What makes a boy a boy and a girl a girl? Anatomy and biology aside, this is a question that really has no black and white answer because the definitions aren’t created for us, but by us. From the first moment a baby comes into the world, he or she doesn’t know what he or she is.

But within those first few minutes, people are already teaching that child what it means to be whatever gender that baby happens to be. Whether it be the color of the hat the doctors give the infant or the toys that loved ones bring to congratulate the parents, gender stereotypes start from birth and are only further cemented through childhood and beyond.

For the first year or so of a child’s life, the baby just exists. They don’t gain any true sense of self-awareness until about the age of 18 months, at which time they can start to refer to themselves by name.

This type of self-awareness will continue to steadily develop as the child grows and this will eventually manifest itself as a gender role. Where do these gender roles come from? They naturally come from what the child is exposed to, for example, the toys they play with and the movies they watch.

Perhaps they aren’t as prevalent anymore but when I was small, Disney movies were the go-to form of visual entertainment and this would have been the late ’90s to the early 2000’s. To provide a frame of reference, it was around this time that “Pocahontas,” “Hercules” and “Tarzan” came to the theaters.

Assuming you all have seen these movies at some point, one would probably think those are pretty common kids’ movies — nothing too graphic, but interesting enough to keep a child’s attention for a while. However, there is a part of each of these movies and most Disney films for that matter, that has actually hurt this generation more than we realized.

If you look at the main characters of, for our purposes let’s say “Hercules,” there are obvious gender stereotypes being utilized all over the place. To Disney’s defense, these are cartoon films, so some exaggeration here and there is acceptable, but when you compare Meg to Hercules, there is an obvious and unnatural size difference along with the play-up of each gender’s tendencies in the film. Meg needs to be saved by Hercules, even at one point in the film she has “weak ankles” and needs Hercules to care for her and that is symbolic to how society sees women and their role in the world.

That being said, the question can be asked if children would actually pick up on these hints at how each gender is “suppose” to be. The answer: why wouldn’t they? They may not be able to understand it in psychological terms, but these movies, along with what they see and experience in their own lives, easily and inadvertently teaches them that to be a man is to be the caretaker and the stronger gender, and to be a woman is to be helpless and dependent on men.

Clearly I haven’t been the only one to notice such stereotypes from this classic movie magnet because these concerns are part of what helped sparked Disney’s new look in its most recent films, like “Frozen” and “Tangled.” These films were designed differently in that the women and men were drawn more similar in size to each other and the storylines were now not just about finding a man to save the princess.

So why does this matter? That answer is simple: being exposed to countless subliminal messages telling us how we should live our lives as a child has made coming into our own life an internal and societal battle.

The girls portrayed in these movies are about as big around as my bicep, which is completely unrealistic, yet as we get older and we realize we probably won’t look like that, it becomes a struggle to accept being a real size. And the guys in these movies are relentlessly shown as being real meaty he-men, which isn’t how every guy is going to be.

I believe, without a shadow of doubt, that these subliminal messages we received early on is a direct link to this generation’s self-image issues because from the very start, they were telling us how to be, but that isn’t always how real-life stories play out.