Raising Kids in Budapest: Gender Tales

My kids go to a Hungarian nursery school. I am a fan. I especially love that they eat a sit-down lunch with at least two courses. Lunch always starts with a soup. Followed by a second course of either pasta or meat and potatoes. Sometimes there is fish, though rarely. I am sure it is not organic. Sometimes they report with a near swoon, Today the soup had hotdogs in it! There is white bread. And strange meat spreads. But I overlook these things because I think the lessons learned from a shared table with real cutlery and decorum are essential. I have been to one of these lunches and it was impressive how the little ones behaved. Then I learned that the girls are always served first. Then the boys. Really? Is this benign, old-fashioned quaintness, merely? Or is it one more ingredient in an insidious pressure cooker of gender discrimination--against both girls and boys. Why can't we just go around in a circle and serve each in his or her turn? In my humble experience, the Hungarians are very specific and restrictive about gender roles. As an American mother of a daughter and son, I find it infuriating.


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Our nursery school teacher instructed me that my 3.5 year-old child, who has boy parts, should wear boy clothes and not come in dresses. I am pretty sure one teacher told me that it would cause "problems" for him later in life. (Perhaps I didn't understand the Hungarian. I could swear that she said it might even cause dyslexia!!??) The other teacher said it would cause confusion in the classroom for the other boys. Leo agreed to wear his dress to school and then change into his play clothes for inside the classroom. (It is a habit here to wear a separate outfit for classroom play.) Slowly he mostly gave up the habit.


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One day I arrived to pick up the kids. Izabella had her fingernails painted. The nursery school teachers decided it was a good idea to paint nails. They refused to paint Leo’s nails. As soon as we got home, we painted all our nails for the first time. I had never painted their nails before. I only paint my nails for special occasions, which amounts to about once year. On one hand, I was saving the activity for a rainy day. I was saving it for a special bonding moment. I suppose I was also avoiding the issue. It was easier to avoid nail polish than to deal with the chemicals and the issue of Leo also wanting to have his done. Finger nail polish is not at all a necessary part of childhood. Then the nursery school teachers took it upon themselves to not only paint the kids’ nails, but also to only paint the girls nails. The next day when it was time to go out the door to school, Leo insisted that I remove the color. He said that the teachers don’t allow boys to have nail polish. I told him that they were wrong and that boys and girls can enjoy nail polish. He removed it. We continued to reapply the paint for a few days. After several days, Leo forgot the teachers’ opinions and went to school with painted nails. Nothing was said, to me, about it.


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In the nursery school there are three bathroom stalls for the kids to use. They designate the last stall for boys. The first two stalls have curtains. The last stall does not have a curtain. My son was shy to use the “boy’s” stall because it was entirely open to those using the bathroom. Often the entire class is using the space at once, washing hands and brushing teeth at the bank of sinks along one wall. When I asked the teacher why the boy’s stall lacked a curtain, she told me that boys always make a mess and it is better if they can be seen. (Read: Girls need privacy. Boys don’t deserve it.) I first noticed this when we started the school. Since then the curtain has been replaced.


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A mother told me of a controversy at one of the local elementary schools. The policy was to keep the toilet paper at the teacher’s desk. When a student needed to use the restroom he or she had to ask the teacher for paper, indicating how much was needed. You know, #1 or #2. Put yourself back into your elementary school days, can you imagine how mortifying this would be? You can imagine that many kids had problems with constipation. Also, there was no hand soap in the bathrooms. The explanation was that it was too expensive to supply the bathrooms and that the kids wasted the supplies. When one parent offered to pay for the toilet paper and soap, it was decided that this was untenable because if they put it into the bathrooms the other classrooms would use it too. This is perhaps not a strong gender issue, but it calls to mind girls who give up school when they menstruate for lack of appropriate hygiene options at the school. We live in the modern world. Can we figure out a way to remove our excretory needs as an obstacle to learning?

