A mum was attacked for handing out lunch boxes at her daughter's party and got called out for being gender discriminative.
Mum, Katy, held a birthday party for her 6-year-old daughter and decided as a return gift to the children who came, to give each child a lunch box and water bottle set.
“I thought it'd be fun if each kid got a lunch box filled with food and juice in the bottle, and they could take the box/bottle home also easier for me to clean up,”
For this reason, Katy chooses Frozen for girls and Spiderman for boys.
On the day of the party, Katy got the kids in a line and asked them to each pick a lunch box. “They just pointed to which one they wanted, which ended up being all the girls went for Frozen and the boys went for Spidey,” she added.
The whole party ended up bitterly when one mum spotted two different types of lunch boxes for the children and blamed Katy for being gender-biased and enforcing gender norms on impressionable young children.
"She asked me if I did that on purpose, to which I replied, 'yes, I bought Frozen for girls and Spiderman for boys because I thought it'd be cute'," the mum explained.
"She went on to say that I was ‘enforcing gender norms on impressionable young children and ‘stuck in the 1900s’,” Katy recalled.
Katy tried to calm her down by offering her child a spiderman lunch box but that didn't help.
"I was a bit baffled and said that was not my intention at all, and if her daughter wanted the Spiderman set I would be more than happy to give it to her since I had extras.
"She said that's not the point and I shouldn't have been giving out things based on gender in the first place. I told her it's not really that deep, to which she huffed and took off. I thought about it and am wondering if it was a bad idea to have 'gendered' lunch sets and give stereotypical girl things to the girls and stereotypical boy things to the boys?"
“She said that's not the point and I shouldn't have been giving out things based on gender in the first place,” Katy continued.
“I just told her that it's not really that deep, to which she huffed and took off.
“I thought about it and am wondering if it was a bad idea to have 'gendered' lunch sets and give stereotypical girl things to the girls and stereotypical boy things to the boys,” Katy said.
She added she had the children form a line to retrieve their lunchboxes, and gave them the choice of which one they wanted.
"Which ended up being all the girls went for Frozen and the boys went for Spidey," the mum said.
"The reason I handed them out instead of leaving them out on a table for them to grab was that I didn't want the kids to fight over one another to try and get food, I thought it'd be easier if I gave them out one by one."
Reference:
Mum Slammed Handing Out Gendered Lunch Boxes, Kidspot
