In the latest issue of Parents Magazine, there was a long article about how to bridge the growing achievement gap between boys and girls. If you haven't been keeping up with the research, this time boys are being left behind at alarming rates.
Even a cursory view of the actual research shows us that boys and girls brain structures are virtually identical. How can this be? After all 58% of college graduates are now girls, and girls are outscoring boys on all standardize tests, except in math and science where the they are neck and neck. It seems to be the conclusion of much of popular culture that our educational system is letting boys fall behind by expecting them to sit down and learn. Parents Magazine seemed to assume that the wetware, the actual brain, is different in a boy than in a girl. But of course, if that were true, then no amount of tricks or strategies would be able to undo boys inherent inability to compete now that girls had been liberated.
How short does our memory have to be to have forgotten that boys used to outperform girls?
Boys weren't allowed to go around playing games all day because they were just naturally active. To the contrary. Through the course of human history, boys have been doing better than girls by simply going to school and sitting through hours upon hours of drab and dry Latin classes, and lectures on algebra. In 1950's America, teachers weren't allowing boys to get involved in their learning by being more active. In fact, boys were expected to sit quietly and listen to their teachers without having any breaks until recess. So how could it be that in today's school environment, where children are more engaged in physical movement while learning, and play to teach, and everything else, suddenly boys brains have become incapable of focusing for the relatively small portion of the class period that they are expected to sit still.
The right blames feminism for all this. They see a conspiracy; an attack on boys. But if there is an attack on boys, it is from the right. By rewarding boyishness in boys, we are doing terrible damage. Americans have told boys that what it means to be a boy is to play wildly and with abandon. Boys play sports and watch TV.
According to the actual science, boys and girls learning abilities and styles are nearly identical until puberty. Whenever a child focuses on one activity for an extended period of time, they are developing executive function and attention span. Executive function is the single biggest factor in academic success, not any magical brain chemistry that is gender specific. And executive function can be learned, just as throwing a baseball or counting to 100. Going to a ballet, playing house, playing tea party, and decorating your dolly's play area are all ways to exercise executive function. Playing sports, playing video games, and watching cartoons are not. In the traditional gender roles, girls have a lot of executive function practice, while boys have a lot less.
In a way, forcing kids to sit through those long boring classes in the 1950's actually was good pedagogy. We now know that they didn't learn what they were supposed to be learning, but they were learning something far more important. They were learning the ability to sit through a boring lecture, a board meeting, a long exam, or a grueling all nighter before a deadline. They were learning executive function.
Childrens clothes today are more gendered than ever. Girls shirts are more pink, and if they are not pink, they always have frills and poofy sleeves (trust me, I've looked). Boys shirts are mostly about sports, military, or (for some reason) dinosaurs. Parents today seem desperate to make sure their children are identified with their proper gender, and if parents are desperate to make that identification, than their children will sense that desperation and do what they can to make their parents happy.
It is time to break the cycle before another generation of boys is lost to gender expectations.
Boys already commit violent crimes in far higher rates, and they already die young because of risky behavior at rates so high that even befriending a boy in early pubescence increases a girls rate of dying from risky behavior also. I am anxious to see what this hypergendered generation of boys is going to do. Hopefully, they will follow in the footsteps of so many generations before them and they will rebel. But this time, they will rebel from the WASPy gender roles that are being foisted upon them by their parents who are so terrified of themselves that they have spent the last decade hiding behind makeup and football helmets instead of trying to liberate themselves.
I write this with my 14-month-old son on my chest. My son is wearing a red and orange striped shirt, a pair of brown sweat pants, and a small pony tail sticking off the top of his head. He is asleep right now, but he will wake up!
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
Sunday, April 3, 2011
Mothering: My Day in Drag
The difference between mothering and fathering tell a significant story. A couple of weeks ago, I dressed in a suit in order to make a contact about a possible job, and I experienced that difference first hand.
People looked differently at me when I was in my man drag. They avoided my gaze. Normally, when people see my 13-month-old, they smile, laugh or stick out their tongues at him. But that day, they were far less likely to look at him at all, much less play with him. On the rare occasion that someone did look him in the eye, they conspicuously looked away when I turned towards them. I was an entirely different person than the tee-shirt and jeans wearing mop headed, Dad. I was a Father.
