I don't have much to say one way or the other, gender stereotypes in stories have been around for a long time and will remain long past me, I am just curious. I do it fairly often for stories that have a single parent so that my son will see that our situation isn't unusual, I stay away from using the technique to impart anything negative about the other parent (ie "look, this little boy's mother is evil and manipulative just like your mommy is!" it sounds silly to say but some stories can make it easy to do even w/o intention, so I stay proactively neutral). When I first started reading to my son I found that our situation was never reflected in any books so I had to make changes on the fly. How do you guys handle it?