When I was little I wanted to be a boy. Well, not really. I just hated wearing a skirts and dresses and figured if I were a boy I could wear pants every day, even to my private school, parties and church. I was a tomboy and to me it seemed like being a boy would be so much cooler, more exciting and easier. Even as an adult, well past my tomboy stage, I thought men had it easier than women. Clearly, they have more powerful positions, get paid better than women for the same job, and can generally discard being sexually assaulted from their list of things to worry about. But now, as a mom to a little boy, I realize being a boy is really rough.
My children are only eleven months apart, so it's easy for me to compare the way they are perceived and treated by other people. Both of my children are sweet, kind and loving. They both love babies and are drawn to them. But since the beginning, when Mateo was just one-year-old and Camila two, I saw the different reactions from people. When my daughter approached a baby the mothers would smile and welcome her saying things like "You like the baby? Say hi baby... Your daughter is so sweet!" Even when she would accidentally tumble over the baby or lose her balance and push the baby's head let's say, the mothers would smile and say "It's okay." But when my son would approach, sometimes the exact same baby, the mother would warn, "Be careful with the baby. Be gentle," and usually lift the baby out of Mateo's reach. I saw this happen again and again and each time I saw confusion and sadness in my little boy's face.
I teach my children to be kind and gentle with those younger than them. I teach them to touch a baby's foot instead of the hand or the face, and to protect smaller children who might need help. When my daughter squeezes a baby's foot with love and excitement the parents say nothing and smile, or they might encourage her to touch the baby's head. When my son does the same the warnings come "Not too hard. Be careful." I see the unease in the parent's face and my son does too, often backing away. At parks where he might approach another child to hug them, hold their hand or help them, he hears "No pushing! Be nice!"
On the rare occasion when my daughter pushes someone the other child's parents quickly let it go saying "It's okay." When my son pushes someone it's assumed he is starting trouble and for no good reason. Just this past week we attended a gathering with many moms and children. A woman approached me to say my son was "Hitting all the boys" and a second woman added that he was "not letting any of them play." I walked over to find him crammed into the corner of a small play house, surrounded by four boys taller and probably older than him, about to cry. My daughter was outside. I asked what was going on and with tears in his eyes he said "I don't know." "They're hitting him and pushing him mom," my daughter explained. "I hit them so they would leave him alone but they won't stop." After some questioning from me, the boys admitted things had been as my daughter had said. I expressed my pride in my daughter for defending her brother (it's the first time I know of her hitting someone), and helped my son get out of the play house. I thought it interesting that my son was hit and pushed and my daughter did some hitting, but it was my son who was labeled the aggressor.
The fact is, my son is more aggressive than my daughter. He has hit other children and when he gets mad he really gets mad. But I can't recall one single time when he was being aggressive before a mother or father treated him in a defensive way, rejecting his friendly approach towards their child.
In their book Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys, the authors Dan Kindlon and Michael Thompson, talk about how boys' emotional lives are suppressed. The book focuses on school-aged and teen-aged boys, but I see now that the process begins in infancy. I don't think my son's experience is unique and it saddens me to see that boys, from the beginning, are treated with suspicion and even disdain. We complain that men don't express emotion, that they're not nurturing like women, but now I see that as a society, we turn that switch off in them early. My son is now three-years-old and I see him approach babies with hesitation now, watching the parent's face and often briefly touching a foot or a leg before turning away quickly. I know he still loves them because he admires them from a distance and says "Mommy, look at that baby. He's so beautiful. He's so little mommy. I want to carry that baby."
I believe we're failing boys in this way. Not allowing them to develop into their full human potential. How can we expect them to be loving fathers and husbands? My friend's son was excluded from a class project and reprimanded for writing a story about a superhero who used fire to save others. The story (and thus the boy) was deemed "too violent" by his first-grade teacher. When I heard what happened I recognized it as the same knee-jerk reaction my son gets when he has the intention of being kind but adults focus on the fact that he is a boy and assume the worst.
In his book Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain, David Eagleman explains that 98.4 percent of those on death row are male and writes "It seems clear enough that the carriers (of the Y chromosome) are strongly predisposed toward a different type of behavior..." But having witnessed events like the ones I've shared with you, on so many occasions, I wonder if it's not the genes that predispose men to violence, as much as the way males are treated and presumed guilty from such an early age.
Perhaps if we change the way we view boys, simply by giving them the benefit of the doubt. If we force ourselves to focus on their kind intentions; wanting to caress a baby, to hug or help another child, to be a superhero who saves others, rather than on our preconceived notion of what and who boys are, we will end the self-fulfilling prophecy of violent men who cannot nurture.
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