Give boys space to be themselves!

Advice from ‘new’ grandmother, Jane Caro, social commentator, writer and lecturer based in Australia

 

His personality will unfold as he grows and responds to his world. He is very vocal and likes animated chats with anyone who will listen. He is almost never still unless he is asleep, but does this mean he will be a chatty person with a lot of energy? Who is this? It’s a little boy! Do those early signs of characteristics mean that he will he grow up to be a restless individual who has a lot to say?

 

His family tries to just wait and see what sort of person he will eventually become, but it sometimes appears that the rest of the world has already decided. In fact, the world seems to have made up its collective mind about him long before he was born.

How do we know this? His mother knew he was a boy by the time she was 20 weeks pregnant, and if people asked her she told them. What was quite extraordinary was how many people then immediately told her, with total confidence, just what her 20-week-old foetus was going to be like after he was born. Once he started moving in the womb, every kick indicated a potential football player, according to these behaviour experts. His family wondered.

People often made a particular noise when told the developing foetus was a boy; it was kind of a laugh mixed with a knowing snort. “You’ll have your hands full!”  “He’ll run you ragged!” “Boys love trucks, noise and getting dirty.” “Boys never sit still and read or draw!”

Generally, this is just conventional small talk that nice people often make with parents of newborns and the new parents always respond with a smile and a laugh, as was also expected. The same reaction is often given when the unknown boy’s personality is described to the parents by strangers. But the parents can’t help feeling a little exasperated by such responses. They want this new little human being to be allowed to be himself – whatever that may turn out to be – and they worry that this will be harder for him than it should because of all of these preconceived ideas held by others.

Baby shops are outrageously gendered. Worse, given shopping for a boy, the policing of gender for boys seems much more restrictive than it does for girls. The number of clothes to choose from is much more limited and the palate of acceptable boy colors is sadly dull and bland. Blue, green, grey, brown and red seems to be about the range offered. The much larger girls section indicate that baby girls are apparently already much more interested in clothes and their appearance than boys, and it is a sea of pink, orange, aqua, turquoise, yellow and purple with glitter, sparkles, chiffon and frills. Girls wear flower and fruit motifs, boys are restricted to machines and animals.

When we say “boys will be boys” with a mock exasperated sigh, we are usually using the phrase to excuse some sort of bad behavior. When they are little, it may just be clumsiness or a lack of consideration. When they are adults, it can be used to excuse really serious behavior, even crimes. Maybe it’s time we stopped rigidly defining what boys are allowed to be, and instead just left them to be themselves.