‘Mummy, I get very angry when people at school and at gymnastics call me cute. I am NOT CUTE! Why do they have to call me that?!’
I asked what cute meant and she said ‘nice, lovely, pretty’. She didn’t want to be defined just by those words. We thought about it for a while – my daughter is 5.5 years old- and she said she’d rather be referred to by what she likes to do rather than how she looks- a swimmer, a gymnast, a scientist. Or that apart from being cute she’s also intelligent and clever. Or say ‘well done’ when she does something really well.
The world is changing rapidly, but girls are still the cute and pretty ones and the boys are mischiefs and little geniuses. The girls are told to get down from a bench/tree/obstacle as they may hurt themselves, whilst when the boys do the same, people smile, roll their eyes and say that boys are so much different than girls! (This is the bane of my life and seen/heard on a regular basis at school drop offs or birthday parties and at work- wherever I go actually.)
Umm yeah they are. Because of years of conditioning and social permission granted to one gender but not the other.
She was the youngest one at swimming today. ‘And I was the best, mummy!’ – my first instinct was to deny it for modesty reasons, but then I thought – she’s right! She was faster, technically better than most of other kids, maybe even all of them (I’d know for sure but I got distracted reading a sample of a book on my kindle). And why should I tell her that she was worse when she wasn’t? Haven’t we got enough of that type of behaviour in the adult life already – in the boardrooms, job interviews, management courses, when women get omitted just for being women? Because men shout louder, ignore what we say (because again – years of conditioning and thinking it’s OK to do so!) and then take credit for coming up with a stellar idea they concocted 5 minutes later, all by themselves – just that it is what we said in the first place, but didn’t have enough shout-power to get it through to others? Because we get omitted whilst the best projects are being distributed due to stereotypical thinking and decisions about us being made for us (oh, you wouldn’t like that project, it would require you to travel a lot and you have a child, so we gave it to someone else…’ – a real example taken from my recent workshop!)
I think we need to end the fake modesty and stop short selling our skills! We are not second class people – but in order to change how the world perceives us, we need to start changing how we perceive our sons and daughters. Empower our children to do what is right, to do what they dream of. Respect their decisions but simultaneously hold them responsible for their actions but let them know you still love them. Ensure they know that they can talk to you about anything and everything.
We had a difficult Saturday. A lot of screaming, anger and attitude – both from me and V. About an hour before bed time, she came to us and said ‘I would like daddy to put me to bed today. Mummy, I love you, but I just don’t feel like I want you around me this evening.’ Which was absolutely fine, I felt the same about her. We chatted about anger and how quickly it takes over anything else and how difficult it is to deal with it – we then cuddled and gave each other a kiss. At the end she said she was OK if I wanted to put her to bed as she felt she could have me close again.
Ballsed -up Parenting 