At a kids’ museum, a group of girls celebrating a birthday arrived resplendent in long dresses with full skirts, bows, and furbelows. The other children wore jeans or slacks. The only way to tell whether the littlest ones were girls or boys was by hair length, but that wasn’t always reliable.

The most obvious gender choice by moms was that some wore high heels while most wore flats. The few dads wore the same unisex clothes as the moms.

What struck me most was the time boys and girls sorted themselves out by gender stereotype with no input from parents. The girls worked behind the counter of a “restaurant’ with plastic food and real menus, preparing whatever their moms, sitting at the counter, ordered. No boys in the kitchen.

Meanwhile a group of boys, including my grandson, played with a large, clever, Rube Goldberg type machine that required them to put colored plastic balls in either of two openings. From one insertion point, the balls went on a journey aided by various moving parts that eventually spit them out—to be collected again. The other entry point led to a machine that circulated the balls and then shot them out into a tube that ran across the ceiling and dumped them in a wire cage. When a child pulled a rope attached to the cage, it opened and dumped the balls—on me or on whoever else was sitting on the tractor underneath the cage.

The boys squabbled over control of the balls and what to do with them but quickly sorted themselves out, sharing tasks, except  for one—an unsmiling mini-bureaucrat—who complained if anyone else picked up the balls and put them in a carrying box, asserting, “That’s my job!”

Watching these boys, I remembered the early days of feminism when Lois Gould wrote Baby X, the story of a baby whose parents kept its gender a secret. The idea was that children should be allowed to be themselves while peopled treated them not as a girl or a boy but simply as a person. I thought she was making a swell point and in my son’s first years tried not to impose masculine stereotypes.

Imagine my surprise when my toddler became fascinated with road equipment, something no girl I’ve known cared about. If I wanted to give him a special treat and I knew where a road was being improved, all I had to do was drive slowly past the sight and let him ogle the machinery. His favorite book was Richard Scarry’s big book of machines and road equipment. And one of the high points of my son’s first years was getting to climb on the bulldozer (“buh-doh-doh”) that was putting in our new septic tank

A year or so later, my young son focused on dinosaurs, as did all the boys he played with. The little girls did not care about large equipment or dinosaurs. Before long, my son was pretending sticks were guns. His father and I agreed not to buy him a gun, because we didn’t want to glamorize guns. Then one day he was playing at a friend’s house when the mom called me and said she had given my son one of her son’s toy guns (with her son’s permission). She explained that my son was obsessed with guns. She had three sons and had tried to raise them without guns—until the day one of them stole another boy’s gun at kindergarten. She said my son was headed in the same direction, and if we didn’t allow him a toy gun, he, too, might steal one. I sadly thanked her, and my son kept the toy riffle and played with it often.

These days, I haven’t seen any guns in the playgrounds, but the playgrounds are designed so creatively that the children don’t need to bring in toys. There is plenty to do without them. But while the boys wear more or less the same clothes their dads wore as boys, the girls mostly wear black tights with short, colorful dresses that just cover there bottoms.

While most kids sort themselves according to standard gender signals, not all do. Years ago, a boy who was a friend of my sisters often came to our house and dressed up in the long dresses in which they pretended to be glamorous women. My mother let him do it and didn’t tell his parents, because she thought our house was the only place he could express himself in this way. Today, a little boy in our family who likes traditional boy things also loves to wear dresses when he is playing. I was with his mom when she spotted a lovely little ballet costume in a store window and considered buying it for her son.

My take-away from watching children is that they are born with an innate sense of gender, which may or may not conform to majority ideals. Our job is to pay attention to what they’re telling us about who they are.

I wonder what experience other parents and grandparents have had as they grow with their children.