"raising boys is easier"

[kalmn]

i've heard a lot of people say this.

i have theories on why they say this, mostly involving the patriarchy and acceptance of same, but i'd be interested to hear other people's reasons or theories.

there may be a rant coming up. you may be quoted. you have been warned.

Comments

[pantryslut.livejournal.com]

What I suspect they often really mean is "it's less heartbreaking to raise boys."

[kate-schaefer.livejournal.com]

Raising abstractions is easier. Each and every actual person is challenging in varying ways.

[rm.livejournal.com]

I think, historically, that comes out of not having to
worry about boys getting pregnant; the evidence of the trouble boys cause being harder to trace back to them or something.

Now I think it's just shorthand for the general resentment most of our culture has for women taking up space, in any conceivable way, at any conceivable age.

[sethb.livejournal.com]

As my mother put it, "Let her mother worry."

[matthewwdaly.livejournal.com]

Okay, I'll play.

People say things because they're stupid.

I've never raised a boy or a girl, and I would consider either to be a challenge that would require my complete devotion. From my vantage point of ignorance, I wonder if the patriarchy isn't more interested in ultimately creating well-adjusted men and subjugated women, so that the metaphorical village would be on my side if I were raising a boy. At the end of the day, I seem to suspect that the patriarchy fucks up everyone's mind and so it would ultimately be the same challenge to raise a child to be properly aware of his or her own value and the need to stand in and yet apart from society.

[onceupon.livejournal.com]

Having never raised a child, I can't say. I can say it's easier, in practice, in our culture, to baby sit little boys. I don't know that it is particularly innate but the play styles of little boys and little girls are sort of funneled into different activities. It is WAY easier to set some little boys up with imaginary light sabers than it is to be involved in an imaginary tea party. And the little girls for whome I sat never seemed into the light saber option, alas. I blame cultural construction.

[sophy.livejournal.com]

I find the exact opposite to be true, for me. I find I can easily get into whatever activities little girls want to play - active and passive activities alike; but with little boys, I often find myself trying to figure out how to encourage and participate in their chosen activities without also encouraging violence and negative attitudes towards people different from them. Unless the boy happens to like more female-ish activities, in which *I* tend to feel more comfortable, but I find myself being very very conscious of how we are viewed by others and the judgments involved with a boy playing dress-up, for example, is much more stringent than a girl who wants to play with, say, light sabers.

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

The range of acceptable behaviour for girls is a lot narrower. It's a lot harder work to stuff a human being into a smaller box.

[onceupon.livejournal.com]

Oh, man, trufax.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I think it would violate the privacy of several individual boys I know to say, "Because they've never met x, y, z, or q."

But I have a list in my head of, "Ah, hahahahaha no," where I can compare boy x, boy y, boy z, and boy q, to girl a, girl b, girl c, and girl d, and have a pretty good sense of which I would find easier to deal with on a daily/parental basis.

[sethb.livejournal.com]

But what was the effort involved to get them to be that way?

[ailbhe]

For me, it's "raising boys is slightly less enraging." But I'm not at all sure that raising them to be nice people, by my own definitions of it, wouldn't be harder - along with all the power and entitlement boys get a whole heaping of unpleasant behaviours reinforced.

[miep.livejournal.com]

my experience has been, because male and female children develop physically at different rates, and also because at various developmental stages, there tends to be a different socio-cultural "way of being/playing", the girls I have worked with have at an earlier stage sought out complex social power learning in a way distinct from the boys. Some of the boys have also been part of these power-dynamic scenarios, but most often, there has been a split by gender, with some girls preferring the less-social-power-working activities.

[sophy.livejournal.com]

I feel weird admitting this, but will for the sake of open discussion, but I've often felt the opposite. That if I were ever to have a child, I'd hope it was a girl simply because I relate much better to girls than to boys and I'd be afraid of not being able to care for a male child as well as I know I could a female child.

The only way I can relate this to what you've heard is that possibly our society is structured to understand men better than women, so people feel it might be easier to raise a man than a mysterious woman?? I don't have a clue. I'm actually very surprised that people say that all, to be honest. But that's my own biases coming in that I find women/girls much much easier in all stages of life and ways of relating.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

I have been known to say to my wife that I do not want to know in utero what the biosex of our child will be, because then I would start having fantasies about giving a boy away to someone who does not have the huge baggage of rage/annoyance/lack of ability to relate to boys.

