Gender-Inhibited Parenting

In every classroom in which I've been, there is always at least one boy who takes notice of me. He doesn't see anything but me. He asks me several questions. He checks to see where I'm going next. He tries to impress me with his exploits. This boy wants me to take notice of him.

Coincidentally, it usually turns out that these boys have the most strained relationships with their fathers. There are the strict disciplinarians who only know to come down hard on their sons when the grades and behavior reports aren't up to (unrealistic) expectations. There are the fathers who aren't there. Instead, these fathers are absent, in jail, with their other family, or even dead. There are the fathers who only care about sports (or some other equally masculine endeavor) and a sense of competition always exists between these fathers and sons.

Often times, these same boys have strained relationships with their mothers. Although they need some coddling and support when their emotional states are in distress, the mothers over-do it enabling their sons to express their anger in more inappropriate ways. Some of the mothers also have high expectations, trying to make their sons something their fathers, brothers, or husbands never were. There are also those mothers who don't know what to do with boys. They allow them to run amok because they feel hopeless about their own skills to parent boys due to their failed relationships with abusive men in their lives. Single mothers are sometimes unable to provide the care and attention their sons (and daughters) need as they are trying to make up for the lack of support from the father.

I have mostly experienced this need for my attention from boys. This might be because I'm a man, but I suspect it also has to do with how these boys are failed by their parents. The ways in which parents struggle to connect with their sons described in Raising Cane have always been evident in how the male students in my classes have struggled over the years.

While these shortcomings are rather obvious in boys who have struggled in my classrooms, it is not so obvious with the sons of my friends. I have several friends who are raising kids, most of them in the early ages of life (<1-5) and I notice the subtle differences in how these friends raise their sons and daughters.

My friends treat their children in ways that reinforce gender stereotypes in ways that I never expected. The boys are often allowed to wreak havoc and expected to bounce back from injury or set backs. The girls are coddled and protected. The boys are encouraged to be rough-and-tumble types while the girls are called "princess" or "little girl" as opposed to their names.

I often wonder if the problems described in Raising Cane and present in my classrooms might be exasperated by this difference in treatment or acceptance of gender identity by the parents.

I don't understand these parent's connection to socially-constructed gender roles. Why don't fathers wrestle with their daughters? I have wrestled many times with my niece. She gets as much enjoyment out of it as my nephew. There is no inherent difference between these siblings based on their biological make-up.

Do boys struggle with relating to their parents because they are not receiving attention that is appropriate for boys? OR do they struggle because they are limited in accepting or giving affection by their gender?

Again, this is where modern parenting and books like Raising Cane fail children. The essential problem lies within gender. Children and parents are limited by unrealistic expectations or accept behavior as being the way it is instead of questioning its healthfulness. Boys have not cornered the market of activity, just as girls are not the only ones allowed to express feeling. The distance between boys and girls and their parents lies exists in the blind acceptance of gender.