Mothering
According to Sara Ruddick, the author of the 1989 book Maternal Thinking, "Anyone who commits her or himself to responding to children’s demands, and makes the work of response a considerable part of her or his life, is a mother." The most common definition of mothering emphasizes caring for someone, usually a child. Sometimes we say it derisively to indicate that someone cares so intensely that they have lost their boundaries.
Fathering
Fathering, on the other hand, is (as Webster's dictionary puts it) begetting. It is a place of origin, as in, "He is the father of the social welfare state" or, "He fathered that child." A father need only make a woman pregnant and then walk away. However, fathering has also come to mean earning money for the household, like a conveyor belt in a factory. The role of earning money fits well with our traditional view of a father as someone who is there at the beginning but doesn't see the parenting role through to completion. The father is there in the morning, all the parenting happens, and then the father comes home at night for a glass of beer and maybe some disciplining of the kids.
From Dad to Father
While I was on that subway wearing a suit, to the people around me I was a father. I was an originator, not an actively engaged participant in my son's life. I was not a dad who responds to the needs of someone I love, but just a father probably taking him to daycare. It was a sad experience for me. There was a presumed distance between me and my son. It felt like I wasn't getting credit for my "mothering."
But there was also a moment of realization of how far we have come. Whenever I am dressed as Dad, people do see me as a mother. They acknowledge Ms. Ruddick's statement that mothering is not female specific. They look me in the eye and talk to me about my child. When I go to playgroups and reading circles with my 13-month-old, I see other Dads who are met as equals by the mother's in the group. I am heartened to see that the traditionally female skill of child rearing, not just child begetting, is becoming a human skill shared by men and women alike. This barrier is falling as quickly as the workplace gender barrier was to fall in 1961. We men are taking what should rightfully be shared with all of us.
Parenting?
As described in earlier posts, the stay-at-home mom is a recent invention made available to more than a handful of extremely wealthy women only through the invention of technology. Before the early 20th cetnruty, most but the wealthiest women had to work even as they were raising their children, and the wealthiest women had servants that raised their children for them so it would be a teeny bit ridiculous to even call them stay-at-home moms.
The real question is not whether we should all do what Judith Schafley tells us to do and have the women stay home with the kids while the men go to the office, but that we should all be able to find a combination of "mothering" and "fathering" that suits our individual talents, skills, and desires. Perhaps for most people, we all want to mother and to father. We all want to find a meaningful job where we can challenge ourselves and engage with other adults, and we all want to cuddle with our kids once we get home.
Certainly, daycare can make that available to a larger swath of people, just as having one auncle stay home with all the cousins can free up the family to go to work. But part time work is another option, where parents can trade off between one another. In that world, perhaps a man in man-drag on a subway car with a stroller will be assumed to be as much a mother as a woman in sweat pants.
Recently, Sara Ruddick passed away, and we all lost a great mother who spent her life caring for us and trying to introduce us to the satisfaction of being great mothers ourselves. And perhaps, for those women who want to be fathers, they can find equal satisfaction in being great fathers. When it comes to parenting, Sara Ruddick showed the world that gender roles are artificially confining unless we can pick which parts of which gender role we'd like and which we wouldn't.
We won't be able to pick and choose our gender roles until we start valuing the woman's role as much as we value the man's role. As long as the emphasis on gender equality remains on the importance of giving women a place in the office, we will always be valuing traditionally male priorities. And it is not enough to smile and say, "Isn't that wonderful that he's a stay-at-home Dad," or "It sure is nice to have a man in the classroom." We need to actively advocate for men in pink collar jobs and the home, and while it is good to have women allies, the impetus needs to come from men.
One example of this kind of liberating gender traitorship is the active and full engagement of a man in man-drag in mothering. I felt deliberately defiant and a terrific rush of liberation when I sang songs with my kid the whole way home. For some, the melody of liberation is "We shall overcome," for others it is actually, "Twinkle twinkle little star."
