I just finished reading a study that attempted to look at how gender gets expressed through parent-child interactions. The paper, titled "Gender Differences in Mother-toddler and Father-toddler Verbal Initiations and Responses during a Caregiving and Play Context" describes research where mothers and fathers were separately video taped with their kids engaging in both play and caregiving activities. The results were interesting both in the way they reinforce what many people already understand about the ways we teach gender by performing gender with our kids, but also by highlighting the importance of context. In this case the researchers noted that the situation or context of an interaction may influence stereotypically gendered behavior more strongly than the gender of the parent. In other words, where we may think that male parents always behave in certain ways and female parents in other ways, the reality of how we do gender with our kids is much more complicated.
This got me thinking about my own experiences talking with parents about raising kids and gender issues. It's one of those topics I struggle with a lot. I find it surprising sometimes that when you give parents a chance to ask questions about sexuality, gender comes up almost right away. It's surprising to me not because I don't see the connection (I do, I DO) but because when I'm talking to adults about their sexuality, often it takes them a while to understand how gender is connected to them getting what they want or being who they want to be sexually. The gender-sexuality connection, whether conscious or not, seems much closer to the surface when they're thinking about their kids.
What I find most challenging is getting parents to the place where they have an awareness of the infinite ways they teach their kids about gender every day. For many (I'm going to say most) people, gender is so far out of their conscious experience that it's like the air they breath. They don't think about it or their relationship to it, and they forget that it's a dynamic, fluid force influencing everything they do and in turn influenced by them. If they ever thought of gender as being fluid at all, they no longer think it applies to them. So when they think about their kids and gender, many of them take a kind of equational approach where they believe that if they act in X ways and provide Y sort of environments they hope to end up with kids with Z gender identities (maybe I should have used different letters in that equation).
On the ground this looks like parents asking questions about when to separate nude kids based on gender, when to start or stop allowing dress up that to them feels like its cross gender lines, how to deal with requests from their kids to do things they imagine will get them ostracized for being gender non-conformist. The best I can do, of course, is talk them (calmly) through these things. I think it's helpful for them to experience me not freaking out about any of the stories they share. I think it's helpful for them that I can describe some of the things we know definitely don't work (teasing, dismissing, ignoring, being angry or mean about it; and here I'm talking parent reactions). But I know they always leave with doubts and honestly sometimes I want to just go home with them.
When I think about it I think there are at least three things that make it easier for me to live with the doubt and questions. First, these aren't my kids. Second, I know that when it comes to something as powerful and complicated as gender, everything matters, and you're not going to one thing that will screw your kids up for life. And third, because I know there are way more than two genders, I have much less anxiety about making sure that kids fit neatly into one of two boxes. I know that wherever we land, what will make us healthy and happy is not determined by the clothes we wear, the bathrooms we use, or how well we fit in to others expectations. Those things can make life easier, but not healthier or happier.
| | Twitter | Newsletter Signup | Sexuality Forum | |