Raising feminist children

Thanks for the link TBE

Just stumbled across this really interesting blog from Shaping Youth which includes some fantastic links and resources that might be useful.

In my experience - as a one time girl, and a mother of boys - the fiercest issues of self esteem comes from comparison and fitting in with your peers of the same sex.

For most of the time the live issue is not 'girls are better than boys' or vice versa, but 'why aren't I as good as the other girls/boys at xyz'.

The sexual stereotyping issue bites by defining what xyz is for girls and boys -- which may not be that child's natural area of strength or enjoyment.

YuleingFanjo-you might be interested in this website www.achilleseffect.com/ - I think she has written a book as well by the same name here.

With DS I am trying to ensure that I treat both children the same, they both have the same responsibilities and will both be expected to do the same number of household tasks. I would love it if he turned out to be a 'gentle' man like my husband and brother who have nothing but the highest respect for women and treat everyone equally.

DS has a lot of dolls, pushchairs, kitchens, washing machines etc as well as Duplo/cars and has a couple of generic barbie type dolls that he fell in love with in a shop. At the moment he is sleeping under the duvet cover of his choice-Care Bears. A lot of it was his sisters (and as such was pretty much pristine!) but I think I would have made a point of getting him some of these things anyway to make sure a potential interest wasn't stifled by lack of opportunity.

As the mother of a girl, I rather suspect nowadays the 'self esteem' circle has turned - girls are expected, on the whole, to be at least as able as boys academically and aren't under so much pressure to be good at kicking a ball.

DD knows she can retaliate and hopefully she knows that she must retaliate in different way to her teacher and to the horrid little person in her class who tells her that boys are best (he doesn't say that to DD any more after she pointed out that she was in all the higher groups for maths and literacy and well...he wasn't - neither could he run faster than her). But DD is hugely bossy and massively confident and tends to speak her mind, so in her case she needs the reminder to be kind in discussions about things like religion, who is the best Jedi (Adi Gallia, Aayla Secura or Luminara Unduli of course) and pretty much every time she opens her mouth.

No, I wish I had, but DD didn't really want me to make a fuss. She knew we agreed with her the teacher was being silly. She'd already realised that teachers aren't always right, having observed in reception that some of them actually seemed to believe in God, which she thought quite a strange thing for a grownup (she did get the 'some people believe different things' speil from me for that, of course. )

Grimma "oh but girls can't be builders" - what a terrible thing for a teacher to say. Did you go in and give them a hard time have a word??

'it can't be a boys thing, because I am a girl and I like it' which seems to have stopped it.
Good for her.

Oh and everything is prefaced with 'some people believe different things and that is ok too, everyone is entitled to their opinion and you shouldn't tell them what to do'

Up to a point... TBH if my DD ever comes across any sort of 'girls cant...' crap then that opinion is not ok and IMO she can tell them exactly what to do! I truly wish she had, in yr1 when they were asked what they wanted to be when they grew up and she said, as she'd been saying since she was 3, 'a builder' (meaning some sort of engineer not brickie) the teacher said 'oh, but girls cant be builders' - being 5 years old she said 'oh all right a ballet dancer' ... crossly explaining to me afterwards that she definitely didn't want to be a dancer but it was all she could think of. Never mind, there's zero chance of her being a dancer and a high probability she'll 'build' something, be it satellites or new molecules - she knows girls can.

yes. ds knows all about periods and how babies are made and born - nothing to graphic but he asks and i tell him in simple terms. i do think de-mystifying the differences is probably part of it.

not like you can 'hide' periods (even if there was some reason why you should) when followed into the toilet and told 'mummy you've got blood'. then that leads onto why/what and that leads onto babies and questions as to why i can't just have a baby brother for him without a man lead to discussions etc. i'm not sure if this is a feminist thing but i guess at least he'll grow up without ignorance or fear or a huge sense of 'otherness' about this stuff.

i do talk about fat and stuff in front of ds though - probably shouldn't but it just slips out when i'm feeling fat and noticing i've put weight on.

Pretty much everything Santa/Satan has said above is what I do, only slightly tweaked for DD.

One thing I do is provide her only with books and films with lots of female characters/strong female characters/heroines. She has access to lots of books from school and can choose any books she wants from the library but books that I buy will have a strong female character in. There are no where near as many of these as there should be.

I also encourage friendships with boys as well as girls-her two best friends at school are boys atm and they all love bombing around the playground playing star wars. Now she is older she chooses her clothes and toys and I'm shocked at how hard I found it at first to follow her into the boys department and buy clothes that weren't 'pretty'.

I am not critical of my body within her hearing, I try really hard to be positive and not negative. I also answer all of her questions in an age appropriate way, I try not to lie or fudge so she knows quite a bit about periods etc at 6.5 as she has a lot of questions. She does like long discussions where I answer all of her questions and this is also something I like to encourage.

