I am a parent, a female parent. I have a son and a daughter. I am married and my husband and I share many of the parental responsibilities equally. When my son arrived two years after our daughter, we naturally loved him equally, as we do our daughter… we see them as equal. Yes, they have different qualities because of their gender and who they are in essence, but at no point have we treated them as less or more because one is a girl and the other is a boy.
It is not about the sort of equality where we push boys to be passive, or get girls to compete with boys, it is an equality where both genders are free to express themselves as they feel is true – no pressure or pictures or roles, rather allowing them to unfold with an understanding that both genders are equally significant and have their own expression and yet are, in essence, of the same origin.
However this is not common in the world… yet. Why are we still so caught up in roles, pictures of the way we need to act in our genders and in how we parent boys differently to girls?
I have frequently heard young boys being told to toughen up, not cry, to like fighting games and super heroes, to beat others in races or games, that they are no good at looking after their home, that it is normal to be rough, not want to be tidy, to not want to look after another person, to not wear pink, nor like flowers or beauty.
Does a 3-year-old boy not hurt the same as a 3-year-old girl if they fall on their knees? Does he not stare in joy at a flower opening up, enjoy the nurturing quality of a lovely shade of pink in his jumper, or snuggle up and enjoy the big caring arms of a parent?
Where did we get the idea that we support our boys by perpetuating these ideas; that boys should not show how they feel if they get hurt, that they need to harden up, not enjoy beautiful things, be aggressive, be physically dominant and win to get ahead?
A question for us as parents and mothers: what kind of men are our boys growing into when we role model in such a way?
My son, like my daughter, is gentle, so sweet, sensitive, caring, playful, enjoys beauty and order, with things being put away neatly. He is understanding, aware of others and when he has fallen, bumped, tripped, or felt fear in his life, I have my arms open equally with care and support, as I would for his sister.
If my son falls, he has the same physiological responses as my daughter does: his skin tears, there may be blood, bruises, tears and shock. Many of us adults respond in entirely different ways if this incident occurs to a boy rather than a girl; with a boy you often hear parents suggesting not to cry and to get up and toughen up, rather than offering a cuddle and care.
I have heard many conversations between women that are about the kind of men they would like to be with, or how their man is not fulfilling their idea of what makes a ‘real’ man.
Some criticism includes that men are:
- Messy, and do not clean up after themselves
- Irresponsible around the home
- Rough and careless
- Insensitive
- Can’t talk about their feelings
- Not gentle
- Do not understand their female partner
- Competitive and trying to get the upper hand
- Distant and distracted by hobbies
- Aggressive and dominating.
But hang on one moment, haven’t we as parents just endorsed all of these habits from a very young age in our boys? We normalise habits in our boy children that become exacerbated ways of life and habits into adulthood, and then we criticise our men for behaving in these ways.
Do we really think that these habits are set through our gender distinctions and not through habitual cultural stereotyping and parenting, when all we need to do is observe a young toddler at a play group to observe these behaviours, traits and habits being instilled from a very young age? We, as mothers and role models, have a significant responsibility in how we support boys to become the true men that they are naturally born to be and are.
My young son is growing into an extremely loving, strong, steady and expressive young man who is not imprisoned by what society says he should be. He is very free to express who he is through what he feels is true within him. He is a boy, but as a parent it is not up to me to tell him what it means to be a certain ‘type’ of male, nor the man he should be in this life. That is for him to discover, express and choose.
I know from conversations that some parents and mothers fear that their sons will be hurt or excluded if they do not conform to what a man is supposed to be, so they make sure they encourage them to learn to not show their feelings and tell them to toughen up in the hope that this will enable them to get through life with less suffering and pain. This is without doubt one of the most disabling choices we can make as parents – to toughen up our children. This cuts our children off from feeling, which is in fact our ultimate strength. In choosing to not feel, we disconnect from who we truly are, and then there is nothing but sorrow, disconnection and a functioning way of being, rather than a truly fulfilling life.
