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Sarah Alsharqi

October 31, 2016

Field project

For this project I chose to study kids. To me kids are the most basic form of humans, their socialization with the outside world is somewhat still limited. I went to the cherry creek mall playground. I got there at two in the afternoon sat around for two hours, at first nothing was really striking, as everyone would expect the girls were in pink and dresses and the boys were in jeans and shirts. Considering that it’s halloween weekend I also got the opportunity to observe choices of costumes, it was a little bit worrying that almost all the boys were in superheros costumes a very muscular looking superheros, girls on the other hand were in tutus, princess costumes, little mermaids, and there were two girls that were dressed up in Broncos jerseys, one was I would say seven, and a little baby who appears to be two years of age, both were not related. I was very curios to see how appearance plays into gender, although not many were challenging gender norms of appearances, I have noticed that when a kid is dressed “unusual” like the two girls in the Broncos jerseys, both have had some ways to establish their gender by hair length or hair accessories. Another six year old boy was wearing a necklace but I could not tell if it was just a chain, and since it’s halloween the kid might be in a gangster costume, the necklace was gold and long and he was wearing a baggy t-shirt and drop waist jeans. The reinforcement of gender is a repetitive theme, and appearances are highly dependent on how one can interpret it.

The kids were mostly escorted by their parents, I would say there was same amount there was mothers than there was fathers, my expectations were that there will be more mothers than fathers. I could not tell their sexuality, but given that most of them were with their partners, I would say almost all of them were hetersexual parents. An interesting theme that I have noticed is that parents were grouped up in groups within their own gender/sex, conversations were solely exchanged between parents of the same sexes, or they would be seating in an all dads or moms group all together.

After a while, I started to notice some patterns in the kid’s actions while playing, there were two small instances that stood out to me, the first one was with two siblings a boy and girl, the boy was older than the girl I would say he was 7 or 8, and the girl was 4 or 5. All the time they were playing the boy kept an eye on his sister. They first caught my attention, when the girl claims up the biggest dinosaur the playground and she gets scared to come back down to the ground, so her brother claims up puts in arms around her waist and brings her down, after that I see them running and playing and every time the girl would leaves her brother and someone comes and pushes her he comes running to her. I could not make the distinction if the brother felt obligated to protect her because he is the man or if he was just being the older sibling. Even before doing this project, my mom used to tell me all kinds of stories about my brother always trying to protect me when we go out to play when we were kids, but she had never mentioned stories about or older sister protecting my brother who is younger than her. This only raises the question of whether boys are being raised in a way that they feel obligated to be the “saviors” or “protectants” in opposed to girls like that little girl waiting to be rescued by the male.

The second instance, was with a group of 2 boys and two girls ages 4-5, the two boy were running around the playground and the two girls behind them, one boy jumps on the other force him to the floor aggressively bends his arms around his back sitting on top of him, and boy laying on the ground makes growling expressions on his face, the two girls form a circle around the boys and start giggling and pointing the boy on the ground. I really do not know where this is coming from, all I kept thinking about while watching them is Batman and Spiderman and the bad guys, it felt like if they were recreating the scenes from these movies. The girls were literally doing nothing but giggling, and assaulting the other kid on the floor by pointing at him, like you are not strong enough to beat the other boy, you just see all the gender stereotypes in all its forms being played in this instance, boys as violent and aggressive girl praising the tougher more aggressive boy.

Furthermore, as I sat around I started thinking what if the playground sitting was different what if instead of the dinosaur theme which can be attributed to the “boys culture”, what if the whole sitting was in pink and glitter, would any boys be okay to play? I could not help but think, that even though dinosaurs are more of “boy toys” the little girls saw no problem to play, and I think this idea stems from the notion of hyper-masculinity and homophobia in the male culture. Its is more acceptable for young girls to play with toys that are meant for boys but it is a threatening when a boy wants to play with girl toys.

The playground was filled with kids from all ages, 2-8 years of age. Segregation in the playground is no issue for the younger kids ages 2-5, but I have noticed that the older the kids are the more you see them playing with other kids from their own sex/gender, I wonder why that is. It was pretty hard to find a make a conclusion out of that, but we can relate this to socialization, as older as the kids get the more they socialize with the world and the more they learn and adapt to gender roles and gender stereotypes, the younger kids are too young and have not yet been exposed to gender norms.

Finally, making sense of the things we see is challenging on one hand you want to deliver a fair analysis of what you see while also trying to break it down to understand it, and it can someone times be misleading.