One thing that continues to perplex me about parenting is trying not to force gender issues. I think this is easier if you have girls. But as of yet, I don’t have a girl to say this definitively, so feel free to disagree. As my FIL put it when my MIL asked him if he wanted boys or girls he answered, “girls, you can make a girl a tomboy, but you don’t want to make a boy a sissy”. And they had three boys and one girl.
This has become a relatively minor issue with AB and I in raising Leif. AB balked a little when I picked up The Little Mermaid on DVD for a Christmas present. “But it’s a girl movie!” he whined. Just because the lead is a female mermaid does not mean a boy can’t or shouldn’t enjoy it. A few years ago I saw a statistic that said that children’s movies where the leads are girls are most often flops because parents of boys don’t take their boys to see them. Yet parents of girls will take their daughters to see movies where the leads are boys. We are teaching girls from an early age that you can transcend gender barriers, but we are teaching boys that they need to be masculine and disregard things that concern girls or place girls in the position of power. This doesn’t automatically engender acceptance among the male up and coming population to know and understand that boys AND girls can do anything they want.
My son is just over two. He doesn’t understand gender. When I ask him if he is going to have a sister or a brother, 95% of the time he says “sister”. Not because he knows the difference between girls and boys (although so many of the potty training toddlers in his class walk around with their pants around their ankles, maybe he is starting to learn the difference), no he says this, I believe, because “sister” is easier to say. Both AB and I bathe and shower with Leif and he has not asked any questions yet. He just loves when one of us hops in the “big tub” with him.
The other day I decided at Target that Leif needed a few placemats so that he quits destroying our dining room table. They had a crappy selection (par for the course at my Target, I am anxiously awaiting the *new* Target!). I layed them out and asked Leif to pick one out. I was thrilled when he picked out one of the least offensive. Not that they were “offensive”… I guess least “obnoxious” is a better word. He smiled and said, “Cat” as he pulled it out of the stack. Hello Kitty. About that time AB walked up and balked and put the placemat back in the stack and pulled out a Superman placemat. Leif has no idea who Superman is, he could care less. Thankfully he also let out a squeal that is indicative of an upcoming meltdown that caused AB to think (quickly) about taking away the Hello Kitty placemat and he pulled it back out and tossed it in the cart (along with the Superman placemat).
My husband is a super guy who has always been one of my biggest advocates for advancing my career in a male dominated field. He has provided “the male perspective” when I have encountered issues with working in my last research group full of serious testosterone. My husband was raised by a progressive mom who worked, who made her boys clean the house and who took her daughter fishing. He gets it. He just needs to be reminded of “it” sometimes.
I do understand the inkling in your heart to want your son to grow up a manly man. I remember the teasing the girly boys endured throughout school when I was growing up. I don’t want that either. But what I am striving for is equality. It is important to me that my son see successful male and female role models in the world. I want him to grow up sensitive to his wife, his daughters, his female coworkers. And maybe, just maybe, watching The Little Mermaid and eating off his Hello Kitty placemat will give him a leg up in understanding women that they boy down the street doesn’t have!
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