We do not protect our sons when we seek this as a remedy – we instead perpetuate the status quo that does not support either gender. We are all born with a precious tool for life, our bodies. When we harden up and disconnect through not wanting to feel things, we are not able to connect so deeply with our bodies. The body naturally supports us when we are connected to it and when we cut off or numb ourselves, we are less able to express how we are feeling, and so neglect to truly care for ourselves or others.
My son may cry when he is punched, trips or is talked to in an aggressive way; he may at times feel isolated and not be accepted in a group because he does not join in the competition, fighting or name calling that is involved; he may feel the pressure to conform and join in with what is presented as ‘normal’ behaviour for a male. This is his choice; I do not make judgment either way, but I do take my job seriously as a role model and counsel as he grows and develops. I will be responsible and offer guidance and support as he encounters these pressures throughout life. I significantly will always be open to who he naturally is to support him to explore and hold these qualities as he so chooses.
As a parent I take this into consideration in everyday parenting – how am I within myself, what is the quality of our relationships, how my children are flourishing, are they steady and confident within themselves, do they feel free to communicate how they feel? These considerations determine the way I am with them as a role model.
In the long term, it is important to consider how I raise and support my son now. How will he develop in life, how will he react or respond to his experiences, will he feel confident and able to enjoy being himself and will he be able to engage in meaningful relationships, expressing the qualities he was naturally born with?
It is clear that supporting him to honour what he feels, confirming / encouraging the expression of his natural sensitivity, care and gentleness will enable him to find his way with these super powerful qualities intact and this can only support him and others. These qualities are often underestimated in society and often derided in a man. It does not make a man weak to be open to feeling what is going on in the world, within his body, in his relationships – it is a strength and benefit for himself and all others.
We are here to offer support and raise our children. We are guardians in their lives; our purpose is not to control, own or pander, it is to support them to make choices that offer the freedom to express, be responsible and empower themselves so that they live meaningful lives of purpose and value within their own sphere and within society.
By Anonymous.
Further Reading:
It’s a Boy! What is true gender equality?
Stitched Up
Gender based violence – where does it begin? Do we really want to know?
Raising Boys – Are we Imposing on Them?
430 Comments
Sexism is one thing but an even bigger part is this habit of seeing ourselves as divorced from our heart, our origin and true nature. As long as we stay trapped in the idea that we all are ‘just people’ – this is the biggest prejudice of all. Your words lead me to feel that it’s high time we cherish ourselves as multi-dimensional beings, way beyond gender or roles.
Joseph not only are we as you say
” trapped in the idea that we all are ‘just people’ – this is the biggest prejudice of all.”
We are also trapped into believing that there is only one life, which is a complete lie that many of us have fallen for.
Not imposing on our children to be anything other than who they are is truly raising them. It can be difficult to not want them to be and achieve and succeed in life according to our pictures and ideals.
Having two sons has been the biggest inspiration for me in re-discovering my own innate tenderness. They have taught me so much…and it’s not always been in a ‘good’ way. At times, I have imposed upon them in ways that you describe and have been so clearly shown that this is not their truth, and then this in turn has given me an even greater ‘permission’ and impulse to tap into the same tenderness that is innately in me. It’s an amazing journey and I am indebted to them for what they have shown me and am in deep appreciation of myself for being open enough to see it.
Otto thank you for sharing your relationship with your two sons with such openness. We do impose on our children all the time with expectations, ideals and beliefs which was the method we were squashed by our parents. So having this conversation is a breath of fresh air where it is possible to be open and honest so that we can change how we interact with our children and grow ourselves too.
Just being able to offer an unobtrusive and open support as a parent, not placing any of our own pressures and expectations is an amazing gift to our children, giving them the space to be themselves.
We do know this about the way we treat the genders differently and it is fascinating and important to explore our beliefs, which frees us from their grip and our blindness.
The nature or nurture discussion opened up to a whole new level. How we pattern our societies and how we can make significant changes by simply stepping back and supporting children to develop their innate qualities rather than imposing our beliefs onto them. Thank you.
Even if we as parents do hold our sons to be the tender boys they are the education system, the media, and the world in general all have a go at bringing them down, toughening them up and making a ‘man’ out of them.
