Our daughter is into dolls and dress-up. What are programmer parents to do? | Hacker News Reader

Our daughter is into dolls and dress-up. What are programmer parents to do?

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15 pointspron14 comments

My daughter also took to Barbie's and princesses. We weren't happy with it at first, but we decided to accept it and encourage diversity in playtime. So we introduced Lego's, nerf swords, my old Capsela kit, and tons more.

So now we have a kid that plays princesses, begs us to go to the annual Ren Faire and Comic Book Day, started building some basic programs/toys in Scratch, and regularly beats down bosses in MMO's.

Strength through diversity.

I agree.

My daughter didn't play too much with real dolls, but she liked the games in barbie.com and the dressing flash games. She also saw Disney princess movies and magazines. She also had many cloths for her penguin in Club Penguin.

We also bough her many interesting scientific games, like the games you described. I'll like to add a microscope and SnapCircuits (with a warning, the electricity from the wall is much bigger than the electricity from the battery).

Now she can program a little (she also program alone small script for Minecraft blocks), can do simple calculus including straightforward differential equations. But yesterday I was tacking with her about the 9 and 11 division rules and she didn't know the proof, so I think we have to talk more about modulo arithmetic after she finish her school exams.

Let her play with dolls, but also give her interesting scientific activities.

Frankly, there's nothing wrong if she prefers dresses and dolls.

Her friends at school will always influence her more than other sources should and at some point she will be mature enough to make her own choices.

The lower number of female engineers doesn't have to be another kind of pressure about what a girl should choose to be. A choice, sure, but hers to take.

What are programmer parents to do?

Maybe they can download a different theme that can be installed on the small human to customize its personality.

Workarounds are, of course, no substitute for investigating to find the root cause. It could be a bug in the child's firmware.

I'd form a list of all the issues, give them solid estimates, prioritize them by customer impact, and, accordingly, assign them into project milestones.

You know, maybe this dolls and princesses problem doesn't have to be solved in the current release.

Customer visibility of the problem could be managed somehow; perhaps the behavior can be confined to certain times and locations.

My gut feeling is that there maybe a priority inversion in the tiny human; the incorrect temperament threads is taking over most of the cores.

You clearly haven't read the article. They're not trying to shape their daughter but protect her from forces that do try to shape her.

The mistake is believing that there is a difference.

We have to live in this world, and this world has forces (external and internal also).

Say you're protected from these forces all your life. You still end up shaped somehow. The shaping hasn't gone away.

Protection is merely the flipside of interference.

But those forces aren't forces of nature, and we have a duty to try and shape society as we believe it should be. Accepting those forces as givens simply means yielding power to those who do care to shape society.

Well, you could take somebody who might do very well in another field--law, medicine, education--and with careful pressure turn her into an unhappy mediocre programmer (or any combination of <happy .. miserable> x <great .. bad> programmer). Or you could consider, and I know this is hard for parents, that your child is not yourself, and let your child figure it out.

Have you read the article? They aren't concerned about her not turning out a scientist or a programmer, but about the endless stream of social cues pressuring her in an opposite direction. They want to remove pressure so that she's actually free to choose.

I hadn't. I have now, and my opinion has not much changed. I've been acquainted with a few girls who went through the princess bit at about four and got over it.

The point is not about "getting over it" but about the fact that our society constantly sends certain signals to women. Of course many women can get over it, but that doesn't mean society shouldn't change the signals.

You should admit defeat and buy her dancing lessons so she's prepared for her onstage career.

Perhaps men really think with their dicks :-) LOL

Ok, but seriously, present her Princess Leia, and how she programs R2D2 to go and deliver a message to Obiwan Kenobi.

Or otherwise, present her with true princesses, enclosed in their castles, and sending (programming) knights to go to war to bring her riches. (Yes, programming is messy, if not for the programmer/princess, for the computer/knight doing the work). :-)

Those Usians... no sense of humour!

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