Pre-school visit

On Tuesday April 2nd, I went to school with my daughter. It was her birthday and I wanted to spend the day with her.  While at her school there were many small things that I saw that pertained to gender.  Mostly the situations were when the children were playing or when lining up for lunch time or to go to the bathroom.  One situation that really stuck out to me was when the children had "free time," a time where they get to play whatever they wanted. My daughter along with other children both boys and girls, were playing. I was not playing much, but facilitating their playtime because, their younger children and they aren't so good at sharing. I looked over to tell a pair of children to share and then when I look back at one of my daughters classmates,  the first thing I heard was "look their humping".I looked at the little girl and she had two dolls, she was moving the boy doll on top of the girl doll.  She said it twice before I actually told her to stop, I was so shocked!!I was at a loss of  words,  at what she was doing. Luckily I was the only one that noticed her doing this, the other kids were busy playing with the dolls and playhouse.

I could not wrap my head around what had just happened because it was such an unexpected thing. I expected to see kids not sharing with each other because they were boys or girls, but to actually see someone doing that was so surprising.  As we have learned in previous class, about Piaget's stages of Cognitive Development, at age 4/5 (Preoperational stage) children are beginning to represent the world with words and images; these words and images reflect increased symbolic thinking and go beyond the connection of sensory information and physical action. This could explain the the child's reenactment of something that she could have witness but its still hard to think that at such a young age some children are witnessing sex. Obviously I don't know how the child knows about this, it could be through the parents, TV or other things, but still.. Also the language that the little girl used was not "sex" but "humping" this could also come to conclude the type of language that might be spoken around her at home.

Another thing that I found interesting, besides that fact that she did that "humping" action with the dolls, is that the dolls that she used were of her own race, African American.  I found this interesting because this could also potently signal that she could have seen someone close to her in a similar situation, or that she simply prefers to play with dolls that share things in common with her.

Even more interesting, when I was looking for a picture for the blog I googled the doll names and things showed but not what I was looking for. I had to google more specifically, black loving family dolls and I found this picture. A nice little family with  4 children. This was interesting because when I googled  "loving family" a white doll family showed up but they had no more than three children, yet the black family had 4 children in it.. coincidence or on purpose??
Why is it that society would attribute a large amount of children to minority families than white. We could say that because typically minorities do have larger families because they might not have the resources to birth control and to doctors,  but then again, it could just be society's construction and way of portraying minorities to younger children and in a way teaching or showing them what their families could possibly look like when they get older.