[beaq.livejournal.com]

Well, duh. Since caveman days, we have adapted to nurture and protect girls, who will raise the other babies, and to toughen and and stoically ignore boys, who will be thrown expendably into the manly bonfire of the valiant hunters and warriors who survival of the fittest to sacrifice protect for the sake wimminanchildren.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

Because boys turn out RIGHT! Since the default member of society is male, cis, straight, white, and able bodied, with a boy you have a chance of producing a correct adult person (i.e. a MAN YAY).

With a girl, the best you're gonna manage is to turn her into a woman.

Less facetiously, I've heard this a lot, too, but mainly from mothers, not fathers. I think there's a sense that the parent who is the same gender as the child is responsible for an unequal portion of how they turn out, particularly in regard to imposing gender norms (hence the social-workish obsession with finding male role models for sons of single moms, whereas for daughters of single moms that's more of a garnish). So Mothers sometimes have more responsibility for their daughters than for their sons, particularly in those areas of gender and sexuality that are likely lead to conflict.

[petsnakereggie.livejournal.com]

For me, raising boys is a little easier because I'm a boy and because I didn't have a little sister, I had a little brother. For those reasons, I feel a little more like I know what I'm in for.

Beyond that, I have no opinion to offer as I've no experience that would allow me to accurately evaluate if it is more difficult to raise a girl than a boy.

[elusis.livejournal.com]

Boys don't get pregnant.

Also, having tried to educate myself about African-American families due to my work, I suspect that there is an implied "[white]" in that statement, because raising young black men has some mighty fearful challenges in it, not least of which is knowing they will be treated like criminals from about the age of five.

[mle292.livejournal.com]

You were going to get stuck raising a kid that will be socially conscious anyway, so there's no easy path. It ain't so bad.

[androgenie.livejournal.com]

From a less Gender Studies perspective and more from a personal experience one, I found that both was equally frustrating. My old roommate had a young daughter (a little older than my godsons), and while life was easier with her because she picked up on language more quickly, she was also more interdependent with adults, so it was difficult having adult time with her. The godsons were more content to do solo activities, but the language development wasn't at the same rate (which are probably factors that feed into each other...more adults = more language, more solo time = less adults = less time to learn words).

[ailbhe]

Oh - and I've found that parents of boys will say "Aren't you lucky they're not boys?" to me, sometimes. Sometimes in front of their own sons. I've never figured that one out. Nor come up with a satisfactory response.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

"I'm lucky that they are the people that they are," maybe?

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Boys tend to develop upper body strength faster than girls, so their center of gravity tends to be higher, which makes it easier to pick them up under the armpits and lift with good balance.

Um. That's what you meant by "raise", right?

Seriously, I don't have any kids of my own, but I do have cousins, a niece and nephew, and I teach Hebrew school, and I don't see any particularly detectable sex-based difference in how easy it is to deal with one child or another. Some children ARE easier to deal with than others, but I can't see any correlation between that and sex and/or gender.

[buttonlass.livejournal.com]

There are exceptions to all statements of this kind. For instance, now I'm busy raising one of each, and the boy is much more challenging on several fronts. I fully expected it to go the other way before we had the children.

I dread any talking about body image or make up or dressing terribly(i.e. You are not every one else and I will not buy a skirt that doesn't cover your bottom.) All the stuff typical to girls and teen magazines and other girls being incredibly mean (personal history has more influence than I like). I hope to raise someone who mostly misses this crap but it's harder and harder to do that with all the influence in so many media types.

It's not that I thought I wouldn't have to do some of this with my son but I thought, before I had them, that it was more likely I would have to discuss how often you are allowed to wear the same shirt in a row and how to be nice to girls and not be a jerk. I may still need to do this stuff with Nico but I'll also have to do a bunch of other stuff in addition.

Much of this isn't going the way I thought and I can only hope that continues to be true.:)

[(Anonymous)]

[mizzlaurajean.livejournal.com]

Hmmm I think it depends more on the child then on their gender.

