To hate this current trend that girls should be raised to be fierce and fiery but boys shouldn't??

[Voodoohoodoyoudo]

Now I'm not saying one gender is better than the other. But as a mother of sons I feel worried for their future because it seems this notion is currently being pushed that girls can get away with being drama queens but boys need to keep their feelings to themselves and pander to them or they might grow up to be abusive men? What happened to equal rights? I don't condone violence of any sort but this is totally unfair that boys shouldn't be able to do what girls do in terms of sticking up for themselves.

I've no idea why raising children to be more assertive, resilient and considerate could ever "backfire".
Unless men are too worried about losing power and privilege?

Bullying is unacceptable regardless of who is doing it to whom.

In DD's class (secondary)there's massive drama at the moment.. from the boys. They're all up in arms the teachers are sexist and treat the girls better. The girls never get in trouble bla bla bla. What they forget to mention is it wasn't a girl that jumped on a table and did monkey noises in a middle of a lesson. It wasn't two girls that had a fight in the middle of the courts. It wasn't a girl that told the teacher to fuck off. It wasn't girls that simulated sexual acts with equipment during food tech. It wasn't girls that emailed teachers inappropriate stuff. It wasn't a girl screaming racist language. You get the point.

They also forget that a lot of their silly, low level disruptive behaviour (which girls are also guilty of) actually does get a pass and is mostly ignored.

Instead they rage the girls never get in trouble. Which is not even true, they do get in trouble , it's just isn't as often or the consequences as severe because their behaviours aren't as often or severe. There is real anger and resentment towards both the girls and the teachers and a complete inability to look inwards. "Suzie shares food and doesn't get in trouble ,but I got a detention for threatening to lie about a teacher to get in trouble."

Soooo unfair. We are actually considering changing forms .

Girls should be encouraged to be more assertive and boys should be encouraged to be less assertive

I think you are taking shit OP.

School stats, 8 out of 10 sexual assaults are committed by young males in secondary school.

98% of sexual assaults in UK are committed by males.

We are bringing up our girls with strong boundaries and stop this "be kind" bullshit that erodes their boundaries.

You only have to walk into any clothes store and look at the T shirts for girls and boys to know that society is still trying to keep girls in their place.

If you are bringing up decent boys you have nothing to worry about.

I'm sorry your DS is being bullied.

Bloody typical and why girls do better in single sex schools.

Urgh. Social media - it's a monster that is out of control IMHO.

The issue at hand is that people should treat other people as they want to be treated (card carrying masochists excepted) first and foremost, with an awareness of differences that may impact them and we should be striving to make the world a better and more equitable place.

Someone has already mentioned engineered culture wars and it's writ large here.

In terms of school bullying, get assertive with the school. It's wrong, no matter what the sex of the perpetrator, but getting fixed ideas that either sex is / should be behaving in a particular way is what got us into this mess in the first place.

How will it backfire? And why shouldn't we raise boys in terms of what is ideal for women, seeing as how the reverse has only resulted in catastrophic male violence in every country

Because I don’t think men can be kind from a position of weakness. I really don’t. The worst men I have known were weak men, they can only get their way by underhanded tactics and preying on people perceived as weaker than themselves.

I have no idea what you are on about.
I raise both my DC (one of each sex) the same and encourage/discourage the same traits in both

I don’t think they are, I think the opposite actually. Girls seem to be the preferred sex now, and very much their parents ‘pink princesses’. I know a handful of parents who have had 3-5 sons in their quest for a daughter, and in the cases where they finally got her, she’s been treated like a lapdog, constantly snuggled and carried and pandered to long beyond the toddler years. As a result they’ve turned into highly strung or sullen little girls who have been taught acting in a vulnerable way will ensure the attention of the parents; whereas the boys are left to get on with it.

I suppose I agree that some parents encourage their sons to be ‘gender neutral’ (more so than their daughters) but I think this also plays into the ‘acting girly is better’ thing. Look at all the Hollyweird celebs whose sons are now ‘daughters’, have been encouraged to grow their hair long, wear dresses and now present as a female. Equally there are loads of insta mums with sons where the sons ‘coincidentally’ all have ponytails and wear neutral clothing and have ‘girly’ hobbies, and the mum writes endless posts about how ‘un-boyish’ her sons are. By comparison you rarely see little girls with very short hair cuts encouraged to wear combats and hoodies and grub around in the mud.

It’s a shame we can’t go back to when I was little, girls and boys were dressed in primary colours and the toys were much less gendered and beige. Parents just left kids to get on with it and play without virtue signalling to them about gender stereotypes.

I'm a mother of sons too.I don't recognise what the OP is saying.

All sounds a bit MRAish to me....

I think you've possibly fallen down a bit of a manosphere rabbit hole on social media. I've just read 'men who hate women' by Laura bates. I get that as the mother of boys the title might put you off, but it's a very good insight into how a few deeply dysfunctional groups take advantage of young boys/teens to instill this sort of belief- and how truly damaging it is to boys (particularly in terms of self esteem and ability to escape archaic macho sterotypes that lead to depression). Worth a read even just to understand what they're being exposed to at school/via social media, and countermeasures available.

