Boys
One of my fellow DotMoms recently wrote about being the mother to two daughters. Well, I’m the mother to two sons.
When I was in college, I read a book called X: A Fabulous Children’s Story, which is about a child raised so that no one at all knows if X is a boy or a girl, so X does all the boy games and all the girl games and lives happily ever after. This is the classic position of equality feminism, which denies that there are any innate differences between boys and girls.
Obviously, my husband the SAHD and I aren’t terribly big into gender roles, so we’re often a bit embarassed by how much our older son is into typical boy things — trucks and cars and trains and airplanes and construction equipment. (The younger one is too little to express such preferences.) We’re still not convinced that there are little trucks somewhere on the Y chromosome, though, as we haven’t raised our children in a vacuum — they’re exposed to books and television and other kids on the playground. (One of my friends likes to tell the story of how her son’s preference for pink went away after exactly one day of school.)
If you watch closely on a playground, you can see gender roles being created. Of course there are exceptions, but it seems that mothers are more likely to chase after little girls saying "be careful," while letting their boys explore more freely. David Reed suggests that mothers are more likely to hover than father — and if men are more likely to spend times with their sons than with their daughters, this reinforces the pattern.
At our encouragement, my mother bought my son a doll, which he occasionally undresses and redresses, but mostly ignores. But he often plays with the trucks as if they were dolls, taking them to the "tractor dentist" who cleans their shovels, and having them go to visit their friends.
I’ll be watching to see what happens as he gets older, and what his younger brother’s interests turn out to be.
