So we have a 4yo boy and a 1yo girl.
For Mother’s Day DP got me a women who changed the world picture book; thinking it would a nice thing for me to read with the kids. Lovely
I was aware these are very much a thing for girls, different ethnic groups, basically anyone underrepresented.
4yo wanted to read my new book so we sat reading. He chose the page with the sharks (obviously), which was a story about one of the first marine biologist female divers and scientists.
One sentence said ‘I had to ignore lots of people who told me this was too dangerous for a girl’.
Of course as an adult I understand the context. For the 4yo they jumped on that and was wait why too dangerous for a girl. It’s too dangerous full stop to swim with sharks. 😂 Anyway que me having to think on my feet and try to process hundreds of years of patriarchy and what parts of that needed to be relayed or whether we should be relaying that at all.
Basically long story short… I opened the book thinking ‘this is good, but if we have a bunch of these for DD then we are going to have to get some for DS focusing on male role models’ and closed it thinking ‘fucking hell are these books a major can of worms and in trying to address patriarchal norms have I inadvertently been the first to bring this to his attention’.
Mind blown 🤯
Yes there’s plenty going on in the world and these are first world problems. But without men fucking everything up we would have less of first and developing world problems so it’s worth thinking about imo.