If it’s so innate, why does the child have long hair? Is it perhaps the parents enforcing a gender role upon a child and through the interaction continue to enforce a gender role upon the child?

Sometimes it doesn’t take much to really impact someone. There was a story I remember hearing about how a family had tried to raise their kids without specific gendered expectations and the son was really into something traditionally feminine. It was only after his friends came over and gave him a weird look over it that suddenly he immediately dropped the interest because he was told very clearly through the reactions of his peers that what he was doing was “wrong.” I imagine the exact same thing has happened with this child. From my own personal experience, as a child I had a high pitched singing voice and one day I was singing in the car because I loved to sing and my aunt laughed and laughed and laughed at how girly I sounded. I can barely sing in front of people to this day because even after coming out as trans and realizing that it was bullshit, the experience has made me deeply uncomfortable singing near people lest they laugh at me again, though this time for having too deep of a voice I suppose.

Normal people: “ thank you comrade daughter for wanting me to be part of your life and share your happiness with me.”

White conservatives: “ did you know my daughter has a crush on me? She kept telling me to brush her hair…”

When i was a little kid and my dad would wash me in the bath he would shampoo my hair into funny shapes and then I would put on a towel and run to show my stepmom

I did this because she was the only one who hadn’t seen how funny my hair looked, not because of some bizarre Oedipus complex

The fun thing is that if your family isn’t as cringe, then yes, the kids will run to show what they like and feel acknowledged, to share their joy and validate it and their connections, to each person they like, which often are parents, siblings, and other people, too.

That her daughter is running to her father might mean that he isn’t doing so much care work and that the mother is more present or even over present? In other words shaping gender norms in families.

I have to say having spend time with small kids and seeing them grow, the first couple of years - which adults don’t really remember - do so much in terms of how kids think and what they see as usual it is absurd.

It’s so weird that they were brushing their kid’s hair, had this fuckin bananas thought, then took a picture and overlayed said bananas thought in text over said hair. Just a completely different type of brain lol.

If you don’t understand subliminal coding, I question your capability as a parent to understand the effect you’re having on your child.

Taking a normal parent-child interaction and making it sound as creepy as possible

My kid does this with my wife, and myself, and sometimes both of us at the same time.

Kids show off to their parents.

Don’t make this weird.

Most sane white people

putting on clothes is literally a learned behavior. what would it even mean for gender to be “innate” at this point?

like it’s not even “nature” vs “nurture,” it’s that “nature” is a useless and meaningless framing of manifestly human activities and concepts.

Wait I don’t understand the masculine feminine dynamics as innate part

Is she saying they because her 3 year old child mentioned Dad over any of her female family members, that only heterosexuality is valid?

Potential explanations for this behavior:

1. Confirmation bias
2. The father is quicker to complement the daughter
3. The mother is quicker to criticize the daughter
4. The mother already knows how pretty the hair is because she was the one brushing it
5. The mother was taking pictures of the process and seemed distracted
6. The father participates in less care tasks (brushing hair can uncomfortable and boring and explaining why it’s necessary can be upsetting, so if the mother is taking on all that work, the father gets off the hook implicitly and doesn’t suffer the negative backlash)
7. The father is normally the one who brushes her hair
8. This behavior is modeled by the mother showing off her hair to the father

Note that none of these explanations involve the innate sexual preferences and desires of literal children