Just like it was tattooed on my knuckles, I’ve got this love hate relationship going on with Carter right now.
I love how he’s developing into this little dude who can think for himself. He likes and dislikes things, he has an amazing memory of streets, construction equipment, and people, even though he thinks all things are blue and can’t count past 7. He tries though. He’s just fucking amazing and sometimes I just want to hug him and feel his Mohawk hair and tell him how much I love him and how cool he is.
Then he’s this little jackass who I want to be as far away from as possible. He’ll spit over and over even when you ask him not to, and tell him not to, and yell at him not to, and punish him for doing it (albeit a positive and non-physical punishment). He’ll put stuff in the dog’s water, he’ll scream inside, he won’t listen, he’ll throw a tantrum because he can’t have yogurt.
Being a parent is hard. Two year olds are lucky they do cute things every once and a while.
I was in one of those online mudslinging debates with a bunch of angry feminists.
I preface this by saying my wife would identify herself as a feminist. She’s made a choice that I think these angry feminists would abhor. She’s decided to get married, have children, and stay at home with them while they are young. (The horror!) My boss at work is an intelligent, strong woman who has the respect of her piers. The validation engineer, whom I go to for advice on testing is also a woman engineer, also intelligent and well respected. When I come to her seeking advice she takes the time to have a thoughtful discussion with me, free of personal attacks and thinking every word that comes out of my mouth is an attempt to show my male dominance over her.
I share in the housework; regardless of what it’s gender roll is considered. I also take an active role in raising our children. I cook dinner every night because I like to.
It turns out I’m a closet sexist.
Why?
I made the assertion that based on observing my son, and many other young children at our Attachment Parenting functions that very young children have a hard-wired propensity to play with gender specific toys.
Carter likes trucks and cars. He doesn’t like baby dolls.
I was met with rude personal attacks on my intelligence level and claims of being an “armchair scientist” and a sexist.
I never said that girls and boys CAN’T or SHOULDN’T or WON’T EVER play with opposing genders toys. I simply said they tend to gravitate to those toys and a certain type of play.
I was initially wrong in thinking that it was due to instincts from when we were uncivilized monkey men living to survive. It turns out that it’s actually hormonal, and studies were done that supported this, although I found them in an undergrad text (how yucky and common).
They disregarded these decade old studies and sited a study not specifically looking at children’s play and propensity to toy choosing, simply on hormones creating both boy and girl behavior in both sexes. I’m sure that study is true. It still doesn’t address my point. Carter wanted to dress and carry around a doll for about 2 days after Oz was born, but he was right back to the trucks and cars after he lost interest in the baby. I guess the rampant sexism in Sesame Street has thwarted our parenting attempts to let him play with any toys he wants.
I was then told that raising kids gives you no special knowledge.
The responsibility for another human being’s life doesn’t teach you anything, or give you any special insight into the human condition.
So I thought maybe I was crazy and I spoke to my validation engineer who has 3 kids, 2 boys and a girl. She was a successful woman. Did she see the same things as sexist Lawryde?
I asked her about it cold, without prefacing her to my debate. She agreed that her boys gravitate to boy toys and a rough type of play. I asked her if she thought it was a social thing or if it was just the way they were.
She thought it was just the way they were. I said, well are you sure that television and your parents and how you treat them doesn’t affect it. She said it would have some affect, WHICH I AGREE WITH. I talked to her about those first moments when they were just starting to choose what they like (around 1.5 years and 2) and asked her if they just kind of gravitated towards gender specific toys. She agreed and agreed that social factors would be almost non-existent at that point. We have different parenting styles so now I have a sample size of two with the same results and 10-year-old research that backs me up.
I then told her about my debate with these immature (still in school or just starting their real adult lives, no kids of their own, not responsible for anyone but themselves, but experts on child development, can’t see the forest for the trees, full of advanced degrees and debt from going to school but no idea how practical things work, knowing everything about me and my typical feminist thoughts, enlarge clitoris’ and labia that look like balls due to high androgen hormone levels during gestation, not understanding respect is something that is earned not implied, mad that I was, by all standard measures, smarter than all of them in high school and now make more money than they do and I’m happy with my loving beautiful family, should be wondering if maybe it’s not that I’m facing sexism on a daily basis, but that really I’m just a big fucking jerk and a terrible excuse for a human being.) (Was that just immature of me? Fuck it. This is my corner of the internet.) girls I knew from high school who were convinced that only social factors affect toy choice in children. She said that before she had kids she had some of the same thoughts, but after having both boys and girls she sees things differently.
The angry feminist will be talking about me now, because that’s what women do. Emails and text messages and phone calls. “Oh, my God. Look what Lawryde wrote. What a sexist asshole!” “He’s so predictable and stupid and his children are going to grow up objectifying women and raping goats.” “We’re so right, and so awesome and so much smarter and better than him.” “Yay, Us!”
I’m sad, it also looks like I lost a facebook friend. (Tear)
I’m reminded on a daily basis how I’m not anything like most of the people I work with. Whether it is their denial of the existence of mental illness, or on their philosophies of raising a child.
A couple of them just had babies. They subscribe to the 1940’s philosophy of just letting a baby cry and it will eventually stop. You baby is a mastermind of manipulation, a la’ Stewie Griffin of Family guy. You child is a dog to be trained for your convenience.
How can people sleep at night with these philosophies? If a baby is crying it needs something. It’s hungry, wet, or just wants your love. How can you deny something you’ve created your love and affection simply because you’d rather be asleep.
If you let your baby cry itself to sleep you’ve accomplished your goal, and it won’t wake up a bunch of times at night, but you’ve also taught it the lesson that it can’t count on you for love and affection. There’s a lot of time in a persons life to find out life is a cruel bitch and people aren’t going to be there for them. Why teach that to them before they’re two.
We didn’t let Carter cry it out. We got up and cared for him. That’s what we signed up for. I would have bought a dog if I wanted to train him like a dog. I have another human that needs to be loved because it can’t take care of itself in this cold unforgiving world.
I adjusted to getting less sleep and waking up at night. We didn’t train him, and now, for quite a while now, all we have to do at night is turn off the light rock him for about 5 seconds, ask him if he’s ready to go to sleep. He say’s Yeah. He gets put in the crib, and he sleeps for 11-12 hours.
No one likes to be called a bad or selfish parent. So I won’t.
