Have you considered the possibility that your family has been putting strong pressure on your son (probably against your conscious wishes) to like pink, and that he has been trying to satisfy what he perceived a parental demand? Children learn by picking up and copying parental behaviour and preferences.

If not, why not?

Possibly a bit tangential to the discussion, but there's some chance the "pink vs. blue" convention has a biological basis in respect to male/female color vision differences.

For example, red-green color blindness affects about 7% of males, and < 0.5% females. IOW on the whole males are more likely to be able to see and respond to blue than red or pink.

There's also intriguing if incomplete evidence that among humans with normal color vision, females are more likely to have finer color discrimination ability in the yellow-orange-red end of the spectrum compared to their male counterparts.

Of course, there are going to be a few males "outliers" who have superior color discrimination ability, so a boy could very well appreciate pink even if it's not as likely as it would be among girls.

>> there's some chance the "pink vs. blue" convention has a biological basis

That makes no sense to me. I'm Greek and in my neck of the woods boys and girls are not expected to wear specific colours, at least not when I was growing up.

If you do a search for Greek traditional dress you'll notice that the colours that dominate are white, black, red and some shade of brown, but they are both pretty much equally distributed between men and women.

That's empirical and maybe someone somewhere has a proper data'd study that contradicts me but you really won't find anyone who can point to examples of pink dominating women's traditional dress in Greece.

I believe the same goes for other cultures. Every time I see the traditional ornamentation of people from the Amazon, or sub-Saharan Africa for instance, vivid bright colours seem to dominate for both sexes. If I think of South-East Asian traditional dress, I get an impression of oranges, yellows, and reds for the women (who do tend to wear the most colourful stuff).

And there's nowhere a shade of pink to be found.

So I think this blue vs pink thing is definitely a cultural phenomenon and that it's really just affecting specific parts of the world.

> If I think of South-East Asian traditional dress, I get an impression of oranges, yellows, and reds for the women (who do tend to wear the most colourful stuff).

Thanks for that info, I wasn't aware of those traditions. Indeed yellow to red is the range of hues that some human females might be able to discriminate better than males. That is, the idea is females see these colors more distinctly or are more visually "sensitive" to these colors.

"Pink" is relevant because it's merely red "diluted" with white, that is, lower saturation of a red hue.

No doubt cultural influences are enormously important re: attributing colors as symbols of gender identity. I was only writing about the possible genetic/biological factors contributing to selecting which colors are assigned to males vs. females, and such factors could certainly be quite secondary.

OTOH the info you contributed is intriguing because it appears to support the hypothesis I was referring to.

>> Indeed yellow to red is the range of hues that some human females might be able to discriminate better than males.

That's interesting indeed, because I was wrong about the male/female dichotomy in Indian traditional dress: yellows and reds (and also fuschias, turquoises and so on) are worn equally by males and females. Blues and purples are also very commonly worn by women. The difference is in the patterns and the shape of the dress, but not in the colours. Apologies for that- like I said I'm Greek, not Indian.

Additionally, the other cultures I mention have an equal spread of reds, yellows, and what have you among men and women, so again I don't see how any genetic thing is at play here.

Finally- All this doesn't say anything about why pink is "girly" only in specific parts of the world. If pink in particular was a genetic thing then it would be all over the place, not just in a few countries.

Pink vs. blue is a cultural thing

Liking animals and people vs. liking things is very much a natural preference.

> before he started daycare was pink

Pink used to be considered a masculine color in England (a boy color) in the 1800's.

I'm sure he will thank you for it later...