Parenting Beyond Pink & Blue ─ How to Raise Your Kids Free of Gender Stereotypes

A guide that helps parents focus on their children's unique strengths and inclinations rather than on gendered stereotypes to more effectively bring out the best in their individual children, for parents of infants to middle schoolers.

When parents place less emphasis on gender, children are free to flourish in activities and ways that are authentic to them. Parenting Beyond Pink and Blue uses everyday language and relatable situations to reveal the cutting-edge scientific research behind our cultural acceptance of outdated gender roles and our cultural focus on gender differences. This book helps parents take notice of the dangerous ways a focus on gender differences can--without meaning to--limit our kids, such as leading girls to dislike math and increasing aggression in boys. Developmental psychologist (and mother of two) Christia Spears Brown, PhD, offers practical information on how parents can be a little less gender-driven in their parenting, presenting a fresh, accessible, even humorous perspective on raising a son or a daughter--it's not about ignoring or denying gender differences, but it is about not feeling relegated to one half of Toys-R-Us. Modern parents want to raise their children as unique individuals; Parenting Beyond Pink and Blue helps them break out of the restrictive pink or blue box.

CHRISTIA SPEARS BROWN, PhD, is an associate professor of developmental psychology at the University of Kentucky. Her work on the impact of gender stereotypes on children and adolescents has been published widely in scientific journals and featured in numerous newspapers, magazines, local radio shows, NPR, and the CBS Evening News. She blogs regularly for Psychology Today in her column "Beyond Pink and Blue." She is also an expert panelist for the ACLU.