It’s true Kathleen. The world we live in does not openly accept let alone support men to be the true tender and sensitive beings that they are. All the more reason for us as mothers to deeply honour those qualities that we know to be true in our sons, even when they get older and adopt a way of protecting themselves from the harsh and dismissive attitudes that are not willing to accept that this is who they are from their innate sensitivity.
Indeed they do, but the parents and other adults around them can be the beholders of that truth and can always offer the support needed, so that they can see and feel that they have a choice. As a parent, that is my main goal – for any children around me to know that there is another choice. It’s super tough out there, intense and so it’s mighty important that they get to see the other way and that they can feel the support needed to choose that way.
The lack of imposition and the honouring and being ness of love of our children is gold in the respect and responsibility of who we are naturally and the way we are parented and live this which and says everything.
Seeing the photo above there is nothing but a pureness and natural impulse to ensure that this little boy knows and grows up to know deeper who he truly is and the massive ball of love that is him. Anything to corrupt this naturalness, heavenliness seen in his whole being and eyes, even through raising him any differently in love to another child who is a girl, to me would be evil. A child is sacred, as too is their truth. In this how could there be any delineation through gender?
Yes, the delineation of gender is interesting and simply a reflection of our delineation of so many other areas in our lives. As a human race, we seem to like to put things in boxes so it can all be easily understood. Boxes with borders! When you look beyond those physical borders you can feel that we are all the same love in our essence and we have our own amazing reflection to offer the world. Having borders, roles, boxes just reduces us and what we are here to offer and reflect – which is borderless.
I look at the eyes of the boy in the photo above and feel such wisdom and openness that requires no imposition of societal or personal values.
The pressure is immense in the world for a boy to conform to a hard way of living, where they say they do not care, they will not cry, that they are rough and all the while, it is seen as normal. The story about boys having shorter attention spans, I have not seen a difference in my children, boy and girl, it is a lot more to do with them being at ease with themselves and able to process the information available, and they read how it feels and if they attempt to ignore it or deny it. This is the level we need to be talking on, how things feel and the energetic component to life, not just the superficial see it and do it stuff. Children are deeply sensitive and learning their way in the world that does not often feel supportive of who they are, there are. There are ways of behaving and talking that many see as normal, but it is like smoking, once thought normal, the tide can change and a more healthy way of being can emerge.
I consider it a miracle and a blessing but actually it is a naturalness of love to be with a teenage son who is very delicate and tender and will express this. Love is very powerful.
Working with children in the past has given me the scope to feel that our men of the future have the potential to live their caring and loving ways if we start the honouring from the day of conception and make our way of living supportive of this.
“This cuts our children off from feeling, which is in fact our ultimate strength. In choosing to not feel, we disconnect from who we truly are, and then there is nothing but sorrow, disconnection and a functioning way of being, rather than a truly fulfilling life.” As I read these words it feels so painful within my very core, that we choose to do this and condone this behaviour with our children, when they reflect so much sensitivity, tenderness and preciousness back to us and we feel to crush it and curtail it. As you say, our feelings are our greatest strength as they lead us to understand who we truly are in essence and when we can express them this is our greatest empowerment, and our greatest healing for humanity.
Being the youngest and the only female sibling, I recall feeling that if I wanted to play with my brothers and their friends and be accepted then I had to harden up and be tough to be accepted into their sacred inner circle.
“I know from conversations that some parents and mothers fear that their sons will be hurt or excluded if they do not conform to what a man is supposed to be, so they make sure they encourage them to learn to not show their feelings and tell them to toughen up in the hope that this will enable them to get through life with less suffering and pain.” In my experience, this doesn’t just happen to boys. I have seen girls get the same treatment from both their parents.
In a world where women are competing with each other so much more to be a man in a man’s world, we have kids of both sexes being groomed to harden up. I am seeing parents who try to toughen up their daughters so they will be able to sustain the hard knocks that come to them in life. So girls are also learning to harden up and ‘drink a bag of cement’and then we have issues with lumps in our breasts, possibly leading to cancer and hardened ovaries leading to further complications. We would do well to teach ourselves and our children to come back to falling in love with our vulnerability and tenderness and sensitivity for both genders.