Good luck, we all worry for our kids, it's hard!

This.

And I have two grown up sons who are very in touch with their feelings and also can stand up for themselves with girlfriends who are similar.

What I think is more of a trend is the number of threads on MN that are telling us that men are very hard done by and women should be more kind.

I don’t know if it’s men coming on here to wind us up or make us doubt ourselves, journalists looking for copy or just some people thinking it’s fun to cause a shitstorm.

This has got to be a joke post Op

Have a look around this site and you’ll find plenty of examples where the same behaviour is lauded for women but condemned for men.

Other examples:
Parents who view you with suspicion when your child invites their daughter over for a play date because they’ll be home alone with a man.
Not wanting your wife to walking around a dark and deserted area after dark on her own, because apparently that’s controlling.
Getting reported to HR for having intimidated a female colleague by body language because apparently being taller makes you “scary”.
You can have your opinion and I’ll have mine, we do not have to agree.
Not that this post is relevant to the op.

This is bullshit. Schools are just not very good at addressing bullying. I’ve seen it on countless occasions: girls bullying other girls; boys bullying boys; boys bullying girls etc. What tends to happen is the child who’s being bullied is told to suck it up.

I think it’s down to two primary reasons: the school knows the bullying child comes from a very difficult family background and therefore makes more allowances for them (obviously they can’t say that to the parents of the other child for reasons of confidentiality); or, the bullied child is more malleable/has less volatile parents and it’s easier to deal with the fallout with them then with the bullying child.

Agree with this. The likes of Andrew Tate would not become popular if we were meeting the needs of our boys and young men adequately. A lot of them feel disenchanted and disengaged, for the sake of all society (men or women, girls and boys) we need to address this.

@BringMeSunshineAllDayLong agree with this, worded much better than I could have!

Who's 'telling you' this? What rubbish.

I don’t see that being ‘fierce and fiery’ = being a drama queen. To me ‘drama queen’ smacks more of ‘spoilt princess’ behaviour.
Which is not the same as being assertive when necessary, and not taking shit from anyone - I’m sure we’d all wish that for our dds/Gdds.

What I do dislike is the often implied idea that anything associated with what boys typically like or do, is preferable to what girls typically like or do. E.g. a girl who likes pink and netball is somehow ‘lesser’ than one who likes navy blue and football.
You might as well say that being female is in itself inferior to being male. But that’s the impression given by some people who like to call themselves feminists.

But the solution to this is not to push girls down.

We need better male role models. Andrew Tate isn’t successful because girls and women have boundaries; they’re successful because culture tells men they’re entitled to have whatever they want and they grow up and find that’s not true. And possibly in their own family they had a controlling father and submissive mother and they think that’s what girls will put up with but many girls and women know better these days.

You just need to be watch films or TV and all the women are stunningly beautiful and often end up falling on love with the guy who isn’t very nice to them….

It’s not up to women to solve men’s behaviour.

There is in Shrek 2, when the Queen says to her husband "Oh, stop being such a drama king". Sorry, I couldn't resist it.

I think the OP has a point, in that not so long ago, the status quo was "boys will be boys", who are allowed to have fun and be naughty, while the girls be good, and stay at home helping Mother; and if they're naughty, they bring shame on their family. See also "What are little boys made of? Slugs and snails, and puppy dogs' tails. What are little girls made of? Sugar and spice and all things nice." What I think the OP is noticing is a backlash against these old stereotypes.

I think the bigger problem is that there are expected gender roles at all, on either side. This is a problem which is centuries old, and each side keeps trying to "redress the balance", which then looks like it's saying one sex is better than the other. Lots of people misinterpret "feminism" as "women are better". One possible reason for men wanting to be women is a backlash against "feminism", with the thinking "if you can't beat them, join them".

It's been known for people to say "things will never be equal until men start having babies". And now, lo and behold, men are having babies! After a bit of tweaking the definition of "man", that is. Science can make so much progress just by stealthily changing the meanings of a few words; every politician knows this.

Funny how women have been disenchanted and disenfranchised since Eve allegedly offered Adam the sodding apple (or whatever fruit it might have been) yet it's barely a century since we were allowed the vote (conditionally at first, natch) and only recently had legal inequalities such as rape within marriage being criminalised and equal rights (allegedly) in employment enshrined, oh and the elevation of being the property of their spouse, but now some men because obviously NAMALT 😉 are getting their boxers in a twist about it due to clever marketing of a sex-trafficking half-wit to make money.

It's a scam, a dangerous divisive scam engineered to pit the sexes against each other, because an equal, tolerant society standing together to fight injustice against all humans threatens the established power base. Which is predominantly male.

Hopefully you won't raise your boys to be as misogynistic as you OP.

Do you want to know a huge reason boys and men are disengaging? Weed. Weed is a huge problem. The shit they are smoking nowadays leaves them unmotivated, paranoid and unable to grow in any capacity. They end up isolated, unable to connect with girls/women and instead of fixing themselves, it's easier to lash out. Weed and porn consumption by teenage boys and up, is ruining them. I would wholeheartedly support a movement to fix this issue.
Instead boys/men and their mothers, blame girls and women. It's so fucked up.