Raising a Gentle Boy

I have had it with the bias against boys. Boys are being raised to feel that the strongest is the best and anything less is inferior. If you cannot be the strongest, you should be the most sarcastic and cruel and that will suffice.

My son has many interests and at 4, I can see glimpses of his more independent personality coming out. He loves to cook and recently sold out of his banana cupcakes before anyone else, at a local bakesale. His pride was evident as he watched them go, one by one to each buyer and he said "May be when I get bigger, I will always make cupcakes and sell them."

I had gone out a few months earlier to find bakeware for his birthday. Every single thing to do with cooking or kitchens was pink. Actually, bright gag-me pink with sparkles throughout. I couldn't even find anything outside of the fluorescent pink girl aisle. Don't boys like to cook? Did Emerill Lagosse start out on a pink Easy Bake oven and sparkly mixing bowls? May be he did, heck, he probably had to. Although I do not adhere to the whole boy-blue, girl-pink thing, I am aware that boys are not suppose to care about anything that doesn't have the ability to kill or blow something up. If it doesn't hurt someone or overpower something, it is considered a flop by tough guy standards. THAT is what we are teaching our boys.

Boys are expected to act like "boys," i.e., raise hell and wrestle and break things and disrupt the calmness of the moment. We chuckle and shake our heads and say "look at him." We say to our boys who watch our reactions more than hear our words "You shouldn't do that kind of thing son," but all the while the contradictory emotions are evident on our faces.

Television shows are made for gender specific themes. Boys are supposed to like the shows with bad guys getting defeated in the end by good guys who have larger bulging muscles and a more sarcastic vocabulary. Things blow up so much, the boys watching don't even blink and the parents don't even notice the guts and gore, because the sound is so familiar in the background. The girls get the sparkly fairies and flying horses that talk and shower the world with hearts and rainbows.

If you make an effort not to teach your son to become aggressive and allow him to find his own interests without leading him to what society considers "boy" stuff, you will see him show nurturing and loving tendencies towards others and his own things. We teach our daughters how to show emotions and talk about their feelings. We show boys how to punch pillows when they feel angry and how to just do what they are told when they disagree with something and not talk back. They grow into young men who cannot express their feelings with words and think that feeling emotions is the equivalent of being less of a man.

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