To think primary schools now days are more misogynistic amongst the boys, than in the past?

They sing that at my dd school. She was constantly telling me how horrible the boys are to the girls. I raise it with the teacher to be told she can't be everywhere she knows the boys are like that but there really is nothing she can do!

There were other contributing factors but this was a part of my decision to home educate. My dd is absolutely much happier in herself now I hadn't realised how bad her mental health was due to school I just thought I had a whiny child

I find this whole debate fascinating and depressing in equal measure. I have a sort of academic interest in it, as a teacher and having studied a lot of gender and childhood-related topics as part of an MA a few years ago, but also more recently a personal interest as parent to a 6-year-old DD.

In part the current issues surrounding boys and young men undoubtedly stem from access to porn and excessive internet use. But the conditioning runs far deeper than that and starts much earlier. Parenting has changed dramatically since my own childhood; as a primary teacher a decade or so ago I was surprised at how gender stereotypes were becoming more rather than less ingrained among the small children I was teaching - clothing was coded pink or blue; Disney princesses for girls were everywhere and I had several worried Dads at parents' evening fretting that their sons would never be 'proper men' because they disliked football and enjoyed Lego and drawing. At the time online campaigns like 'Pink Stinks' and 'Let Toys Be Toys' were sounding the alarm about this stuff, but their concerns sound really pretty quaint now. I remember at the time there was also a spate of TV documentaries about how gender stereotypes played out in parenting/educatjon, so it was clearly part of the zeitgeist.

Roll on a few years, and by the time my own daughter was born the gender conditioning had ramped up considerably, starting with the gender reveal party trend and progressing through to highly stereotyped birthday parties (dinosaurs, football and Pokémon for boys; princesses, mermaids and unicorns for girls) and separate preschool activities for boys (football) and ballet (girls) - for four years now my daughter has been the lone girl in her Saturday football class, and we're in supposedly liberal north London.

While it was a fairly standard thing, when I was teaching, for at least a few of the boys in my classes to prefer to play with the girls, in my DD's school the sexes have been strictly delineated from the outset and exist almost in two separate bubbles, seldom interacting. 'Boys will be boys' prevails, and lazy gender stereotypes about boys being better at maths and girls being more docile are thrown about constantly by parents. It's all incredibly different from my own experience of growing up in the '80s and '90s, and it feels like we've regressed in a lot of ways.

I spend a lot of time working with children at the upper end of the primary age range, and can confirm several PP's reports of boys making sexual noises and porn/Andrew Tate-related 'banter' even in Year 6. The upshot of all of this is that we've decided we'll be sending DD to a girls' school for secondary.

No, with the exception that he thinks women are bad drivers. Conservative as is in greed is good. The problems of other countries aren’t our problems. Not views learnt from me.

I’m a financially successful and independent woman who mostly raised him solo from the age of 10. But I am a shockingly bad driver.

Conservative views of women? In what way?

I don't know if it depends on the schools but my son's school is light years more right-on and the children less savage than when I was a child. It is true that they sing "Seven, eight, Andrew Tate" but I am sorry to say we used to sing pro IRA versions of hymns because we found it funny. Children are stupid and pick up snippets of culture they don't fully understand.

It is not that I think we live in an idyll but it is easy to forget that the past wasn't always great either.

Conservative accurately describes my 22yo son. Not like me, he has his own mind.

seriously? I’m guessing this ends better!

The internet. 🤢

Although society is generally more educated and less sexist in lots of ways, horrendous stuff is creeping through. How depressing. Hopefully you can have open conversations with your children about this all.
Also it’s always sort of cool to say things your parents obviously hate so some of these kids may be trying to be ‘different’.

Bluey episode

*At my children’s primary school there’s a rhyme the boys proudly chant -
Boys are strong, like King Kong
Girls are weak, throw them in the creek
This is from reception age. No idea where it’s come from. It deeply disturbs me.

We used to say GIrls win, boys in the bin. Its normal for boys and girls to dislike each other at some points in primary.

This is incredibly depressing as a boy mum

“I'm just a bit fed up of the constant boy bashing on here to be frank.”

