Saw a new patient yesterday who apologized for bringing her three-year-old son to the appointment with her. He did pretty well; she brought a bunch of toys and a coloring book and a box of snacks, and she told him in advance that he could have the snacks when I came in the room, so he settled down with his crackers while we talked. It’s never a surprise to me when kids start to wiggle or wander around during Mom’s exam. It’s hard to sit still when you’re three. But it does still surprise me when mothers – whether they’re patients or friends – say the kind of thing this woman said to me:
I’m really sorry about him {child is doing nothing unusual, just climbing on and off the chair} My older one, she’s six, and she’s an angel. But he’s all boy.
Meaning what, exactly? That boys are devils? That being active is somehow evil behavior? I know, I know, she probably didn’t mean that he was evil, but he was sitting right there, listening to this. I have enough trouble with the idea that kids are “good” or “bad” – we don’t use that language with our daughter. Kids are concrete, and they’ll take what they hear very seriously. But beyond that is this idea of being “such a boy”.
Some parents say this with pride – “he’s all boy”. Some say with exasperation, like my patient. Some say it with fear before the baby is born – “I don’t know what I’d do with a boy”. It seems “such a boy” is a kid who is active and inquisitive, a kid who loves to explore and try things out, who wants to know how the world works. It’s a kid who experiences the world physically and doesn’t want to play quietly. “Such a boy” isn’t compliant, doesn’t follow directions as well as his parents would hope, and has a hard time using his words to manage his feelings.
Many of my friends, as they became mothers and raised their children, became convinced that there were essential qualities to gender that they’d previously dismissed, that boys really are biologically driven to play fighting games and girls to play with dolls. I came to motherhood relatively late in life. I have only one child, a girl who is verbal and compliant and cares deeply about clothes and makeup and hair, but who also can outrun and outclimb pretty much every boy she knows. I see a lot of differences in the ways the boys in her cohort are raised and socialized, in what’s expected of them. There’s a lot of variation in energy level and verbal ability, and there may well some difference between the “average” boy and the “average” girl – but there’s a lot of overlap in the range. All this “such a boy” stuff tells me that parents aren’t seeing the kid they have; they’re seeing what they expect or hope or fear, their own stereotype of what boys or girls should be, and responding to that rather than to the actual kid in front of them.
Parents are trapped in a paradox of pressure. Schools expect kids to sit still and shut up because we need more rigorous academic training; there’s no money or time for recess or PE. Content is being shoved downward until preschoolers are doing what used to be first-grade work. Parents are signing those same preschoolers up for tutoring to give them an edge. And, simultaneously, there’s a lot of noise about how boys are at risk. Christina Hoff Summers and her cronies have created a cottage industry decrying the ways in which “misguided feminism” has harmed boys, because sterotypically feminine behavior is privileged in schools, where sitting down and shutting up is the goal. See the circle we have here?
My patient thinks she’s struggling with her son because “he’s all boy”. I think she’s struggling because she’s hundreds of miles away from her family and friends with essentially no support, and every message she hears is that her kids have to start NOW, at age 3 and 6, to prepare for competition in the big bad capitalistic world where they will have to make their way alone, just like she and her husband are making their way alone. They need health insurance and housing and money to put the kids through college, and no job is secure, so he works all the time, and because he works all the time, she has to manage all the kid stuff and house stuff herself. So a kid who sits and plays alone is a lot easier than a kid who really wants to get up to the top of the china cabinet and see if he can fly.
I wish she had a real community, a society that supported her family and bridged the isolation. I wish we as a country valued something other than material achievement. Maybe then she could expand her vision of what kids are and enjoy her smart, active, questioning son, and come to see him as an individual who is all himself, and not just all boy.