i'm not sure if this is the right spot for this. i'm sorry if it's not....or if it's been talked to death..
but can we talk about raising boys for a minute?
i'm extremely interested in raising my son as a peaceful, feminist kid that doesn't cling to gender contstructs.
currently i have a moderatley difficult monster-boy-child, that begs me daily to buy him toy guns, and has a hate/love-too-much relationship with the girls in his daycare: either he's really aggressive with them or way too affectionate with them.
i tell myself everyday that besides motherhood being a life-changing expereince, if i can just do this, raise weeble well, to love and respect and support women and if he choses to hold onto this overtly masculine gender bias, at least have an open mind to change his mind later if he chooses, or support/defend other boys who don't embrace the construct.
but it's HARD, mamas. like nothing else i've known. i feel like he's...not the enemy, of course, but on the other side.
i guess you could say the gf and i approach this with love and patience and logic. we talk about respect, specifically, and then examples of it. we talk about why guns are bad and how it's not okay to play with a toy of something that bad. we talk about how it's okay for boys and girls to play dress up. it's okay for boys and girls to play spiderman. boys can wear pink and purple and girls can wear blue and black if it makes them happy.
and weeble gets really really angry when we talk. like, screaming mad.
we beat back the "well, he doesn't have a male figure in his life" for a year. weeble called the gf "daddy kim" on his own, but their relationship is strained right now, for similar but much more personal reasons. i ended up swallowing my pride and let weeble see his father, again. i've got violently mixed feelings on this, and it's already going sour: bd is incapable of treating me with respect, and is totally undermining everything i'm trying to teach my kid.
*sigh*
any other mamas dealing with this kind of thing? anyone?...
raising boys is hard. hard hard hard. raising girls is hard too, but for different reasons.
Dylan and Cade are night and day. Cade likes to play with boys, Dylan with girls. Dylan says there's "no such thing as girl stuff and boy stuff," Cade says, "Girls can't do that!"
It is so difficult to fight gender stereotypes. If all the kids at school are saying girls can't do x, y, and z, it's hard to counteract that. Since our voice saying those stereotypes and roles aren't true is a minority voice, kids tend to be rather opposed to it because it doesn't fit in with how they are making sense of the world. Kids have really black and white thinking. My son thinks that you can only love one person in the whole world, and Cade thought the same thing at about this age. There doesn't seem to be space yet for all of the contradictions inherent in our existence, or for different truths to coexist together. Grown people have trouble with this too, obviously, but for kids it seems like a developmental thing to first allow them to construct and understand the world. I think that's why they get so mad about it, because Cade does that too. It's not because they are rock solid conservative misogynists already, it's because that information is fucking with what they had already established from other sources. As they get older and able to think more abstractly, they'll be less rigid. I hope anyway, heh. But really, when you think about it, kids are pretty undeveloped still at these stages. Grasping something like gender equality or stereotypes or the idea that what you see and hear all around you can be false is intense. They don't even understand logic! See "whining" for a perfect example of that.
Kids also do what I call the inch/mile thinking. An example of this is that Cade thinks John Kerry is a god. The other day a news reporter came by looking for the person who had called 911 after a boat accident and Cade said very earnestly and full of reverence, "I bet it was John Kerry." We talked with him about how we were voting for Kerry and he was a little better than Bush, but cade took that inch and made it into the mile of John Kerry, Superhero. But yeah, that kind of thinking also seems to play into why they seem to be so conservative in their views of gender.
But yeah, I feel you on the boychild as foreign thing. It feels really dicey sometimes, like "oh god. what you just said....you are going to be the Bad Man of the future!" And it often feels out of my hands, because much of it is. Dylan, and Cade in particular have shown me that kids really do have their own personalities, they aren't ours to mold into whatever we want. That's scary, since we can't always mold them away from certain things, but it's liberating in a way because regardless, I will know that I've done my best, I've been a broken record about gender equality, I've lived by example, I've read the right books, said the right things, seized the right moments for education, so the ball is in his court to take it the rest of the way, just like we all did in our various learning processes. Just keep the hope alive that he's taking some of this in, even if it has to germinate for a while and wait until he has a place in his brain to put it.
There were ten million tangents in there, I apologize if that was all totally irrelevent.
