“You were never allowed to have Barbies,” my mom tells me, sitting on the edge of my bed. “They just magically disappeared. Unrealistic body types … I was devastated when at five, you told me you wanted to paint your room pink.” She laughs. “But it’s just how you are.”

My mom grew up in a forward-thinking household. When she was a child, her mom made her watch the sex-ed video they played in the fifth grade. Although it embarrassed her at the time, it impresses her now. She realizes how important – and how radical – it was for her mom to ensure she received a proper sexual education. Her mom believed that all women should have the right to understand their bodies without feeling ashamed, and to have the confidence to make safe and healthy decisions in relationships. My grandma was a feminist, and she raised her three daughters to be the same.

My mom defied gender norms in college as the only female math major of her class. Later, when her colleague told her to put on heels because her new pantsuit “wasn’t acceptable work attire,” my mom replied, “That’s just too bad.”

My mom’s understanding of gender was relatively progressive: it didn’t influence capability; both genders deserved fair and equal treatment, basic human rights. She believed in fighting for women’s rights, in particular, because she knew her freedoms and opportunities were privileges not shared by many women around the world. These beliefs in equality haven’t changed, but her awareness of gender has evolved over time, “most notably,” she says, “when I became pregnant with you.” She remembers noticing how much a baby’s gender determined its identity before it was born. She also remembers beginning to differentiate between gender and sex: sex, being a baby’s biological sex, and gender, a person’s individual identity. Society equated the two and told children who to become – what colors to wear, which toys to play with, what to study, and what to like. Society assumed that all people of the same sex naturally had the same identity. These expectations were beyond my mom’s control, but she never let them influence which toys I played with or which subjects I studied. “I was so conscious of raising you that way,” she says. She actively exposed me to traditionally “boy’s” and “girl’s” toys, making sure I had equal access to both and could decide which to play with for myself. “You loved trucks,” she says, “Your first multisyllabic word was ‘front-end-loader.’ I was so proud.”

My mom never ignored my sex. Although “everything was yellow and green,” I wasn’t by any means raised gender-neutral. My mom was determined to raise a smart and independent daughter, so I grew up understanding that I could be anything I wanted. My gender wasn’t a hindrance or an advantage; as my mom puts it, “it’s just another fact about who you are.” But even though my mom made every effort to raise me unconscious of society’s expectations, she couldn’t protect me from outside influences that did otherwise.

Thanks to the internet and overexposure of media in the modern world, my mom says, “parents are no longer the only dominant influences in their children’s lives.” Literary, visual, and social media have become so prolific that we fail to stop and question them. On our iPhones, in our grocery stores, engendered consumer products seep into our minds, shaping our ideas about gender, subliminally, slowly, and surely. It’s commonplace to see “who’s pregnant,” “who’s losing weight,” and “who’s having an affair” on the shelves of our checkout lines. “It’s just the way it is,” we think. As a result, our children are taught to think that a woman’s place in the news is the tabloids, that their lives revolve around love, marriage, or beauty. Our children are taught to equate masculinity with athleticism and femininity with vanity.

My mom’s experience as a twenty-first-century parent has taught her that empowering children requires a more active effort today than ever before. She knows she can’t censor the media, so she asks us what we’re reading and watching, and trusts our judgement. She taught us to be conscious of our media, to recognize bias, and to not let stereotypes influence us. She taught us to choose what is right for us based on our own interests rather than society’s. She raised us to be feminists, as her mother did for her.