My 12 year old son is stronger than me

[LargeSquareRock]

I’m what is referred to as a strapping woman, 6 ft 1, 88kg. Reasonably fit.

My 12 year old son is 42kg, 5 ft 2, reasonably fit.

We play a game where we face each other, lock hands and push. He’s beaten me and pushed me back almost every time for the last 3 months, unless I use rat cunning.

Ive been currently reading about the men beating up women in the Olympic boxing. Current TRA line on X is

1. They are women
2. Even if they aren’t women, it’s the same weight class so it’s fair
3. Women and men are physically equal and it’s only because of socialisation that women can be beaten by men.

Well, I repeat, my 12 year old son, nearly half my weight, can beat me in a strength competition. That’s anecdotal, but anyone with half a brain knows that this is the case across the board.

Yup- 11 year old son can throw a ball further than me or his very strong and fit 15 year old sister can.
Sex matters.

Yep. Both kids do athletics, the youngest, 10, does a ‘quad kids’ event which is a jump, sprint, longer run, and a throw. The boys routinely throw double the distance of the girls even at age 9 and 10, well before puberty starts proper. The other events are less stark, but you can see even at a very young age the massive differences in strength. By the time they get to the U13 category (age 11 and 12), the differences are marked in every discipline.

At 10, he can pick me up easily.

His brother, at 15, sometimes picks me up and carries me round just for a laugh. We weigh the same - I can get him off the floor and heave him a few feet.

I am several stone heavier than my partner. He can pick me up. Go figure.

That's true. I never thought my technique was particularly good, but maybe it was.

I know this is a serious subject, and I have personal experience of it - I got really scared by a friend's 9 year old son play-ambushing me, he easily took me to the ground and thought my cries of 'let me go, let me go' were all part of the game, and I had to shout for his mum to call him off...

So a serious subject, but I have to say I've been smiling at all the little glimpses into your families' lives, all the little mock fights and arm-wrestling and getting lifted up by your offspring - it sounds so much fun, it's sweet

@MarieDeGournay I’m delighted to read so many stories of mums play fighting and wrestling with their sons too. It’s adorable and also a fairly safe way for boys to learn about their own strength.

i am absolutely furious at the boxing situation.

However, some feminists have had a role in this. Years ago on here under a different name, I remember a whole thread of people disagreeing with me that men were stronger than women. They kept saying there was no physical difference.

I have seen this lunacy too. First time was in 2011 on an Australian forum called Essential Baby when I was pregnant with my first child. All of these posters who I had thought up until that point were highly intelligent feminists got on a thread saying that the only reason men were stronger than women was because of socialisation. Baby girls are carried more therefore men have 162% higher punching power, or some such nonsense. It was beyond ludicrous and whenever any poster challenged them, they would go off on these bizarre sneering rants using a very particular strange academia gender studies language.

I knew nothing about gender ideology then, but when I look back, this was the first time I saw the seeds sprouting. I now realise that some very devious people had planted these seeds over the course of decades in academia. While it wasn’t about transgenderism, it was the same robotic denial of facts using strange academic language.

Same

My son is ten and almost the same size as me (5'5)

He's definitely almost as strong

It's not socialization, it's physical

presumably you just showed them comparative lists of world/olympic records. With one exception (bizarrely, the discus) all mens records are way higher, faster, stronger. Wish I could get an explanation about the discus TBH.

Men's discus is 2kg, women's is 1kg.
Women also use lighter weights in the other throwing events.

Yes, arm wrestling seems to be a sport a lot of the top strongmen seem to start trying out after they retire nowadays. In almost other every measurement, these men are far, far stronger than their experienced arm wrestling opponents but they get beaten when they first start. It's a sport which has a lot technique involved to get leverage over your opponent, as opposed to a simple feat of strength.

Conversely, the poster you are responding to suggested women might be "instinctively" holding back their strength but she doesn't know if those men were subconciously holding back their strength "instinctively" either, so they didn't accidentally end up breaking her arm. Or she might have instintively great arm wrestling technique and missed out the opportunity to excel in the sport. Who knows?!

My brother definitely started to hold back his real strength as he got older, we still had massive physical fights and I certainly had no qualms about using my full strength against him. I couldn't beat him. On a couple of occasions where he really lost his temper and suddenly applied a tiny amount of his proper strength, I would just end up on the ground before I realised what happened. I'd be really suprised on those occasions because, despite however much we were raging at each other, 90% of the time he still managed to show enough restraint to hold back using his true strength against me. I didn't have any restraint, I was going for it!

Thank you so much for this absolutely eye opening thread.

They are women
Even if they aren’t women, it’s the same weight class so it’s fair
Women and men are physically equal and it’s only because of socialisation that women can be beaten by men

They really do believe these points which is depressing. What must go on in their minds?
I think they correctly acknowledge that female sport has been held back so there’s some catch up to do. But they go too far and think the catch up will one day equal men or even surpass it.
They talk about training and say Serena Williams would have been as good as men if she’d trained with them. But then if training is so important why are teenage boys with not much experience beating women’s records?

My absolutely tiny 11 year old - in the 10th centile height wise for his age, very slim - can beat me in some strength based exercises, particularly upper body. He can beat me running at running too over at least a mile, hands down with no training whatsoever. And I am not even slow for a women my age - normally in the top few at parkrun in my sex and age category.

I'm 40 and pretty strong and fit from regular training. My 70 year old father is considerably out of shape, not at all fit and has some health issues. He can still pin my wrist down if we 'play' that; it's not even a competition.
Biology is a fact, not 'hate speech.' I don't see why the powers that be find that so incomprehensible and still allow cheating males to decimate women's sport.

So true OP I train regularly in the gym and can lift good amounts for my age and sex. When play fighting with both of my boys I stopped letting them win at about 13/14 because they were both stronger than me by that age.
As a pp has said the effects of male puberty are astonishing. Mine are both skinny beanpoles but effortlessly stronger than me.

Yes, it's so sexist too. Do they think the world's top female athletes didn't manage to beat men because they just weren't training very hard? The mind boggles.

Exactly right, @Nothingeverything , it demeans women’s achievements hugely when the ‘wrong training’ argument comes in.

My teenager would be the number one woman over both 800 and 1500 in his age category by several seconds, but barely scrapes the top 100 for boys. He trains like a shit bag twice a week, and spends at least 30% of any given session on Snapchat. To deny the girls in that elite space the work they have put in is appalling.

There is a massive and undeniable problem getting girls to stick with sports through their teens. These messages that they should be able to achieve on a par with the boys if only they trained right are harmful and absolutely sexist.

So our minds are weaker rather than our bodies?

😆

I was not saying anything remotely like that.

Idk what's going on in my household then!
My 15 yo is an inch taller than me, over 20kg heavier, goes to the gym etc.
He can carry me around BUT I can still beat him in an arm wrestle.
I'm pretty strong but still....

Technique not strength.