There are days when I’m amazed at how easy it is to change the world. Those are the days when my kids accept as fact the things I tell them about how the world works (or, perhaps more accurately, how it should work). Statements that might sound strange or jarring to someone who has been on the planet longer and has had a chance to absorb implicit and explicit cultural norms – statements like “you can marry a man or a woman” or “boys can wear tiaras, too” – make perfect sense to them because their mommy told them it is so.
After all, what one generation can’t even imagine possible is to the next generation how it’s always been. Let me put it this way: Obama is the only president my kids have ever known. From their perspective, the president of the U.S. has always been an African American.
And then there are days when I despair of the world ever changing. Those are the days when my kids tell me flatly that “only girls can like pink” or “fire trucks are for boys.” These proclamations contain a tentative question. As my kids notice that the world around them does not quite seem to match what I’ve led them to believe, I can see them wondering: what does this mean about my reliability and authority? What should they trust – my words or their own powers of observation?
As parents, we wield a lot of power. When we talk to our kids, we have a limited opportunity to paint a picture of the world as it should be. At the same time, perhaps the most basic lesson of parenthood is that we don’t have total control over our kids’ lives. We can’t ultimately regulate what they hear and see and learn. That lovely clean slate onto which we can project our own ideals is quickly overloaded with other messages that come from the world as it is.
Sometimes it’s tempting to try to shut out that world – no Disney! No princesses! No macho superheroes! At other times, I relent, worried that ideological rigidity will backfire (and fairly convinced that even a child raised in a cave will still somehow emerge able to identify every single Disney princess and superhero). Lately, I choose instead to address head-on the contradictory nature of what they’re experiencing. I say, for example, that yes, there are a lot of people who think pink is just for girls. But I point out how limiting this is, and that colors can’t belong to one particular type of person, and I name the boys and men we know who like pink, so that it becomes obvious that the idea that pink is just for girls is really quite silly.
Watching my kids navigate the morass of gender expectations is painful, poignant, and even amusing. Recently, my son – who used to love having his toenails painted a rainbow of colors – excused himself from our afternoon pedicure activity with the explanation that “nail polish is for girls.” He wistfully watched me paint my daughter’s toes, and then tentatively said, “Well, I think it would be ok for me to wear nail polish as long as it’s blue… because blue is for boys.”
But the most difficult moments are when I realize that sometimes it’s not just a battle of my words against the insidious mass culture, but also of my words against my own actions. How will my kids really come to believe that cooking dinner is the responsibility of both parents, for example, if I’m the one they see doing it night after night?
The truth is that the biggest challenge to raising role-rebooted kids is that we parents are not fully rebooted ourselves. Even the most enlightened, self-actualized of us are mid-process. So while our kids may be starting off with a relatively clean slate when it comes to gender expectations, we’re decidedly not. I’m a feminist married to another feminist, and we talk a great talk about egalitarian marriage, but we’re still struggling every day with what that actually looks like in practice and how to make our ideals match the messy reality we are living. And I know our kids see that messiness and learn from it. My hope is that they’re learning about honest process, not just hypocrisy.
In the meantime, I think the best we can do is try to provide real life, on-the-ground examples of the values we want to teach, so that we can honestly point to “hard evidence” to contradict the fallacies our kids will encounter again and again. I believe it will be easy for my kids to challenge homophobic claims about what constitutes a legitimate family given their deep personal experience of families with two moms or two dads. If they didn’t see women married to women and men married to men in their daily lives, my statement that they can marry whomever they please would ring false. At the same time, we also need to be prepared to address the inconsistencies and contradictions that they encounter, acknowledging that change is a slow and sometimes difficult, non-linear process, and that what we (our family, our community) believe may not be shared by the world at large, or even by many others.
There are days when the analogy of rebooting doesn’t seem quite right. If only we could simply press a button and start afresh. But on those days when I eavesdrop on my kids at play and overhear the words I’ve used to describe the world I’d like to see articulated by them as How Things Are, I can almost see the little spinning icon and I think to myself, well, the processor may be frustratingly slow, but eventually that fresh screen – that new world – will appear.
Judith Rosenbaum is a feminist historian, educator, and writer, and director of public history at the Jewish Women’s Archive. She is a founder and blogger at Jewesses with Attitude and is currently working on an anthology that explores contemporary redefinitions of the “Jewish mother.” She lives in Boston with her husband and their hilarious and high-spirited four-year-old twins. You can find her on Twitter at @jahr.
Photo credit e y e / s e e/Flickr
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