. Huzzah!
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