Gender Constructs at Play
At Wilston-Grange Kindergarten, children between the ages of 3.5 and 4.5 years are engaged in loosely structured play for much of the day, as they build social skills and begin to explore who they are, away from the supervision of their parents. Over my four visits to Wilston-Grange, I observed an environment buzzing with energy. A regular day at the kindy begins with a couple of hours spent playing outdoors before breaking for morning tea. The children then spend another couple of hours inside doing as they please and, after lunch, have the opportunity to nap. Show-and-tell and teacher-lead activities and discussions are weaved into the day but decisions as to how the children will spend large blocks of time are left up to the children themselves. I was quite surprised to realise that, in a large number of instances, the boys most often engaged in activities typically assigned to men – they assumed the roles of policemen and construction workers – while the girls involved themselves in role plays of positions most commonly associated with women, such as hairdressers. The boys wore Spiderman and Star Wars shirts while many of the girls dressed in pink or carried pink lunchboxes. This is certainly not to say I observed a strict divide between the behaviour or activities of the boys and girls, but I found gender constructs were at play a surprising amount for children of this age.