Re-post: That does not love make ... reflecting on how we're raising our daughters & especially our sons

"I was recently a part of a convo about the differences in how some parents treat their sons, particularly the lack of responsibility they tend to have around the house. One comment in particular stuck with me all day..."it's because we love our sons and raise our daughters". Moral of the story: the boy you coddle today will be the selfish, inconsiderate, self-entitled man that some poor woman will have to cope with later. Somehow, we haven't been able to connect the dots on that one! ...

"I want to make it clear that this is not nor was it intended to be a male bashing thought. The convo was around an event where the daughter was asked to participate in all the prep and cleanup missing out on the celebration, while the son got the opportunity to chill. When it was over, he was asked to remove the trash only while the young lady went to work washing dishes and doing everything else. His aunt noticed and told her niece to sit down and made the nephew get up and contribute. Family members disagreed with her actions and told her it was wrong to make him do "women's work". She started to question her actions and THAT is what started the whole debate and the root of the comment." Ms Pharr

Well said Brittny! Somehow it seems we've developed this inane, mixed-up notion of how to best love our sons & daughters that emphasizes (hyper) self-sufficiency for daughters and, as you put it, (over-protective) coddling for sons - which often leaves our daughters inadequately protected (& growing up too fast) and our sons ill-equipped. It's always mystified me that if we're able to recognize that we hold our daughters to high expectations as an ACT of CARE so they'll be prepared for, rather than debilitated by, the challenges they meet … why are we so unable to see that failing to do so for our sons is tantamount to an almost criminal ACT of NEGLECT?

 Perhaps even more importantly, failing to equally challenge and teach sons to be fully self-sufficient, to hold them to standards & may be even more importantly to be accountable for their actions (and their own emotional work)** – implicitly suggests that less is expected of them because they are somehow *less* capable of being the fully developed adults that we expect daughters to be. And that ultimately breeds a sense of insecurity about their own capabilities (i.e. hearing his partner’s expectations for him to aspire & reach higher as being too demanding & unrealistic, rather than as a testament to her faith in his ability –“Baby, I believe in YOU!”), and a practical and emotional immaturity that leaves them playing catch up with their peers who were holistically raised and lagging behind the kind of women they *would* aspire to be with. In a word, we’re crippling the boys that we should be raising to be men, undermining and sometimes assassinating their potential relationships - not only with women, but with the world and their selves … and that, well, that does not love make.

 **Addendum (inspired by the last emotional justice talk): though seldom fully acknowledged, feelings are NOT exclusively the realm of women - what are joy, lust, & anger if not emotions? - and we're certainly not the only ones to feel those are we? Without a shift that encourages and allows both sexes the space to show & express a *range* of emotions - there's going to keep being an unequal division of emotional labor, emotions will (wrongly!) keep getting equated with irrationality (what the hell is more rational than crying or asking someone to stop when something hurts?? it HURTS damn it!) - and women will keep getting gaslighted for daring to emote (and to compensate, they start denying & suppressing emotions too, because they don't want to come across as "irrational" - even though then they'll get chastised for being "unfeeling") ... hell in a hand basket I tell ya... le sigh

 Still the most criminal part of all this, for me, is that it can prevent boys & men from ever coming into the fulness of their being, because they feel either ashamed or genuinely terrified of emotions they do have (Ladies, it's not just about guys not wanting to share or open, or even simply about them not knowing how. Listening to men speak in my interviews (and these are the married ones) it's clear that for some there's genuine, paralyzing terror around emotions, not just talking about them, but *feeling* anything at all - often because they feel acutely vulnerable). And all that unfeeling can't help but dull even the most fulfilling of sentiments ... like Brene Brown said, "You can't numb those hard feelings without numbing the other affects, our emotions. You cannot selectively numb. So when we numb those, we numb joy, we numb gratitude, we numb happiness" and that is a tragedy.