My one-year-old daughter owns more shoes than me.

She also owns more hammers, more bike helmets, more dolls and more ducks. Does this reflect an intentional gender neutral approach to parenting? Perhaps a little. Does it indicate that the majority of her belongings are either hand-me-downs, second hand or found on a wall? Certainly. Any discernible gender construction has been, up until now, overshadowed by the simple fact that everything she owns, collectively, is probably worth about £47.89. And I include her bed, car seat, lunchbox and toothbrush in that.

But let’s get back to the shoes. While I love clothes, adore dressing up, sew my own outfits and revel in the prosaic creativity of simply getting dressed, I’m rather less enthralled by shoes. Perhaps it’s a hangover from my barefoot New Zealand father – a man who regularly wielded an angle grinder on the building site in nothing more protective for his hooves than a light scattering of toe hair. For much of my childhood, my dad would be walking the streets in either bare feet or a pair of flip flops so worn down that he might as well have just painted his footwear directly onto his heel in acrylic. And yet, who am I to judge: these days I can often be found slipping my footwear into a bag at the end of work, to cycle home with the wind on my soles.

So it has been rather surprising, not to say challenging, to have birthed a daughter who regularly tries to go to bed in a pair of wellies. Or to have a bath in her trainers. Or to swap her Crocs halfway through dinner. The girl is obsessed with shoes and will insist on everyone wearing them from the very moment she wakes up in the morning until she finally, reluctantly, falls asleep in the evening in her slippers. Her favourite pair this week are some flapping navy ballet pumps with an anchor by the heel. Last week it was the multicoloured high tops bought by my mother from a charity shop for £1.50. For my part, she prefers me to cook dinner while wearing either a pair of square-toe red high heels; or mud-encrusted brown walking boots. I suppose you call that variety.

It is hard, when you have children of each gender, not to wonder whether this sort of behaviour is a result of inbuilt passion or social conditioning. At what age do little women come to treasure accessories? At what point do small boys get told that clothing is purposeful, not pleasurable? The truth is that my daughter is almost always, entirely, universally and continually mistaken for a boy. The signifiers of gender, apparently, still apply whether you’re 18 months old or 18 years; and so a short-haired person, in a pair of blue trousers, wearing trainers and wielding a stick will probably, unconsciously, be read, in the West, as male.

In her short time on earth my daughter has been routinely called “little man”, “little lad”, “big fella” and “him” by strangers whose intentions and affection are so clearly benevolent and positive that I cannot begin to imagine correcting them, let alone taking offence. But here is where it gets interesting: as a ’90s and Noughties feminist and former tomboy, am I more comfortable presenting my daughter as “masculine”, and encouraging so-called “male” qualities than I was putting my son in dresses and playing princesses with him?

To some extent the question is moot, as my boy never showed the slightest interest in wearing a dress, or anything more ornate than a pair of orange joggers. When it comes to getting dressed, he will simply stand and accept the assault of clothing with the weary resignation of a customs officer being scanned at the start of a shift. But I also have to be honest and say that I found all the butterflies, unicorns, fairies and castles stuff quite dull. If we were in the woods, I preferred to make bows and arrows or mouse houses, rather than, I don’t know, unicorn nests? If we were at home, I preferred to read books about the Ancient Egyptians and deep sea and mountain villages, instead of subtly trying to imprint a love of horses, princesses, pixies and kittens onto my son.

Perhaps the barefoot, white knuckle, hair-curling truth is that we have far less control over our children than we ever imagined. Their range of influences – physical, tangible, digital, abstract and unconscious – are so wide, so manifold and so subtle that the idea we could construct anything as pervasive as their sense of taste is laughable. You might have a child who loves sparkly clothes and playing with toy babies and holding miniature tea parties. You might have a child who does car noises, and makes robots out of cardboard and wants to wear brown. Neither of these outcomes are entirely your design; and neither should be judged as inferior to the other. Whether you’re striving for gender neutrality, gender plurality or gender invisibility, the main thing is to recognise, as early as you can, that your children are going to do what they want eventually. You can lay the foundations but what they build on them is their life’s work. And if that means that in 40 years time I am being wheeled into the bath to be worked over with a flannel by a child in pink kitten heels, well, we can’t say she didn’t warn us.