What Happens When a Girl's Girl Has Two Sons?
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I had no idea how to parent boys. I have always been a “girl’s girl” (ten years of all-girls school, four years of women’s college). Growing up, I was constantly confounded by boys’ behavior, and that was even more the case when I had two of my own. What was I supposed to do with the arsenal of mind games I had acquired over the years? Guys didn’t seem to hold grudges; it was attack one second, peace the next. I was used to protracted girl fights that involved drama and cutting remarks. That was my area of expertise.
My boys, now 10 and 12, interact on a much more active level. Whereas my sisters and I could sit for hours playing with dollhouses together (and later lounge on the sofa reading magazines), when my boys were little they could barely be left alone for five minutes before there would be a bang and a crash. I was way out of my comfort zone.
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"If you have a son and can’t believe how loud or destructive he is, you aren’t alone,” Rosalind Wiseman, author of “Masterminds & Wingmen,” tells Yahoo Parenting. “If you don’t have a lot of experience around boys, it can be really difficult to see the difference between when they are playing and when they are fighting—it all looks like fighting. Before you intervene, just look at the boys. Are they happy? Does it seem like a democracy—where everyone is giving as much as they are getting? If they are, leave them alone. If one kid looks scared or out of control, then you can separate them.”
But not every boy is into all fighting all the time. “Don’t forget that boys like to do things that are traditionally considered girl activities if they are offered them without a stigma attached,” says Manhattan educational consultant Tina Hammond, who spent twenty-seven years teaching preschool. “Things like baking, or dancing, or acting. We don’t give boys enough opportunity to do these. Why aren’t we encouraging boys to have an artistic side?”
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And empowerment is important for children of both sexes. For several summers, my sons participated in a variety show at camp. Year after year the girls won every prize, even the ones who didn’t perform well. (And it was okay for the mothers on the sidelines to cheer “Girl Power!” but it would have been terribly incorrect for me to yell “Boy Power!”) It was as if the judges felt the girls needed empowering more than boys. I, too, had been indoctrinated with that impression, but now that I had my own boys and saw the courage it took them to get on stage, I knew differently. They didn’t possess the natural bravado that the girls did.
“Girls, until around the age of eleven, go through the Pippi Longstocking phase. They’re pretty courageous and frequently more resilient and bold,” says psychologist Camilla Mager, who specializes in the psychology of girls and women. “Boys have ‘be strong and independent and successful’ hoisted on them a lot. Accessing emotions, and taking huge risks that could possibly make them look stupid, would seem to fly in the face of what most boys are being taught.”
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Perhaps actress and UN Goodwill Ambassador Emma Watson said it best in her September speech to the United Nations: “We don’t often talk about men being imprisoned by gender stereotypes but I can see that that they are… Both men and women should feel free to be sensitive. Both men and women should feel free to be strong… It is time that we all perceive gender on a spectrum, not as two opposing sets of ideals.”
