Boy talk

Oh dear, I’m well and truly hoist on my own petard on this one. No way out of it but to write my own post on raising boys in the post Girl Power era.

We are all very careful these days to bring our girls up to think the world is open to them. We call those stiff-jointed Playmobil people ‘firefighters’ not ‘firemen’, we carefully play female doctors with them, we explain how Barbie’s body shape is just for plastic people, not for real people. We try to be good role models, emphasizing that choice is all. We try to compensate for the generations of mothers who told their daughters “you can’t, you’re only a girl”.

Do we try as carefully for our boys? The scales have been weighted so far in their favour for so many generations, and we’ve been busy trying to redress the balance. Perhaps we need to pay attention to whether we may have started tipping them the other way.

I don’t really know where I’m going with this thought (which is why I was keen to read what someone else had written). It IS still a man’s world out there, for all the great strides that feminism has enabled women to take. But it’s not a boy’s world. It’s well documented that schools are places where girls naturally do better, and that is very evident at primary level. We prefer pupils who write neatly, colour between the lines, produce careful work, sit quietly when requested. What value do we place on the ability to figure out how things work by taking them apart, even if that means strewing the pieces around? Do we see the creative imagination behind a story about zombies in scrawling inch-high letters, when it’s on the classroom wall next to the ones about flowers and butterflies, in tiny beautiful writing with darling illustrations? Do we value the drive that makes it so important to be the fastest runner in the playground, or do we smirk to each other “boys are SO competitive” and make them play co-operatively instead?

I fear it starts long before school. As Someonesmrs commented, it’s all too easy for a gaggle of mums to denigrate boy-ness in a jokey way, saying “he’s such a boy” when a child does something daft. We say to each other “huh, men, typical” in front of our small children, and expect them to understand that we don’t really mean it, or not in a bad way at any rate. Do we take pains to make sure we say just as often “huh, women, typical”? I don’t think so.

I know I’ve told the story to girlfriends about the day Husband declared in exasperation “I can’t look after two children AND cook the dinner at the same time”, and enjoyed a communal girl laugh at his expense. Have I been careful not to tell the story in front of my boys? Is it really such a given that men can’t multi-task (yes), and if it is, do I want my sons to feel they’re second best because of it? I would be horrified if I thought my daughter felt second best because women are more emotional, or scatty, or liked shoes. I absolutely wouldn’t want Husband joking around with his friends about my womanly inadequacies in front of her, (and luckily he’s far too nice).

I suppose the bottom line is that children tend to pick up and internalize their parents’ attitudes. So if I think that girls should look pretty and keep quiet, marry doctors and not be them, then my daughters will assume that as the norm until they are of such an age when they can bring their own adult discernment to bear (and even then, they’ll still be deeply affected by it). If I, clad in my post-feminist war-paint, believe that it’s time men paid for the easy privileges they’ve enjoyed in the past, once we’ve scraped them off the soles of our shoes, then my sons will somehow have that burden put upon them. And actually my daughters too.

There we are. Petard duly hoisted with me on it. Did any of it strike a chord with anyone? Personally, I’m more the Bridget Jones generation than the Sex and the City generation. I was already a mother by the time the Spice Girls were telling men they had to get with their friends. So I’m not the best person to pontificate on girl power. Anyway, I’m too busy entertaining children AND cooking dinner.