A few years ago when I had Junior Infants, we were doing our RSE lesson where we were learning the anatomical names for our sex organs. Before this lesson I purposely dressed the female doll in the blue babygrow and the male doll in the pink babygrow. Before we gave the babies a bath and discussed their sex parts, we decided to name our dolls. As I had anticipated, the children immediately came up with ‘girl’ names for the doll in pink and ‘boy’ names for the doll in blue. I allowed them to choose whatever names they wanted and then we voted on a name. When I undressed the baby to bath, then we had great conversations about what clothes people can wear and that we can’t make assumptions based on the colours that people wear on their clothes.
I found this fascinating that at such a young age our children already have these stereotypes concreted in their minds.