It is alarming how, younger and younger, we are ‘toughening’ our children up to cope with the world. Surely our efforts would be better placed looking at the fact that our world is tough, mean, disharmonious, abusive and full of conflict and getting down to sorting this out.
I had a fascinating conversation with a friend about how young men that are respectful of women, tender and sweet and openly caring often get questioned as being gay – because how can they respect women and be so sweet, whilst also be attracted to women? It is like we are making being gay a way of excusing this kind of behaviour rather than accepting that men can be equally sensitive and open and gentle, and still be a man and strong and caring.
If we are any to offer this level of support to a child we must first be willing to offer it to ourselves. When adults honour their own sensitivity they truly support children.
Great point, and are we willing to go there and be sensitive. As adults we have often over time have, layered ourselves with a protective shield that gets us through life, but it does not serve us or anyone else. We then have children and they come to us so sensitive and transparent and we freak out consciously or subconsciously, and so choose old patterns and ideas to function and parent. The more I have allowed myself to feel, be honest and responsible for my chooses the more my children have felt the difference. I am their role model and what they experience in daily life is a woman learning to as transparent and sensitive as she can be to what life offers and what her own children reflect. The way often we parent is to go into, survival, defence, a reactionary way of parenting that creates children who are guarded and prone to be separatist in their outlook, thinking about themselves only first, this harms us all.
Interesting thought provoking points. Women complain about adult men, how they behave and how they treat women, but at the same time women as a group, are also responsible of raising boys to the men they would not like as a partner themselves. It shows that our ‘normal’ way of parenting needs a different approach.
It does indeed raise some points to ponder and reflect upon as women. There needs to be a shift concerning how men and woman see themselves and how they interact. How we parent both our boys and girls matters, the same old stereotypes and ideas breed separation and false notions of what it means to be a woman or man. That is why it matters so deeply how we live ourselves as parents, understanding that every choice matters.
Just reading the criticisms of men listed I can feel the hurt of this stereotype being projected on men and that I do not feel I am any of these things but the opposite. Peeling back these expectations of men and allowing true expression as we grow up and in adult life is super supportive of men returning to the expression of all of their natural qualities in full.
The choice to do this is a huge reflection for men as there is the potential to see and feel others living another way.
And the world is a richer place for every man who chooses and is supported to express their tenderness, wisdom and delicacy.
Reading this made me wonder why we put so much effort into inequality?
Are we afraid to see and feel we are all equal… and therefore we have bought into a complete lie?
It is interesting what you say here Susan. As it reminds me to be one of the three sons in our family, so no girls, therefore I do not know the difference my parents would have been with a daughter. What I do remember though is that my mother sometimes was complaining she would have liked one of us to be a girl, probably because from her own upbringing she had the idea she could be different with raising girls than in raising boys.
As parent there is so much to undo of the imposed ideals and beliefs on how you should parent a boy. Imagine if we all would be able to just be love with our children as demonstrated in this blog, to be love with them and without any judgment or investment in any outcome, how then would our boys look like when they grow into adulthood? What I can see is that this for instance would bring an end to the wars we now have in the world as none of these men would be able to become a soldier in how we know soldiers to be.
Boys and men ar super sensitive and tender. It is interesting how the world does everything it can to crush these beautiful land powerful qualities.
So very needed this article, thank you. I also grew up where I was taught to “toughen up”, and parents did not ask how I was feeling. The effects of this kind of parenting then created a “ME” that I considered fully normal for a long time. I am know slowly re-living what it is like to be a true man. For that it is good to have role models around me of men living as tender, delicate, sensitive but also powerful men.
To empower our children to live fulfilled, confident, purposeful lives we need to allow them to know themselves truly from the inside, from their essence and to honour their sensitivities and delicate nature. From there we need to give them tools to support them to deal with the realities of life and false expectation or pictures that we can get hooked into.