People looked differently at me when I was in my man drag. They avoided my gaze. Normally, when people see my 13-month-old, they smile, laugh or stick out their tongues at him. But that day, they were far less likely to look at him at all, much less play with him. On the rare occasion that someone did look him in the eye, they conspicuously looked away when I turned towards them. I was an entirely different person than the tee-shirt and jeans wearing mop headed, Dad. I was a Father.
Mothering
According to Sara Ruddick, the author of the 1989 book Maternal Thinking, "Anyone who commits her or himself to responding to children’s demands, and makes the work of response a considerable part of her or his life, is a mother." The most common definition of mothering emphasizes caring for someone, usually a child. Sometimes we say it derisively to indicate that someone cares so intensely that they have lost their boundaries.
Fathering
Fathering, on the other hand, is (as Webster's dictionary puts it) begetting. It is a place of origin, as in, "He is the father of the social welfare state" or, "He fathered that child." A father need only make a woman pregnant and then walk away. However, fathering has also come to mean earning money for the household, like a conveyor belt in a factory. The role of earning money fits well with our traditional view of a father as someone who is there at the beginning but doesn't see the parenting role through to completion. The father is there in the morning, all the parenting happens, and then the father comes home at night for a glass of beer and maybe some disciplining of the kids.
From Dad to Father
While I was on that subway wearing a suit, to the people around me I was a father. I was an originator, not an actively engaged participant in my son's life. I was not a dad who responds to the needs of someone I love, but just a father probably taking him to daycare. It was a sad experience for me. There was a presumed distance between me and my son. It felt like I wasn't getting credit for my "mothering."
But there was also a moment of realization of how far we have come. Whenever I am dressed as Dad, people do see me as a mother. They acknowledge Ms. Ruddick's statement that mothering is not female specific. They look me in the eye and talk to me about my child. When I go to playgroups and reading circles with my 13-month-old, I see other Dads who are met as equals by the mother's in the group. I am heartened to see that the traditionally female skill of child rearing, not just child begetting, is becoming a human skill shared by men and women alike. This barrier is falling as quickly as the workplace gender barrier was to fall in 1961. We men are taking what should rightfully be shared with all of us.
Parenting?
As described in earlier posts, the stay-at-home mom is a recent invention made available to more than a handful of extremely wealthy women only through the invention of technology. Before the early 20th cetnruty, most but the wealthiest women had to work even as they were raising their children, and the wealthiest women had servants that raised their children for them so it would be a teeny bit ridiculous to even call them stay-at-home moms.
The real question is not whether we should all do what Judith Schafley tells us to do and have the women stay home with the kids while the men go to the office, but that we should all be able to find a combination of "mothering" and "fathering" that suits our individual talents, skills, and desires. Perhaps for most people, we all want to mother and to father. We all want to find a meaningful job where we can challenge ourselves and engage with other adults, and we all want to cuddle with our kids once we get home.
Certainly, daycare can make that available to a larger swath of people, just as having one auncle stay home with all the cousins can free up the family to go to work. But part time work is another option, where parents can trade off between one another. In that world, perhaps a man in man-drag on a subway car with a stroller will be assumed to be as much a mother as a woman in sweat pants.
Recently, Sara Ruddick passed away, and we all lost a great mother who spent her life caring for us and trying to introduce us to the satisfaction of being great mothers ourselves. And perhaps, for those women who want to be fathers, they can find equal satisfaction in being great fathers. When it comes to parenting, Sara Ruddick showed the world that gender roles are artificially confining unless we can pick which parts of which gender role we'd like and which we wouldn't.
We won't be able to pick and choose our gender roles until we start valuing the woman's role as much as we value the man's role. As long as the emphasis on gender equality remains on the importance of giving women a place in the office, we will always be valuing traditionally male priorities. And it is not enough to smile and say, "Isn't that wonderful that he's a stay-at-home Dad," or "It sure is nice to have a man in the classroom." We need to actively advocate for men in pink collar jobs and the home, and while it is good to have women allies, the impetus needs to come from men.
One example of this kind of liberating gender traitorship is the active and full engagement of a man in man-drag in mothering. I felt deliberately defiant and a terrific rush of liberation when I sang songs with my kid the whole way home. For some, the melody of liberation is "We shall overcome," for others it is actually, "Twinkle twinkle little star."
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