Raise boys and girls the same
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All parents have specific ways they intend to raise their offspring. The entire world population is proof of that. However, from the moment human beings enter this world, they are brought up around varying amounts of societal and familial expectations whether they realize it or not.
These expectations include things like what clothes children are supposed to wear, what movies they are supposed to like or what they should want to be when they grow up. Raising a child in this kind of environment is detrimental to the person that they will eventually become.
Childhood should not come with stigmas.
The first decade of a child’s life includes some of the most influential years they will ever live through. When they start school, they are introduced to new people and things outside of their family they may have never stumbled upon otherwise.
These are the years when boys and girls enter their worlds as blank slates and allow their surroundings to impact their development simply because they do not know better yet.
Because of this, if a boy is raised under the impression that his father will be disappointed in him for wanting to pursue musical theatre, he might avoid discovering something that could make him genuinely happy.
Due to a household’s predisposed status quo, little boys are more often than not expected to reach for Tonka trucks in the toy aisle instead of Barbie, and they should start playing football in fourth grade.
They are told that they must make the money, marry and start having kids in order to carry on the family name.
The same applies for females. Countless little girls are brought up imposed with the idea that they are supposed to dress up as princesses, wear makeup and marry a man to bear his children while he goes off every morning to make the money that provides for the family.
They are expected to always be ladylike, polite and partake in the minimum of nearly anything that they do from the moment they can to the moment they cannot.
These outside pressures often end up leading to the child repressing the thoughts and feelings that make up who they are as a person in fear of their family’s and society’s harsh opinions.
Kids have been disowned for coming out as gay or transgendered, they have been judged by their families for doing what they love and mistreated by other authority figures in their lives for not conforming to the world’s restrictive gender-specific molds.
These are archaic, outdated ways of parenting a child. Gendered upbringings may have been acceptable [if not required to survive] in the 1800s and all years preceding it, but it is 2015.
Women are allowed to own land, gay marriage is legal and men dance in ballets all without the looming possibility of being stoned to death. These actions, among several others, have become socially acceptable and perfectly okay.
So, why is it that there are still parents who reprimand their sons for dressing up like Cinderella, and send their daughters to timeout for wanting to wear the blue shirt instead of the pink one?
Parents nowadays should not be raising boys and girls, they should simply be raising children. A child’s parents are the first humans they will ever interact with.
The power that a mother and father have over that child’s mental, physical, emotional and intellectual growth is all encompassing, and should not be taken for granted.
Raising a child is not an excuse for a parent to create a clone of themselves. It is a chance to introduce every wonderful and awful thing the world has to offer to their own flesh and blood, and to guide them through their experiences with thoughtfulness and understanding.
Parent should introduce children to things they may enjoy, but do not force those things upon them. They should simply teach them to be kind people, and be there for them as they figure out and learn from the rest of their life experiences.
Childhood is a fleeting thing; the most should be made of it regardless of one’s gender.
Read on jackcentral.org