DS2 (4) comes out in favour of the patriarchy

[sethstarkaddersmackerel]

DD (5) insisted on accompanying me to my Feminist Network meeting today. I allowed this since the cafe where we met has a play area and I wanted to model 'mum having a life' instead of just 'mum wiping bottoms and preparing food for dcs'. So she came with me while DH took DSes 1 & 2 shopping. Then they had some Quavers.

On the way home I asked DD what she had enjoyed most about the day (thinking she would say the Quavers).
DD: The feminist meeting!
Me: Hmm. Do you even know what feminism is, DD?
DD: Er, no....
Me: It's about making things more equal for women and girls.
DS1 (in a sad little voice): Not boys?
Me: Well you see DS1, at the moment, on average, men earn more money than women and women have to work harder, and we don't think this is fair.
DS1: Tee hee hee! That means when I grow up I will be able to buy more things than DD because I will have more money than her!

oops I mean DS1. If DS2 is already in favour of the patriarchy I'll be gutted given that he's only a baby.

That's not favouring the patriarchy, it's favouring having one-up on your big sister!

Don't worry - you've got many more years yet to teach him

At what age do they learn altruism?

Well, as I have only girls, IME very young indeed...in fact probably born with it. Can't answer for boys, I'm afraid - I imagine they take a lot of teaching...or maybe never learn it!

This seems apt

that's spooky!

seth, he sounds like a future highflier . He'll go far. He sounds quick on his feet and always looking for an angle.

I made the mistake of telling my daughters, in a fit of ire at my DH for cocking something up, that only women seem to be capable of doing more than one thing at the same time. Now, if they ask me to do something and I'm busy, and I say I'm busy, they respond with: "But you're a woman! You can do more than one thing at a time!"

LOL Claig.
He is a mini-scientist always wanting to know how we know things but also super-competitive. I think he'll be one of those people that does a science PhD then goes into the City. DD wants to be an artist. The pay gap in our house is going to be slightly bigger than 20% I fear....

Re their assumptions about male and female roles, DD has insisted that nurses are female and doctors are male. This is despite the fact that she has hardly ever seen a male doctor in her life and two of her schoolfriends' dads are nurses....

I wonder where they get these ideas - e.g. 'nurses are female, doctors are male', 'we need Daddy to fix the sink' etc? If it's not based on observations from their actual life (where they see female doctors and Mummy can fix things) is someone (teachers?) telling them this stuff? I just can't understand how they are coming to such conclusions otherwise .

It just goes to show, Ephiny, how ingrained in our culture the patriarchy is

We do asses materials used in school for equality and positive role models, and remove those with outdated and inappropriate stereotyping. However, the outside world has more of an impact.
I do remember a poster wondering about this when her son said 'Only Daddies can fix bikes' and I asked her if that's what happened in her house.
She didn't answer my question.

But that's different, Goblinchild. There's nothing wrong with a child thinking that only mummies do cooking, if that is what they see because that is what is practical unless the parents do nothing to explain that it's not because she's a mummy that she's cooking, but because it makes sense for her to do it for whatever reason.

It still doesn't explain why my children as well have decided that doctors are men and nurses are women, when they've been treated by male nurses and female doctors? It's just so endemic.

They see it on TV.

Yes it is very ingrained, weird though that such beliefs still persist even though they're not remotely in synch with reality any more - e.g. plenty of female doctors both in real life and on TV or in books - in fact medicine may become a female-dominated profession before long when you look at the ratios of medical students in recent years!

Not just restricted to gender issues though, I've noticed parents and other adults insist to children that trains go 'choo choo' even though they don't and have not done so even in the parents' lifetime (and now maybe even grandparents don't remember steam trains being the norm) :) So it seems to me that someone somewhere is telling children an outdated but perceived as nice and cosy and 'suitable for children' version of the world with regard to gender roles, may well be happening through children's picture books, cartoons etc (I don't have children yet so not really exposed to these things!)

Actually I remember a while ago a little boy in my extended family insisting that 'daddies go to work, mummies stay at home' although his mum and dad both went out to work as did the parents of most of his friends. Would be very interesting to track down where exactly it is coming from.

You will have to look for other scapegoats based on facts then, rather than assuming without evidence.

terry Pratchet had a theory ... that inside every child's mind is the world of the toothfairy. there is a house there. It is square, with four windows and a pointy roof and a chimney that has smoke coming out of i.

THIS is what children draw, when told to draw a house. My children draw this house, and we live in a terrace. Children who live on the 47th foor of a high rise flat draw this house.

I think it's the same with doctors and nurses, mummies and daddies etc.

Daddies Fix Things. Mummies Cook. Even if daddy is a chef and mummy puts flat pack furniture together with a butterknife and a grin!

Fascinating coldtits. You may be onto something there. I believe in Plato's theory of forms, the little of it that I know. I think he says that there are pre-existing ideal forms for things that we see. So there is a form for a cat, which is abstract and that any cat that we experience here is just a shadow of or representation of this universal pre-existing form. We all share the same world of forms.

Maybe the house and daddy and mummy are forms and universals and each individual house and mummy and daddy is just a particular representaion of that universal form. That could explain where these inbuilt notions stem from.