In Susan D. Witt's article, "Parential influences on children's socializations to sex roles" really had me examine my own parenting style. Being that I have a son who will be three years old in April, I really wanted to pay close attention to how my wife and I treat him, since the article talks about how parents teach their children because you are a boy, you have to be this certain way, typically, tough. In our house, when my son falls down or hits his head playing under the table, which seem to be a part of daily three year old activities, we tell him to "dust it." Upon hearing "dust it" he repeats the phrase and physcially dusts off his hands as if they were dirty. When it is a serious injury and he is immediately crying, or it is just obvious he is really in pain, there is a different parential protocol to console him, as it should be. It is a very cute idea that we came up with because we did not want to baby him.
Being that my wife and I recently had another child, who is a seven month old baby girl, we discussed how we would treat her. Obviously, she is a girl and girls are treated differently in society, especially American society. Girls tend to be "delicate" not because they are infantle but, because she is a girl. We decided we would treat her the same as we treat our son in an effort to stray away from stereotypical gendered sex roles of boys being tough and girls being fragile. It is hard to image what it was like to grow up as a female in the 1950s, and to have those sex roles gendered to way more of an extreme than in today's society. As a father to my daughter, it is also a very hard truth to swallow that we live in a society were women are going to be getting paid 30% less than males with the same creditials, doing the same job, just because they are females. The fact of the matter is without someone taking a stand against this blatant sexual discrimination my daughter will be in the same situation as women coming out of college today, and that is just not right.
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