“But hang on one moment, haven’t we as parents just endorsed all of these habits from a very young age in our boys?” Yes, so so true , we are the ones who keep perpetuating the lie, it’s an old lie that has been told for a long long time over and over again, generation after generation.
Inspiring these beautiful young men to be all that they are starts at home with ourselves allowing our divinity and delicateness to be known.
What you are offering the world is a golden opportunity to begin anew – so that we can let go of all these long held beliefs that have held back the whole of humanity. If I had read your blog forty or so years ago I would have felt so supported to follow my heart and not compromise. Now as a grandmother it’s such a joy to be able to confirm my grandsons who do not reject their sensitivity and beauty.
This picture says it all. Absolute serenity and sensitivity shining brightly through to us all . An amazingly beautiful sharing and so honouring to read and feel .
When I see my son naturally expressing who he is I find it very humbling and inspiring as he teaches me every day how to claim back my own natural expression as a man.
The absolute beauty in mutual support between father and son.
Yes society’s cultural ‘norms’ are horrible and so far from who we are, but if we are honest we will admit that it was us who did a deal to swap our innocence, naturalness and joy, for acceptance, recognition and attention. Whichever way you look at it, it certainly is not worth it.
Fiona so true, there is a mis-conception that making boys tougher when they are younger that they become stronger when they are older, in fact alot of boys who go through this are the ones that are very weak when they are older as they are not connected to their true essence, they have lost all sense of feeling and connection with themselves.
Thank you for sharing this is a great blog and everyone should read it. So many people get caught up in toughen up their boys without realizing the damage it will cause for the boy as he grows up.
The picture shows how much he is staying himself and didn’t contract away from his beauty.
My years of studying with Universal Medicine made that I became much more aware about myself and how I can learn to honor and love myself again. This directly had effect on my daughter. Children feel the choices of the parents and the quality they live in. This is for us all to realize. It start to love ourselves again if we want our children to keep loving themselves.
Being ok to feel vulnerable is so important for us guys as we can so quickly look for mechanisms of protection to prevent this when we anticipate feeling hurt. Amazing that boys can grow up supported to live like this as adults and offer a loving and consistent reflection of being a man to the world.
This is something that cannot be denied, and stands as an inarguable truth in relation to how equally sensitive boys are – “If my son falls, he has the same physiological responses as my daughter does: his skin tears, there may be blood, bruises, tears and shock.”
A key for me as a woman…mother has been to not try and protect and put up shield against life, when things get tough or feel challenged, it has been about letting that tenderness and vulnerability be there, this is what children want to feel, a parent open, gentle, sensitive, not hard and pushy and not connected. A young child and baby is all about connection and vulnerability and it asks you as a parent of how willing are you to go there and be with those sensations again after closing them down in adult life…If we get scared, think it is pointless, decide it is not the way to survive in life then we start to try and close it down in our children, because we do not want to feel it ourselves. Are we willing to be real, honest and open with our children and respond to the love and beautifulness that they share without trying to hinder, control or dictate how it is expressed? This takes self development and self healing, we only offer what we live to our children so what is the quality we live?
Absolutely agree, it is not about teaching or talking to our children about how to live but showing by example and inspiration by living to the best of our ability our own natural way which includes tenderness and vulnerability and self-care.
I am a parent, a female parent. I have a son and a daughter. I am married and my husband and I share many of the parental responsibilities equally. Sharing the parental responsibility these days is rare, so beautiful to know you and your partner have responsibly chosen to support each other in this way. This not only helps each other, but naturally ripples out to the kids and reflects a true role model for them that supports them to find their way through life from a place of knowing their truth and moving forward trusting in that.
Our only job as parents and carers of young boys is to make sure we do not crush their delicate nature by imposing upon them the many burdens of beliefs and ideals we have taken on in our lives.
So true Liane it is important to not crush their delicate nature. Boys are so delicate and any crushing would shut them down and this at later time in their life will blow as behaviour issues due to burying their feelings.
This photograph touches me every time I see it. The quality of what shines from those eyes makes it impossible for me not to appreciate the tenderness and treasure in every man.