I have recently been having some fascinating conversations with other parents of small children about the ways in which people so desperately want to pigeonhole small children--to label them as this or that--in ways that to me often have very little to do with the child in question.

I understand the instinct, the need sometimes, to pigeonhole; I do it myself, all of the time. I do think in my case this instinct has lessened with age, in large part because I have realized how useless a tool it is in terms of actually learning anything about a person, but I am not going to lie to you: I do it, still. Don't we all? She's so superficial, I will find myself thinking about a woman I work with who mentions the labels of her designer clothing. And then I will spend a half hour surfing a site on the Internet that rents villas in Italy, not that I'm renting one in the immediate future, but still: It's not rocket science. It's not even work.  And I can talk about clothes with the best of them. Just because it's not how I like to think of myself--a clotheshorse, a fashion person--doesn't make me any less superficial than the person who's less concerned with how she's perceived.

We judge because it helps us feel better about who we are, it helps us make sense of our own insecurities, and it helps us maintain the illusion that we are making the sense of the world around us and the people who inhabit that world, although the truth is that we can't really do that, and ultimately the judging doesn't really assuage our deepest fears. But why, oh why, do we do it to children? Why can't we just let them be?

Let me be more specific, using some recent examples from the world of children I inhabit, including my own. I know a little girl whose father brings her to school each day; not a week goes by that I don't hear someone say, as the two of them pass, "Oh, look! She's such a Daddy's girl." I know a little girl who dresses in pants and shirts in navy and olive green and whose hair is cropped very short: "So boyish, such a tomboy," people murmur as she passes. There is a little boy in our building who plays dress-up and doesn't like cars; "Are you worried? He's so sensitive," a neighbor asks his parents in the lobby one afternoon.  There is Lily, who often gravitates to boys on the playground, just last weekend building sand forts with a group of five or six of them when a mother asked me, "Do you want me to try to get some of the little girls over here for her?" There is Annika, whose ears I already want to cover each time someone says to me, over her head, "I am looking and looking for signs of Lily in her."

Stop looking. No, don't call over the girls for a child who's so profoundly engaged she hasn't looked up from her play in 45 minutes, don't assume anything about a child based on her transportation arrangements (not to mention the vaguely offensive datedness of the "Daddy's girl" term), don't make a kid wear skirts if she doesn't want to or really have an opinion on it at all (don't you have anything better to do?), don't undo decades worth of work on the part of some very determined feminists by making little boys feel self-conscious if they don't feel like smashing each other over the head with blocks, don't use the word sensitive as though it means non-masculine--sensitivity is a rare and commendable commodity usually found in conjunction with wisdom and empathy and we need lots more of it in men and women--and most of all, give children the freedom to figure out who they are on their own terms, without labels they don't know and can't understand, without a lifetime of often misguided judgments on our own parts, without our own secret or overt biases and desires and fears. 

If you want for them, your children, children in general, want this. This freedom. It is perhaps more important than anything else.