[bifemmefatale.livejournal.com]

Hah, I *just* had this argument with my gf last night. It is my position that they are equally difficult or easy because I don't believe in gender essentialism. She remarked that an aunt of hers had said girls were more deceitful while boys 'fessed up and took their lumps. I told her that my daughter has often 'fessed up and my son *never* has, even when caught in the very middle of the infraction.

[orbitalmechanic.livejournal.com]

Okay, I have to say these comments make me cringe. You know me, you know my girl. You know she loves dresses, nail polish, rock climbing, soccer, gymnastics, chin-ups, biking, and running around like a squirrel.

She is also a freakin' textbook case of bitchy girl social dynamics, and she brings a lot of other girls into that interaction. I am sure that cultural pressures are involved, but she is four, and developmentally four-year-old girls have a very different social awareness than boys. She is hyper-alert to inclusion and exclusion and "you're not my friend" power dynamics (except when she's on the monkey bars). The boys just don't see it. I'm sure cognitively they'll even out, but patterns set fast.

(I hope you also know I'm not saying these differences are necessarily important, or that they justify later divisions, or any of that crap. But at this particular moment? My girl is making me NUTS. You know, give or take her "Best Camper" award at gymnastics camp. If I were an adult who found social dynamics difficult, it would be so hard and so flat-out confusing to deal with.)

I do hear a lot of people say that raising girls is easier.

[orbitalmechanic.livejournal.com]

I want to try to explain better why these comments bother me. Of course "easier to raise" is a loaded statement and not, in general, one that I would make. But it seems to me that sometimes denying the differences between boys and girls is like being "colorblind"--it's more comfortable for the adult but not necessarily helpful for the child. Statistics don't determine the individual, but they can help a parent understand where his child is on the spectrum and which spectrum s/he should be on.

Throughout childhood, on average, emotional development is different. Boys are not simply taught to talk less and run more; they are cognitively in a different place. At puberty, physical and emotional changes will develop differently. Different children will have different skills for dealing with those changes, and their peer groups will provide different kinds of support, and adults will also have different skills for helping. Girls who are part of only the second generation to play serious high-school sports? Awesome, but they're understudied and we know less about how they should train and avoid injuries.

Again, yes, the original statement gets on my nerves. But I think it's also counterproductive to dismiss the possibility that certain groups of adults are flat-out better at dealing with one set of childhood behaviors/trends/etc. Is it fair, is it always true? No. But I also think it's unfair to ask children to exist in our own fantasy genderless world, when they have to go live in the real one.

[wild-irises.livejournal.com]

I completely agree that generalizations here aren't helpful, so I'm about to quote one. Audre Lorde said (roughly), "It's easier to raise girls than boys because it's easier to raise children to fight oppression than to resist privilege."

Generally, I hear more often that girls are easier: they toilet-train earlier as a group, they tend to be more docile/socialized/well-behaved most of the time. But there's also a social perception that they're at more risk.

I also want to especially thank ailbhe for pointing out the implied "white" in the generalization.

[kalmn.livejournal.com]

elusis, not ailbhe.

i think i have to get that audre lorde quote tattooed on myself. backwards on my forehead, maybe.

[snippy]

My mother, who had both boys and girls, said boys were much easier. I've only had boys (I dreaded having a girl because I knew my issues with my mother would interfere with my parenting a girl).

IME as a girl child and a mother of boy children, boys are harder until puberty (age 9 to 11, roughly), then very suddenly girls are MUCH HARDER. Boys are usually harder to socialize in general-potty train, teach to each with utensils, etc. But the hormonal flux and body image changes that many girls experience around puberty are difficult to experience and take away part of your ability to self-manage.

[beckyzoole.livejournal.com]

I agree with this. Girls tend to have a rockier puberty than boys. This is because of body image issues, because their bodies and minds need to adjust to fluctuating hormones instead of an increased steady level of hormones, and because the way their bodies change is often more difficult to handle than the way boys' bodies change. (Periods can be messy and painful; breasts can get inappropriate attention from others that they do not know how to handle.)

Also, girls tend to go through puberty earlier than boys do, which means that they must handle this more-difficult transition while less emotionally mature to boot.

And so, it IS frequently more difficult for parents to help their girl children through puberty than their boy children.

But before puberty, I've found little difference, except that boys tend to take longer to potty train.