Mum of girls (Caitlin Moran) telling us mums of boys how to speak to our sons

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Thanks 🤔

I don't see a problem with it. Everyone who is a parent has skin in this game. Toxic masculinity affects teenage girls as much as it affects teenage boys (some would say even more so) and as she makes clear, it's usually mothers, not fathers, who are doing most of the parenting of boys.

I happen to think her ideas are a bit facile and not especially illuminating but she's someone who has thought about parenting a lot and I think she has as much right to comment on it as anyone else.

DH sent me this yesterday. Making essentially the same point, albeit more succinct.

Although my reading about it didn’t make a lot of difference
A bit like my recipe books….they have no idea how crazy my oven actually is. So nothings improved

Off topic: Although she came from humble beginnings, she’s spent the vast majority of her life in a very small bubble and sees everything through that narrow lens.

I lost any time I had for her when she was fangirling Lena Dunham and said she ‘didn’t do race’ as she didn’t want to ask any challenging questions.

She’s bubblegum fluff and one of those, like Job Whiley back in Radio 1 days, who’s always keen for you to know she’s in some exclusive clique that you’re not part of.

She’s not a serious person or writer or journalist. I wouldn’t take any advice from her especially on raising my kids.

Was there anything in what she wrote that made you think she said you shouldn't have dinner together, cheer them on at rugby matches or have high moral standards?

Parenting is definitely important, but I am Asian, and find most recipe and parenting books don't fit my cultural needs.🙂
I remember trying to Gina Ford my kids. Yeah, that didn't work out! Plus it felt completely wrong to me. Western parenting techniques mostly don't fit with my family.

Having an oven that has a perfectly even temperature all over still won't tell you how many eggs to put in a souffle.

I think all women are allowed a voice on how to prevent male violence against us?

I really lost interest in what she had to say when she wrote an excruciatingly detailed column all about her daughter's anorexia. I just don't see how that's justified, even if the child did give consent.

You read one parenting book, decided it didn't suit you, and so dismissed the entire genre?

I have to agree with you OP. To give advice that's worth listening to presumably you have to have experience of what works/doesn't work. I have boys; I wouldn't presume to tell a mother of girls how to raise them and I actually have been a girl. Caitlin Moran I think has been neither a boy nor a mother of a boy.

But a mind of its own oven won’t raise that soufflé either

How would you know what would resonate with a boy if you haven't been a boy and haven't got a son? I definitely think it's an incredibly important job for mothers of sons don't get me wrong. But boys and girls are different and that's just reality.

You seem to very wedded to the notion that reading parenting books makes a good parent? I have read a few more, plus some columns. I am not keen on the form. You will have to take my word for it that DS is not an incel or Tate fan.

I don't read recipe books either, but I can cook because I learnt from my mum. i wing it. I wing most things.

You're right. Mothers who don't have boys shouldn't offer any advice about raising boys regardless of how much expert opinion they've gathered because what would they know?

But then if you've never been a boy then you'd have no idea about the pressures and feelings that boys experience growing up. How would you? If you grew up a girl then your lived experience would be totally different.

Therefore I agree with you - we should only listen to fathers who have sons to tell us how to raise boys. They've got first-hand experience and that's what's important, right?

I’d want to meet someone’s child/ren before taking their parenting advice.
If we’re continuing with the cook book analogy, I wouldn’t follow the recipe of someone who had consistently cooked absolute disasters.

I don't understand why they get random journalists and slebs to write pieces that would be far better done by an expert. Unless it's an opinion piece then I think you should stick to what you know.

I think reading parenting books helps us to be good parents. I don't believe I know everything about everything so when I find myself in a new situation I do what I can to learn about it so I can do it to the best of my abilities.

I learned a fair number of recipes growing up but my mum never showed me how to cook sourdough bread, mushroom biryani or moyashi soba. I suppose I could just have guessed but that would have been an awful lot of trial and error and wasted food until I'd got it right. Reading a recipe to point me in the right direction seemed much more likely to produce something edible.

She didn't mention the stuff that is (IMO) the most important.
Telling parents not to sit on the sofa, questioning kids is the exact opposite of what we did. We talked and talked and talked about everything.
I've read quite a lot of her stuff and her parenting style is way too lax for me. She seems to take for granted that "they'll smoke a bit of weed", well no. It's a gateway drug.
I know mine don't touch drugs as they work in roles that do regular drugs testing. I know their cousins do.
Maybe mine smoked it as students (my DH did and developed a transient paranoid mental illness as a result) but they say not.
Alcohol I expected and put up with.

If you want a good parenting guru, then Dr Naomi Fisher is someone I can get behind and will take advice from.

@Smallmercies having a vested interest in something doesn’t qualify you to advise on it. I’d have a vested interest in an appendicectomy I was about to have, but that doesn’t mean I can tell the surgeon how to do it!

She seems to take for granted that "they'll smoke a bit of weed", well no. It's a gateway drug...

...Maybe mine smoked it as students

Crikey

He's had his appendix out 3 times I imagine

I am not really interested in parenting advice that condones smoking weed, so I will pass.
This is exactly why I prefer to take parenting advice- if I do at all- from my mum, whom I still consider a great parent, rather than from media darlings. My dad wasn't bad either.

I’m the mother of boys.(also a girl)
i wish some girl’s mothers would talk to their daughters about how they treat boys….
Both my sons have had horrendous experiences with some really awful girls, which has left them both very wary of them.

Good point. I also think some parenting methods aren't going to work for every child or every parent. I dont know Gina Fords credentials but cry it out goes against every natural instinct I have in me. It is only in the west that we seem to be obsessed about children sleeping in their own beds and through the night. Cultural differences do have in impact on what we see as ideal behaviour and development.