I agree with Julie. You can't mold your son into anything. All you can do is treat him to respect himself and others. I have tried to teach my oldest that girls can do everything boys can do and vice versa. I think the vice versa is where we feminist moms of boys usualy forget. Like, boys can be nurses. Boys can wear pink. Boys can show emotion and not feel ashamed etc etc.
You really do lead by example and now is a great time to be raising a boy, what with all the sexual/violence education.
The biggest thing you can instill in any child, no matter their gender is a sense of compassion.
I deal w/ this every day all day.My son is 8.It gets better if you stay constent.My son tells his friends he cannot play w/ guns.It is great!He sees both me and his dad do "girl jobs" and I work at a wood shop.One of those "guy jobs".Relax you just have to find out what works for you and your family.I want my son to be everyones dream man.He has to go at 18 LOL!
i don't know how i missed this thread!
i was raised by a long line of "good ole boys" and am surrounded with it. i have a brother though, who was pretty much raised by my mom and my sister and i. i don't think there was any inherent feminist intent in the way my mom raised us but he turned out pretty well.
with my own son i've gone through a lot of different trains of thought. my biggest number one priority and battle with him is teaching him about personal boundaries. we talk constantly about how our bodies are our own and if anything, even as innocent as a hug or tickling, makes us uncomfortable we tell the other person. and if someone tells us that, on the flip side, we absolutely MUST respect that personal boundary.
as far as things that are "traditionally male" it's really hit or miss. he has had an on and off fascination with guns. i grew up around them and with a healthy understanding, i think, for what they were for and could do. i don't buy them for him but if he turns something into a gun i matter of factly tell him that as long as he points it at nothing living it is fine. pretend or not.
the current and longest standing battle has been with sports. my son is obsessed with basketball and football. it astounds both his father and i because neither of us are particularly athletic or into sports. all ds thinks of is sports. we try to balance it by taking him to the WNBA games as well as NBA games (it helps that tickets to WNBA games are cheaper and more readily available).
i guess i focus less on keeping things gender neutral and more on, sure boys/girls like/do this but so do *insert other gender*
when i see or hear people directly feeding him bullshit gender stereotypes i wait until we are alone and talking and address it in a matter of fact way. i use ourselves and people we know as examples of how stereotypes are often wrong and always limiting.
hope that made sense
I just found out I'm having a boy and I'm devastated. I never imagined that I could carry a boy and will now be raising one. So far all the tests have shown the baby is healthy so of course I'm happy about that. I just can't shake the feeling that I'm going to be raising an alien. I have all sisters, my mother has all sisters - we are a family of women. I don't know how to relate to boys and men as comfortably and naturally. And the thought of bringing one of 'them' into the world makes me sick. I have to find a way to come to terms with this before he is born, as it will be difficult enough to raise a son in a feminist way in this culture. The last thing he will need is his mother's baggage. Does anyone have any suggestions for resources - magazines, books, articles, websites etc, or their own thoughts?
kat-While I cannot understand how you feel (I have a 2 year old son, though I did not care whether my child was male or female and chose not to find out before birth), I think a good way to look at it is to realize that raising a child is not in raising a BOY or a GIRL. It's about loving and caring for a person regardless of what type of genitalia they have. I am not going to guarantee that your feelings will change upon birth because each person's feelings are individual. I hope you are able to find a way to consolidate your preconceived thoughts of raising a girl with the reality.
I absolutely stand on the side of all the moms and say raising boys is hard. My husband grew up in a family where his mom was totally responsible for house and childcare, and he subconcoiously thinks I should be the same way. but one weekend a month the boys see me put on my fatigues, they even have a mug that says "My momma wears combat boots". I think thatyour son can grow up and learn acceptance for his passions instead of having any stereotypes to live up to. I think that goes the other way too. You wouldn't ban him from becoming president of the poetry club, so keep the same thing in mind if he wants to play football or something. You are doing a wonderful job on your own and he will see that and remeber how strong his momma was and remember that women can be anything.
Have you read Raising Cain, or the Good Son? they are both about protecting the emtional lives of boys.
Having a boy for me was also quite a difference. I have four sisters and no male cousins. But personally, I have found raising a boy to be one of the coolest experiences of my life.
I can't wait to see what a fine man he turns into.