Christmas is coming up and I have some present woes. I’m buying presents for my four and a half-year-old niece and it is causing me to ponder a lot.

It’s not really a problem. She’s a lovely little girl and I know things that she likes. It would be easy to find something she would enjoy. But it’s hard to leave it at that because she is one of those people; she is a really girly girl.

Pink

There is a certain color scheme here

I want to respect her right to be girly. I want to respect that she likes pink dresses, stories about daft princesses in pink dresses, pink accessories and pink décor in general, make believe tea parties, play stoves and play cleaning equipment, Barbie dolls, Bratz dolls, and so on. I really should respect that. But it’s hard.

I know that she is allowed to like those things. Even though I think women who don’t adhere to feminine stereotypes are more fun, I don’t want to force them to be “manly” or anything. It is her choice and she can like pink princesses if she wants.

But at the same time I feel like maybe it isn’t her choice. Has society just convinced her that she needs to like those things? Would she perhaps enjoy other things more if she was just exposed to them?

I don’t know, and that’s where my woes originate. It’s hard to decide if I should try to initiate some sort of campaign to let her see another world; a world where women don’t have to enjoy cooking, cleaning and being pretty princesses unless they want to. In short, I’m wondering if I should give her toys meant for boys.

I’m not the only one thinking like this; my sister and I have discussed this before and she is totally with me. She thinks that there is just too much pink, too much cute and too much girly stuff in my niece’s life. We’ve talked about buying her things that don’t adhere to those stereotypes. It seems like an easy enough solution.

It seems right too. She’ll still have her pink and ultra-girly stuff; she’ll just have some non-girly stuff as well, so she can choose for herself. But on the other hand I feel like things don’t really work like that for someone that age…

I remember how it is being a child. If she gets things that aren’t what she already likes for Christmas she’ll be disappointed. She probably won’t see them as an opportunity to explore something new.

I guess I’ll have to think about it some more. I want to give her presents that she is happy with now and not just make some misdirected political statement, but at the same time I feel like I should seize the opportunity to show her a direction she might not have considered.

And of course I do realize that I’m thinking too much about it. With the attention span of a typical kid that age it probably won’t really matter in the long run.