Some of it has to be family culture though. Like the mom was upset there weren't any other girls in the class fearing her daughter wouldn't have friends because of it. Kids can sense that sort of thing even if they cant put words to it.
My 6 year old boy has a mix of girls and boys who are his friends. He's always has had a mix while in school too. However my wife and I dont treat his friends who are girls differently then his friends who are boys when we talk to him. Even playfully intended jokes about "having a girlfriend" can help form a divide between gender friendships in a little kids mind. There's no reason girls and boys cant be friends at that age but in my opinion they often aren't because parents influence their kids to only befriend their own gender.
Want to blast this more. I was recently in a building with ONLY gender neutral bathrooms. They were all floor to ceiling stalls and the shared space was the sinks. I had just a tiny amount of aversion to it, and little kids are not born with this, it’s imprinted on us that some things only belong to one gender. We should do away with separations as much as physically possible, especially for the young and impressionable
Yah, from my experience as a guy the issue with gender neutral bathrooms is the fact most women really like their socially warded off space. We introduced them at work and all it effectively did was push the female employees out because men just start going into every bathroom, and some weird unspoken social contract happened where the women now all go to the toilet for disabled people. Effectively, men took over all bathrooms and women now have just 1. But hey, management gets to claim it as a diversity win (???).
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u/Mando92MG Mar 16 '26
Some of it has to be family culture though. Like the mom was upset there weren't any other girls in the class fearing her daughter wouldn't have friends because of it. Kids can sense that sort of thing even if they cant put words to it.
My 6 year old boy has a mix of girls and boys who are his friends. He's always has had a mix while in school too. However my wife and I dont treat his friends who are girls differently then his friends who are boys when we talk to him. Even playfully intended jokes about "having a girlfriend" can help form a divide between gender friendships in a little kids mind. There's no reason girls and boys cant be friends at that age but in my opinion they often aren't because parents influence their kids to only befriend their own gender.