Oh and everything is prefaced with 'some people believe different things and that is ok too, everyone is entitled to their opinion and you shouldn't tell them what to do' as DD is particularly bossy confident and prone to 'setting people straight'. Sadly she has been bullied a little at school because of her love of 'boys things' (a Scooby Doo lunchbox and a Doctor Who T-shirt for example, ffs) but while I was seething she came up with a robust 'it can't be a boys thing, because I am a girl and I like it' which seems to have stopped it.

i worry though that i will make ds as much of an outsider as me with my sort of 'anthropological' view of what should be my own culture/nationality/whatever. i can't help but raise him with a critical eye because even if i tried not to it's who i am, he would have it. just have to hope i raise him with more confidence to be 'outside' in some respects and certainly won't be punishing him for it as i was punished.

he's already scarily perceptive sometimes in terms of seeing through the crap and then i have to try and teach him the manners to go with his perception (because it's seen as rude for children - well even adults lets face it - to tell the truth). it's an interesting balancing act. i'd like him to manage it better than me who would unconsciously blunder into offending someone who was in a strategic position to make life miserable for me just by being honest and 'outside' of some pretending game/world that i'd never felt part of.

now i really am waffling and claim my right to the most waffly prize.

I would say that you live it yourself-DCs do as you do and not as you say. There is nothing worse than being preached at. I think that I did a good job with my DSs judging by their attitudes and relationships with girlfriends but they would have stood for lectures or long discussions, they just take it from birth as normal.

I totally agree Santa. Your post makes sense to me.

I have to say, though, that the only thing that I consciously want to do, is to make sure that I actually DO talk about it with DD. My mother was an especially ardent feminist, but never actually had a conversation with me about her beliefs, or the marches she went on, or the women's lib bus she drove, or the women's centres she worked in... I found out via other people and casually dropped comments. For some reason it was Not Spoken About and I wish it had been more of a topic of conversation. Though, having said that, we did grow up in a very non-communicative household, especially when it came to any sort of emotion or major life event.

Sorry, now I'm rambling. But I think that, for me, the most important aspect of raising a feminist child is to encourage an open discourse.

with the mulan thing i think the big thing was getting him to feel empathy with her position that just because she was a girl she was restricted and barred from things and her courage and need to look after her family and go out and do was frustrated to the point of having to pretend to be a man and how unfair that was.

as with all aspects of teaching i do think a lot of it is about exploiting opportunities rather than engineering things out of nowhere.

i think it is example. ds for example thinks i'm really strong (i am actually more bloody stubborn than strong) because i'll move massive pieces of furniture round, got the old sofa and chairs out of the house single handed for collection etc. so he just won't automatically think women are weak or incapable because he has seen otherwise.

that's a petty example but i hope ykwim.

then there's the challenging when they come out with stereotypes/crap learned at school or when you're watching something on tv - subtle oh is that true? oh but what about me? or so and so? sort of thing.

then there's stuff like watching Mulan and exploiting the opportunity to talk about how isn't it crazy how people think girls can't do x or boys can't do y? and looking at and laughing at the attitudes of sexism/gender policing. but also letting them know it is real - people really do suffer from it.

i don't know. muddling through.

hard for me to deal with the eww pink is horrible thing because i agree - i've never liked pink. so i can't do the oh pink is good you should wear it too thing but i can say i don't like pink and when he says pink is for girls can therefore say, oh have you ever seen me wear pink? do i like pink? and at his level point out the marketing con of it all and the yukness at uniforming genders. i can hate the pink culture (as in the whole agenda) and share that with him.

i also really encourage his friendships with girls and was ecstatic when his best friend at nursery was a girl because she was just as brave and energetic and etc etc as him so was his natural ally.

long waffle of disconnected thoughts from me sorry.

Good points Calamity it should be on deeds and actions rather than appearance. I will always tell him he is beautiful but make sure he knows its on the inside and outside (hopeful for a guddun')

I found 'Delusions of Gender' quite helpful when I was expecting DD.

DD is now 2 and therefore a bit young for discussion, but we do try to make sure that we praise her for 'doing' things, rather than looking nice. Lots of "oh what a wonderful drawing, you are so clever' and 'thank you so much for helping daddy to feed the cat' rather than 'ooh you look pretty today'. But as she gets older I will be encouraging more thoughtful analysis etc. I think I would find it much harder had she been a boy, mainly because I am pretty sure that DH would have gone in to 'rugby, cricket' mode.

In every Aspect of parenting lead by example is a golden rule. you can say all the right things until your blue in the face.

Thanks for the links Matronalia

thats true cogito he'll be constantly exposed to messages about everything, there is just so much gender conditioning and sexism I'd like to give him the best start via the message me and his father give him. He is an individual though. Good for your little boy for coming to that clever conclusion about God on his own though :)

There is the feminist breeder.