I don’t know what the book is about, but I love the title, love that my boy is engrossed in it, and love that he thinks it’s the best book ever. I love that he sews, cooks, cleans, and plays dolls with his sister. I love that he doesn’t yet relegate jobs into gender categories and that he’s perfectly comfortable holding my hand in public. He’s a scabby kneed, scruffy headed, roller blading, bike-riding, stick wielding nine-year old boy who doesn’t own one pair of pants that aren’t torn to shreds but he still sometimes crawls onto my lap at dinner parties. He hasn’t yet learned to think that some emotions are “girly” and to be avoided, and wouldn’t think it strange to hold the hand of a friend. He has a capable mother, strong sisters, and has been raised in somewhat of a protective bubble in that he has had limited access to TV, and a much smaller dose of the still prevalent gender bias that inundates our pop culture than many kids his age. He does the things he likes to do, and doesn’t have to deal with the peer group pressures that many boys have to contend with. I don’t think he’s ever heard anyone tell him to “be tough”, to “act like a man”, to not cry, or to not “be a girl”.
I’ve said in previous posts like this one, this one, and this one, that there are gender differences, and that boys definitely do have different interests, as a group, than girls, but I don’t think that it’s necessary or biologically determined for boys to think of girls as less capable than boys or for boys to innately feel ashamed of emotions that our culture has deemed feminine. Those things are learned, and with effort, maybe we adults can protect our boys from internalizing those opinions until they are old enough to think critically.
team effort 