Gender scholars have documented the significant inroads feminist understandings of gender have made into popular parenting advice books, and identified new strategies of nonsexist, trans-affirmative parenting. But while many parents now welcome gender-atypical tendencies in kids, a perplexing puzzle haunted many feminist parents: Despite their efforts to expand their kids’ options, somehow their sons still like trucks and nerf guns, and their daughters still like Barbies and princess.This dissertation uses these moments of perplexity amid progressive social change as a window into the consumptive, interpretive, discursive, and semiotic work that enables seemingly “natural” and “individual” attributes like gender and life stage to emerge or dissipate from parent-child interactions and conversations about these interactions. Based on 72 interviews with feminist parents in the US, it examines the shifting tension between gender and childhood as social structures. With reflexive analyses of how these parents made their parenting choices and their kids’ interests intelligible and reasonable to me, I argue the reproduction of childhood as a social structure can serve both as an end and a means for the transformation of gender structure. Protectionist discourses of childhood innocence, for example, can help parents reframe the aggressive gendering of childhood as a sexualizing and adultifying threat. Moreover, popular narratives around child development offers one—albeit not the only—interpretive frame for parents to make ungendered sense of their kids’ gender-stereotypical interests. Hence, while degendering can serve as a “childing” practice to make childhood happen, life-stage category can offer an alternative to sex category as the anchor of account-ability. Integrating theoretical insights from feminist sociology, linguistic anthropology, and childhood studies, this dissertation not only offers a pragmatist-minded intersectional analysis of the reproduction of gender in social interactions, but also provides an ethnomethodologically informed conceptualization of gender and childhood as linguistically mediated accomplishments. First, I argue the “naturalness” of gender is not “done” when people put on a choreographed “gender performance.” Rather, the accomplishment of gender remains underdetermined until their audience makes four ideological moves in their uptake of that performance. Whereas the “performance paradigm” has inspired scholars to catalog people’s manhood and womanhood acts into a growing typology of multiple masculinities and femininities, I illustrate how centering the audience helps us approach the interactional production and naturalization of gender processually as open-ended negotiations of sign relations, where meaning emerges from selective attention. Second, I argue childhood is not simply a “natural life stage” in which children become habituated into their gender performances, but an ideologically charged social construction that can be deployed to achieve and legitimate various interactional and political agendas. Whereas sociologists of children and childhood have debated whether scholars should focus on the future-oriented process of “becoming” adults or the lived experiences of “being” children, I transcend this binary by showing how childhood is also an active process of “doing.” Taken together, this dissertation showcases how intersecting systems of oppression can not only amplify each other in some situations, but also mute or contradict one another in other situations.