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Boys play soccer. Girls do ballet. Period. Except for the brave outliers. After being in the school for over a year, I finally learned that there are two girls in soccer. I was told there were none. My daughter wanted nothing to do with a class that had no girls. They did allow Leo to do ballet. And this term they let him try aerobics. He was the only boy. I thought aerobics was great because it is movement and dance. It should be a great way to exercise and have fun. Then I learned that they trained the aerobic girls to do a pom pom routine (with real pom poms) to perform for the soccer boys in a big game against another nursery school. My daughter got out there and did the cheer. My son, who also learned the cheer, refused to participate in front of the big crowd. Did he refuse because he was stage shy? Or did he refuse because it was very clear that he was the only boy in the cheer squad and the boys were on the soccer field? Why did they need to train the aerobics class as cheerleaders? How was that necessary? It was gender training. Of course they don’t see it this way.

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My son at 4.75 will sometimes choose to dress in his sister’s clothes—a purple shirt with two large flowers and a purple skirt—to go to the park. My main complaint about this is that the skirt is too large and constantly slips off his hips. He knows the difference between “boy” and “girl” clothes. Sometimes he chooses “girl” clothes. He likes vibrant colors. Have you seen the choices for boys? All shades of brown and blue.

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Leo recently chose the same shoes as his sister, ivory-colored mary janes with small flower details on the velcro strap. I overhead the following in the sandbox:


“Ah! Your shoes are very nice. They are girl shoes,” said a little girl.


Leo continues to dig.


“Why are you wearing girl things?”


Leo digs.


“Don’t you want to have boy things?”


Leo digs.


It seems he handles these incidents by stonewalling. It usually works. (What if one day it doesn’t work. What if older, bigger, meaner kids confront him?)


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I wanted to buy two booster seats for a car trip. The salesman, who worked in a children’s high-end boutique, advised me that I should buy the smaller sized chair for my daughter. Girls grow slower and are smaller than boys. This is fundamentally wrong. It is informed by gender stereotypes. Not to mention that is entirely wrong in our family. Miss Izabella is in the 96th percentile for height, her little brother is in the 56th percentile.


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A friend’s daughter attended a private nursery school in Budapest. She arrived one day to pick up her daughter. Her daughter told her about the day’s curriculum. The teachers decided to teach about marriage. They dressed the girls as brides. The boys gave a ring to a girl and proposed. When a little boy wanted to propose to his best friend David, they teachers told him no and then laughed at him when he become tearful.

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Recently I attended an open house at an elementary school with both kids. It is time to enroll Izabella in the first grade. You are allowed to enroll at any school. Parents visit various schools and attend these open lessons to meet the teachers and form their impressions. The teachers here start a first grade class and then move up with them through the fourth grade. Selecting the right teacher is crucial as your child will work with them for the next four years. At this open house the teacher had her current fourth grade class perform a theater piece and then those students met with the little ones in a series of stations. The whole concept was based in sound pedagogy. The students acted beautifully. The only problem was the play they performed. It was an old Hungarian tale about a new housewife. When her husband leaves for work he tells their cat to cook, clean, and bring water from the well. The wife goes off to gossip with her friends. When the husband comes home he is angry that the cat did not do the work. This repeats three times (as all good tales do). At one point the husband is so angry with the "cat" that he take the cat and places it on the back of the wife and then beats the cat with a broom. (HELLO: WIFE BEATING). Then she goes to her parents for advice. They tell her to go home and be a a good wife. She goes home. She does all the cooking and cleaning. The story ends. I kept looking around the room. Surely another parent would raise an eyebrow? I was ready to walk out. Nope, not a word was spoken. All clapped with enthusiasm. Iza will not attend school there.


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I am surprised that my feminism is the source for my son’s defense. I want to create a world in which my daughter can develop her strengths and discover her talents. I imagined my motherhood as a struggle to help my daughter. Instead I find the gender landscape far more treacherous for my son.



I tell my kids the following:


There is no such thing as a “girl” color of “boy” color.


Girls and boys can do anything.


There is no such thing as a “girl” toy or a “boy” toy.


I am sure that Hungarians would refute these statements.


I also tell my kids that a boy can marry a boy. Or a girl can marry a girl.