"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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[pgdudda.livejournal.com]

This type of comment always makes me cringe, because my reaction as a gay man tends to be, "No. The boundaries are just policed differently, and in certain contexts men actually get the more violent enforcement - both physically and emotionally." So it'll take a lot of discussion to convince me that the range of acceptable behaviors is significantly narrower for girls than for boys, since my individual experience growing up was the opposite: For example, girls are allowed to be "sensitive" and boys aren't.

Now, if you are claiming that boys and girls are socialized differently, well, yes. They are. But that is not the same as "narrower range of acceptable behaviors".

[onceupon.livejournal.com]

Girls aren't "allowed" to be sensitive - it's mandated that they be sensitive.

And, yes, the boundaries for kids of any gender are policed differently.

[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.

[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.

[sophy.livejournal.com]

I'm going to agree with you here. I think this is an instance of where the patriarchy hurts all genders pretty equally. I think there are definitely some/many/most instances in which it hurts women and/or people with non-normative genders much much worse, but this is one area where I think it's fairly equal - but different. Men and women are both stuffed into pretty narrow boxes and get socialized into those boxes very rigidly as children. "Boys do this and girls do that." Period. And it sucks for all of us in the end.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[pgdudda.livejournal.com]

And it's mandated that "boys don't cry", which is its own kind of socially-imposed straitjacket.

[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.

[onceupon.livejournal.com]

Babysitting was my only source of income throughout highschool and the beginning part of college - and I tended to sit for multiple kids. I wonder if that has anything to do with it as well? I used to keep three boys from this one family while their parents went out of town for the weekend (who leaves a 16-year old in charge from Friday afternoon to Monday morning with a 5-. 7-, and 11-year-old???) and they were particularly fun because they wanted to be involved in everything - we cooked, we cleaned, we ran around the backyard, we played dress up, we jumped on the trampoline. Whereas, the two girls from down the street were very much about doing things that didn't involve me or that involved me on the tea party level. It was a really interesting shift, and it was really evident, knowing their parents, that they'd been influenced by the roles their parents expected them to fill.

[onceupon.livejournal.com]

Dude, I'm not arguing with you that gender expectations hurt everyone. I have explicitly agreed with you on that score. But I'm not going to play oppression hierarchy with you about who has it worse.

[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]

but only sensitive to a point...I was a very sensitive child, and it was something my parents tried to (damn near) beat out of me.

[onceupon.livejournal.com]

but only sensitive to a point

Well, of course. But that goes back to the narrow range of acceptable responses.