This is not personal. It’s a widely reported and worrying social phenomenon. Your child might be Perfect Peter now but at some point he’ll be breathing that toxic air. You need to take the blinkers off and be part of the resistance.

At my children’s primary school there’s a rhyme the boys proudly chant -

Boys are strong, like King Kong
Girls are weak, throw them in the creek

This is from reception age. No idea where it’s come from. It deeply disturbs me.

My son is 8, year 3 and has no idea who Trump or Andrew Tate are. He just wants to run about at lunchtimes and watch spongebob when he gets home.

Yes of course I discussed it and with school they thought I was loopy.
It's the fact that it's on the Oxford reading tree that annoyed me.
Things need updating.
Also demonising the character of Rumpelstiltskin is problematic but I was writing in the context of the thread.
I've always disliked traditional fairy tales.

Do they discuss it at school? Do you discuss it at home? We did have to have a discussion about the beauty and the beast with our kid. Wouldn't ban her from watching it but I do encourage discussions about problematic story lines at home.

It’s alarming how quickly things change because of parents allowing unsupervised internet access.

My son was in primary school in 2016 and him and his friends would do Trump impressions about building a wall rather than the extreme misogynistic crap that some kids are watching today. In his day, it was very unusual for primary school kids to be doing stuff like vaping too.

You're completely right, sadly. But there's no doubt that this kind of misogynistic behaviour from rich men is a bit of a honey trap for lots of young men and my point really was that we should assume that could include our own sons. And make sure equally that our daughters don't start thinking it's acceptable or something they can turn a blind eye to!

But this is another element where I think it’s very confusing. My younger female colleagues are very different to myself (I’m a millennial) and older colleagues in terms of how they think eg a lot more gendered & old fashioned.

Hahaha ofc, just a joke.

@ThisZippyDenimGoose I think it’s so confusing for both sexes & there are real mixed messages. That’s a convo I’ve had a lot with my niece, she doesn’t like how the whole Onlyfans is a legitimate career choice but says she can’t say that as it’s shaming. She doesn’t want to send photos of herself to boys but again said she’s the odd one out.

@Mlanket I know but it’s so normalised. Some other older relatives were showing me their insta feed which had lots of photos of classmates posing suggestively in bikinis etc. my nephew said he felt uncomfortable liking the posts but that it would be seen as rude if he didn’t & my niece said she felt she had to like the photos too but didn’t want to as she felt it put pressure on her to be sexy & she doesn’t feel sexy or want to be sexy but that’s apparently bad. I had no idea what advice to give, thank god I grew up without it.

You're completely right, sadly. But there's no doubt that this kind of misogynistic behaviour from rich men is a bit of a honey trap for lots of young men and my point really was that we should assume that could include our own sons. And make sure equally that our daughters don't start thinking it's acceptable or something they can turn a blind eye to!

This is something we all need to be aware of. I listen to some quite out there stuff with Andrew Tate, Tommy Robinson, Jordan Peterson etc which my sons find equally shocking and hilarious as an almost 40 year old feminist but we need to hear what these people are saying and understand what about them is appealing to young men. We do ourselves a disservice by writing this stuff off and refusing to even try to understand because it’s out there and it’s striking chords. It’s difficult to be a man at the moment, young men don’t quite seem to know where to position themselves, mental health is poorer than ever and instead of looking to their fathers as previously, some of them are finding role models in some pretty divisive figures which won’t end well. I like to be able to talk to mine about this stuff openly and offer my views from the perspective of a woman they hopefully love and respect as opposed to just what they hear from their friends in school. Luckily their father is brilliant and we all have some interesting discussions.

I agree with things being problematic at a young age for both boys and girls.
I teach in primary and the amount of children in year 3 talking about the things they watch on you tube and comments about fortnight games is awful.

The thing that got me last week was I over heard a child being incredibly unkind to another child whilst I was on playground duty. When challenged the year 2 child said... its all good we are just having a roast battle you know.... roasting each other. I said I wasn't interested in what they thought they were doing it was unpleasant and we don't use language like that in our school.

What are you talking about?