Children are not experiments. They aren’t social statements. You have a lot of agency in how you raise your child, of course, but the co...
Children are not experiments. They aren’t social statements. You have a lot of agency in how you raise your child, of course, but the concept that you can abdicate your responsibility to raise them within the bounds of reason because of au courant theories about child rearing is deeply flawed.
This isn’t the opinion of Zoe Saldana, apparently. One of the stars of the “Avengers” film series — she plays the character “Gamora” — recently told Us Weekly that she works hard at keeping her household “gender-fluid” for her three sons.
“Practice makes perfect!” the article declares. “Zoe Saldana takes practical steps to keep her home a gender-neutral environment for her three sons — twins Cy and Bowie, 4, and Zen, 2.”
The remarks were made at the Planet Oat Oatmilk National Launch, which sounds about right.
“I’m always gonna be honest and that is always the best way to welcome healthy and truthful discourse, especially around parenthood,” she said.
“[The twins] made a comment two weeks ago like, ‘Boys are stronger than girls,’ because they’re in that stage of comparisons. And you have to take a moment and kind of put together an answer that they will understand.”
Her stated goal is apparently “[to] not bring all this charge that you have as an adult and as a woman into their lives. They’re a blank slate.”
I’m not entirely sure what that statement means, but OK.
However, the idea that children are a “blank slate” — that they can be whatever you necessarily want them to be — is a disturbing one, and not necessarily borne out by the facts.
She had previously told the magazine that her family has “a very gender-neutral environment where my husband participates in a lot of tasks that were normally given to women and vice versa.”
“I get to do a lot of male things, which is, I don’t know, put the TV together, fix things that break,” she said in 2018.
“We’re sort of a very gender-fluid household. I think it’s important to raise boys in that environment, and girls as well.”
That doesn’t exactly sound wholly gender neutral, although this seems like a pretty small sample size of what goes on in a house.
However, let’s examine her decision to have “female toys and male toys” around her three sons.
While this may be a great soundbite and a way to affirm one’s liberal bona fides, it’s not a scientifically supported method of raising children.
A study published in 2016 noted that children as young as 9 months preferred to play with toys associated with their own sex and that “[m]any studies have found that a majority of boys and girls prefer to play with toys that are typed to their own gender.”
“Stereotypical toy preferences were found for boys and girls in each of the age groups, demonstrating that sex differences in toy preference appear early in development. Both boys and girls showed a trend for an increasing preference with age for toys stereotyped for boys,” the City University of London reported regarding the study, “Preferences for ‘Gender-typed’ Toys in Boys and Girls Aged 9 to 32 Months.”
“Historically there has been uncertainty about the origins of boys’ and girls’ preferences for play with toys typed to their own sex and the developmental processes that underlie this behavior. As a result, we set out to find out whether a preference occurs and at what age it develops,” said Dr. Brenda Todd, a senior psychology lecturer at City University and one of the study’s authors, according to the City University of London news release.
“Biological differences give boys an aptitude for mental rotation and more interest and ability in spatial processing, while girls are more interested in looking at faces and better at fine motor skills and manipulating objects.
“When we studied toy preference in a familiar nursery setting with parents absent, the differences we saw were consistent with these aptitudes. Although there was variability between individual children, we found that, in general, boys played with male-typed toys more than female-typed toys and girls played with female-typed toys more than male-typed toys.”
It’s one thing if your boy wants a doll or girl wants an airplane. It’s different if you’re imposing it upon them, as Saldana appears to be doing. After all, she’s trying to make the house a gender-neutral environment. Practice makes perfect, after all!
Even if you’re practicing something that isn’t supported by science.
To a certain extent, every child is an individual, but we can make generalizations about the kind of things they will or won’t enjoy. Biology remains the key driver behind gender identity.
This isn’t going to be changed by having mom set up TVs or having dad do the vacuuming or making sure that boys have tea sets and girls have trucks.
What does this prove? How does this make society better? Why is the left so afraid to have boys raised as boys and girls raised as girls?
Saldana’s attitudes about gender might make for a cheap joke, considering her character’s name and what happened to the biblical Gomorrah (different spelling; the sounds are the same) but it’s no laughing matter.
Children aren’t experiments. They aren’t a clean slate.
You may make yourself feel better as a parent by treating them like that, but I can almost guarantee you’ll be the only ones in the house who feel that way.
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