One of Saskia’s preschool teachers* also taught her next oldest brother. Her teacher noted, rightly, that Remy was truck obsessed during his tenure in that young preschooler classroom. Indeed, he was. A word he pronounced carefully and slowly, as if to revel in it, was con-struct-tion. We spent hours upon hours upon days upon days just across the street from our house one summer watching a giant hole be dug and shored up when pipes were being replaced. We could barely get to and fro the preschool when there was construction en route.
Their shared teacher noted that I seemed unworried about Remy’s preoccupation with vehicles and observed I do not embrace Saskia’s interest in princesses nearly so readily.
“Why?” he wondered aloud.
“Why?” I wondered aloud in response.
I thought about it for a few minutes. Then, I said I’d had one truck-and-construction-crazed boy before Remy, so I understood that time-honored phrase this too shall pass. I’d also had a boy without one fiber of curiosity about transportation. The pretty concerns—princesses, jewelry, how ballerinas walk, or what she will and won’t wear—are new, for me, with a girl. More than anything, though, it is not her I’m worried about. I am concerned by how much more marketed to girls are, the retch-worthy kazillions of dollars that go into such things as beauty products aimed at a tween audience. It’s that for a little girl she is growing into the marketing.
About my scrappy gal no matter how much pink she adorns herself with at age three, I am not personally worried. Sure, she covets my jewelry and every single shoe that comes into the mudroom is tried on and sure, she likes her baby dolls. She can rough it up. She can kick a mean soccer ball. She rides her tricycle like it’s an off-road vehicle. And she plays with our toy cars, trucks, and the ambulance. Earlier today, in fact, I found the cars as she’d left them after playing with them for a good stretch.
**
As for the notion that you should let children love what they love, I say, yes of course.
One tot I knew very well (now all grown up) attended the Hampshire College Children’s Center two decades (plus) ago and he and his pals were truck obsessed. Only they called trucks, “dadoos.” All twelve toddling kiddoes called them by that name and that’s pretty much what all twelve kiddoes—primarily boys in that group, but the girls as well—played with. Sometimes, I subbed in the infant room and one morning I went in and learned the teachers had decided to rotate the wheeled vehicles out for a bit. The teachers, it turned out, were tiring of the kids playing the same game repeatedly.
Here was the game: each child would procure a dadoo. The kids would roll their vehicles around the low, round tables while repeating, “Dadoo, dadoo, vroom.”
You can appreciate this game might just wear itself a bit thin—for the teachers at least.
Instead of finding trucks that morning, the kids discovered little animals had been put on the shelves.
The kids each grabbed an animal. They waddled toward the round tables. And then, they commenced their game—the animals their motor substitutes—repeating, “Dadoo, dadoo, vroom.”
*the ever most wonderful Dave Harmon
