Very controversial article here from a psychiatrist.
Personally I think that you should encourage boys to wear pink and girls to be tomboys. I was a tomboy but I have a daughter who is a ‘girly’ girl who wants to wear pink and dresses and makeup.
What do you guys think?
Why?
Why not? I don’t think gender roles should be stipulated.
Personally, I think you shouldn’t.
In a debate, traditionally the proponent of a position is the one with the burden of proof for his proposition. Answering “Why?” with “Why not?” is what debaters call a gratuitous assertion, and as my high school debate teacher was fond of reminding us, a gratuitous assertion may be equally gratuitously denied.
Isn’t encouraging a child to be a tomboy stipulating a gender role?
I personally neither encouraged nor discouraged - if my daughter wanted to play football with the boys, she could. My son wanted grandma to paint his toenails when he was four. Big deal.
Both seemed to be turning out as well or better than expected.
I rather doubt that gender roles are entirely set by social expectation - post-pubertal boys are more aggressive, post-pubertal girls are more verbal and social. It’s not set in stone, but it’s also not subject to change at the behest of the parents.
Regards,
Shodan
According to that article, Facebook is partially responsible for destroying everything “honored as good and true”. Seems like a pretty generic grumpy old man rant.
For what its worth, I also think he’s also factually wrong. Until semi-recently, young kids were often treated in a gender neutral manner. Here’s a picture of a young FDR looking not terribly masculine at a young age. So the authors idea of a previous heroic time when man-babies were man-babies and girl-babies were girl-babies is an illusion.
I didn’t have a debate teacher :). Ok fair enough though.
Thinking it through, I shouldn’t have said you should encourage boys to wear pink and girls to be tomboys, what I should have said is that you should let your children express themselves naturally and if they want to wear pink or be tomboys then you should allow that.
I think a parent should embrace whatever a child enjoys. Your kid wants a doll? Buy him a doll. But when he asks for a gun, don’t offer him a doll as an alternative. I guess what I am saying is embrace whatever they like… but you don’t necessarily have to encourage/advocate one way or another.
I was a HUGE tomboy. Worshipped my older brother. Refused to wear a bra (even though I was pushing c-cups by 5th grade. At age 4, I asked the mall Santa Clause if I could be a boy for Christmas. When learning how to make lists in first grade, we were to make a list of our favorite things. My list: 1) meat, 2) boys (because they are better than girls). Yes, I used parenthesis. And yes, I only had two favorite things.
On the other hand, when playing doctor with the little boy up the street, if felt great, in all the right ways. When the little girl up the street wanted to practice kissing, I was horrified, refused, and felt weird about it.
While my parents embraced my tomboy-ism, and bought me all the soccer balls and skateboards I wanted… it didn’t turn me into a boy (thanks a lot Santa). I am not at a hospital getting body altering surgery simply because I was a tomboy and I idolized my big brother. I’m even married to a man, and am working hard to have his children… (I do have a career though, hmmm…)
Do I think you will turn your son gay if you paint his toenails? No. Not even close. Nor do I predict the downfall of western civilization as the result of the advent of metrosexualism. Pauly D. may spent hours on his hair, but he has enough testosterone for six adverage men.
But neither to I think you should paint his toenails, insist he wear pink t-shirts and legwarmers, and make him watch Bratz, if he is not inclined to do so.
Manufactured outrage by a jackass who has no insight into the parent child relationship outside of a picture. Why would you even care?
I will agree that one shouldn’t force gender roles down their throats, but I’m not sure it’s easy to say what is and isn’t natural. Children learn a lot about how to social by how people around them behave and treat them. To that extent, I think it’s hard not to have some concepts of gender roles filter through simply because they exist in our culture as a whole. I think this is exactly why we’re starting to see more and more young girls who really have no concept of what sexy is dressing in provocative ways, because they see older girls and women dressing that way. Is it any more natural if they pick it up from TV and other kids at school than if their parents have heavier influence over it?
And where is the line drawn. I wouldn’t say there’s anything wrong with a girl being a tomboy and playing sports, but how many parents who are okay with that would let their boys run around in dresses and makeup? On the opposite end, not many parents would take issue with boys being masculine and heavily into sports, trucks, and whatever, but young girls dressing like sluts?
How do we decide what behavior should be encouraged or discouraged? I doubt anyone would take issue with a parent disciplining a child for foul language because of social norms, but at what point is a parent enforcing social gender norms inhibiting them and at what point is it just helping them fit in with our culture? I’m not sure that there’s a meaningful line that can be drawn there that everyone can agree on.
biddee, have fun with the naturally expressing children. Then children that grow up in other cultures, those cultures that teach how to learn, work, effectively structure family life and reproduce, are going to hand it to your children. And this will serve you, and the entire (corrupt and stupid subset of modern Western) culture that you represent, absolutely right.
What a grumpy old guy! This is really telling to me:
And this is portrayed as a bad thing. No, it isn’t. On the contrary, we need to get it through our heads and teach our kids about proper sex education and not expect them to magically get it when they marry or turn 18.
You do know the OP is referring to artistic/creative expression and not work ethic right? I mean we wouldn’t want to tie toenail colour to the collapse of Western Civilization.
That might be considered stupid.
Absolutely agree!
I’m 35 and everytime I hear something like this all I can think of is old people grumbling “Kids these days…” Maybe it’s because of my age that people feel more comfortable saying it nowadays but I hear it everywhere and I really don’t believe it. Every generation has had discomfort with the next. It is normal.
No, OP is referring to the basic gender and behavioral roles. Seeking to be a worker and provider is a behavioral role. Seeking to be a loyal wife is a behavioral role too.
Experience teaches that rejection of standards of traditional culture usually comes as a package. Once they are rejected and things go downhill, the “enlightened” and “liberated” people line up to vote for politicians who promise to bandaid their problems by handing out money obtained from people of the more functional, traditional cultures. E.g. certain American politicians have recently borrowed a trillion dollars from the culturally traditional Chinese and Japanese just for this purpose.
Excuse me. It’s the more “liberal and enlightened” who carry the traditionalists on our back; famously, it’s those evil “Blue States” who subsidize the traditionalist “Red States”. And traditionalist societies tend to be impoverished hellholes more often than not, like the Third World in general.
Do you have any idea what traditional culture means? I come from an extremely traditional culture and it’s not good for women.
The last few decades have featured a) a huge increase in the number of woman in the work force and b) a huge increase in American wealth and power relative to other countries. The idea that woman moving into a “worker” role is somehow detrimental to American success relative to other countries is silly.
“Traditional” Japan is far more indebted then the US is. ‘Traditional’ China has 70% of its woman participating in the workforce, just a point or two lower then the US.
Your just throwing out stuff based on your vague intuition that stuff was better back in the day when “men were men”, you haven’t even tried to verify it with any factual information.