Im sure that some of us have come across the Facebook post about the young boy who wanted to wear pink shoes to pre-kindergarten.  Sam is only 5 years old when this was posted and was a confident young boy about what he wanted to wear.  His mom tried to explain to him that the pink shoes were meant for girls, yet he did not care because “ninjas wore pink shoes too”.  Parents and children have two separate mindsets however.  Kids think that these shoes are great, yet parents don’t think that that is acceptable for him to wear solely based on the color.

In the text Wood discusses the idea of parental communication about gender.  Boys are more persuaded to not play house and girls may be dissuaded from engaging in physically aggressive sports.  Overall, gender socialization is more rigid for boys than it is for girls.  It is more accepted for a girl to do more masculine activity rather than for a young boy to do a feminine activity.    I think that this post is a message to all of us out there to let, if we decide to have kids, let them be who they are.  In this case, Sam wanted to wear the shoes not because they were pink… but because his favorite animal is a zebra.

http://ideas.time.com/2012/12/14/the-lesson-of-the-boy-in-the-pink-ballet-flats/