ABSTRACT
Along with other social institutions like schools, media, and peer cultures, parents play a critical role in the social construction of heterosexuality in early childhood. In this chapter, I draw on qualitative interview data collected from parents of three-to-five-year-old children to explore how parents often support and sometimes resist heteronormativity, including the particularly central role of heterosexual fathers. I argue that as parents juggle their own beliefs and feelings with the social forces around them, they fall into five basic patterns: from a group I call naturalizers, who view gender differences as rooted in nature even while they pursue actions that craft those very differences, to resisters, who try to dismantle childhood gender patterns but cautiously and with great anxiety about the reactions their children may face. In their approaches to children’s gender, these parents open new options while falling into old traps as well; I highlight the traps that reproduce heteronormativity. I conclude the chapter with attention to the possibilities for social change, and the role that parents as well as other social actors and institutions can play in loosening gendered and heteronormative constraints on children and on societies more broadly.
