The Girl Who Climbed Trees: Understanding What We're Up Against

There is a tree at the edge of a small park in Portland, Oregon, that has become something of a landmark among the children who live nearby. It is not an especially beautiful tree—short-trunked, broad-canopied, its branches reaching out in every direction like open arms. It would not make the cover of a nature magazine. But every afternoon in the spring and summer, a child climbs it. Her name is Maya.

Maya is five years old. She has dark braids held in place with bright yellow barrettes, a gap between her front teeth that her grandmother says makes her look like a bright and hungry squirrel, and a complete absence of any doubt about whether she belongs up in that tree. She climbs with the focused intensity of a small mountaineer, her hands finding holds her father didn't even know were there, her feet testing branches before committing her full weight. From the topmost safe perch, she surveys her kingdom: the playground below, the houses beyond, the cats walking along fence posts, the world itself spread out beneath her like a map she is just beginning to learn to read.

And every single time she climbs, someone calls out to her.

"Be careful, Maya!"

"Maya, come down from there—you'll fall!"

"Honey, that's not really a place for little girls."

That last one comes from a neighbor. The first two usually come from her father, who loves her so fiercely that his worry sometimes arrives in the world a half-second before his reason does. Maya's response, always, is to look down from her perch with an expression that seems to say: *I've got this.* And she almost always does.

But something is happening here—something so small and so common that most adults don't even notice it. Every time someone calls Maya down from that tree, every time someone tells her to be careful when what she is actually doing is being brave and capable and wonderfully alive, an invisible thread is being pulled. It is a thread connected to who Maya believes she is allowed to be, what she is permitted to want, how much space she can take up in the world. It is one thread among thousands, woven into the fabric of her childhood, and by the time she is old enough to notice the fabric at all, it will feel so natural that she will believe she chose it herself.

This is the nature of the forces we are going to explore in this book. They are not dramatic. They do not announce themselves. They arrive in the world dressed as concern, as tradition, as simple common sense. *Little girls don't climb trees. Little girls are gentle. Little girls should sit properly. Little girls should be quiet.* And because these messages are so small, so ordinary, so thoroughly woven into the everyday texture of family life, school culture, peer interaction, and media representation, they slip past our defenses without so much as a whisper.

Until we learn to listen.

Until we learn to see.

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Maya's story is not unusual. In fact, it is so ordinary that it could be the story of almost any little girl in almost any neighborhood in almost any country in the world. Research conducted across dozens of cultures has consistently found that parents, teachers, and other adults speak differently to boys and girls from the very earliest moments of their lives—often without any awareness that they are doing so. A 2016 study published in the journal *Language and Communication* found that adults used significantly more safety-related language ("be careful," "don't climb," "watch out") when speaking to girls as young as two years old, while boys were more likely to receive encouraging language about exploration and physical challenge ("you can do it," "try that," "great jump"). The researchers noted that this difference emerged regardless of the adult's gender, the child's actual risk-taking behavior, or any conscious intention to treat the children differently.

Let that sink in for a moment. A two-year-old girl and a two-year-old boy stand at the base of the same tree. An adult approaches. The adult doesn't pause to consult their own beliefs about gender. They don't consciously decide to speak differently. And yet: *be careful* to the girl, *you can do it* to the boy. The words come out almost automatically, shaped by cultural grooves so deep that they function like instinct.

This is what developmental psychologists call gender socialization—the process by which children learn the behaviors, attitudes, and expectations that their culture associates with being male or female. It is one of the most powerful and pervasive forces in human development, and it begins not in adolescence or even in kindergarten, but in infancy. In fact, it begins before infancy ends.

Consider this landmark finding from the field of developmental psychology: by the age of two to three years old, most children have developed a basic understanding of gender categories. They know whether they are a boy or a girl. They can correctly identify the gender of other people in photographs. They begin to understand that gender is a stable characteristic—that a boy who puts on a dress doesn't become a girl, any more than a girl who puts on a baseball cap becomes a boy. This milestone, known in the research literature as gender categorization, typically emerges between 18 and 30 months and represents one of the earliest and most significant cognitive achievements of early childhood.

But here's what makes this finding so important for our purposes: once a child understands that gender categories exist, they immediately begin looking for information about what those categories *mean*. And they are exquisitely attuned to the social environment around them—every glance, every word, every reaction—to figure out what they are supposed to be. The psychologist Lynda M. Sagrestano described this process as children becoming "active social detectives," scanning their world for clues about gender norms with a level of attention and motivation that researchers compare to the intensity with which they learn language.

In practical terms, this means that Maya—the two-year-old Maya, the three-year-old Maya, the four-year-old Maya—is not just hearing the comments about the tree. She is *interpreting* them. She is taking those words, those tones of voice, those worried looks from adults, and using them to build a model of what kind of person she is allowed to be. She is doing this at an age when her brain is growing faster than it will at any other point in her life, when neural connections are forming at a rate of approximately one million per second, when the architecture of her self-concept is being laid down with a permanence that will shape everything that comes after.

And she is not alone. Every single one of the millions of little girls around the world is doing the same thing. They are all collecting the same invisible data. They are all building the same kinds of internal models. And they are all, in the process, receiving messages—subtle, contradictory, and sometimes openly limiting—about what they can be, what they should want, and how much space they are allowed to occupy.

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To understand how deeply these messages penetrate, we need to trace them back to their sources. There are four primary channels through which gender stereotypes reach children in their earliest years: family, school, peers, and media. Each of these channels has its own distinct character, its own mechanisms of influence, and its own particular power to shape a girl's sense of possibility. In this chapter, we will focus primarily on the family—because it is the first and in many ways the most influential environment in a child's life, and because it is the place where parents have the most direct power to either reinforce limiting messages or interrupt them.

The family is where gender socialization begins, and it begins almost immediately. Researchers have documented what they call the "gender parenting gap"—a term that describes the measurable