Well, yes. And even though there might be trends in certain times and places, those gendered framings assume that the kid in question identifies as a boy or girl. Maybe that’s the fun of always being an edge case!
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Right. And at the end of the day, what difference does the kid’s gender indentification (or the indentification of agressors) really have to do with learning how to indentify and avoid toxic or potentially dangerous people or groups?
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Their gender does not essentially have to do with anything, but there are still going to be various biases they encounter from others based upon others’ own inherited gender roles. A person who doesn’t buy into those roles may know that they are a superficial difference, but there are social effects of dealing with mostly people who consider those to be hugely significant. Not unlike how religious differences can be literally immaterial and insubstantial, yet have very concrete social impact.
So, I can understand why some people feel the need for books about expectations and situations which may generally seem gendered. But the limitations of that approach might be more obvious to those for whom the assumed genders don’t readily apply.
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That’s a fair point. I don’t buy into those roles, and believe that they hurt more than they have ever helped. It is my opinion that emotional intelligence, healthy relationships and self-esteem are essential human skills. Everyone needs them, and adding the superficial layer of gender only muddies the water.
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Lord of the Flies. It’s couched in historical fiction; but it’s a pretty good guide to middle school social dynamics in other respects.
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Throughout the year? Throughout the day. My daughter lost it at one point in primary school and decked one of them. They left her alone after that.
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I’m not certain I’d worry to much about the authors credentials as it’s not like the experts have much more than a few more anecdotes on which to base their equally arbitrary advice (which is why experts advice is also all over the map.)
Human experience of almost any sort is going to be so diverse that just like baby-raising books, if you’re in need of advice, read a bunch of teen-raising books and use the one that seems to fit and whose advice you like and ignore the other 99 that don’t fit your child’s personality or experiences.
They’re not necessarily wrong, they’re just wrong for your child and for you.
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Specifically written as a criticism of middle school British boy dynamics, not universal, though.
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While Lord of the Flies was a story of young boys, in my limited experience, it seems that oddly enough, for modern middle-class schools, the boys are a lot safer than the girls.
The schools are pretty good about clamping down on physical violence and physical bullying incidents often bring instant reaction from students (usually girls) who’ve been trained from the early grades to intervene.
But on the girl’s side, the emotional violence and bullying seems to have remained unabated (if not gotten worse), and the emotional scars they leave seem to last a lifetime.
At least for my socio-economic class, raising boys was far easier than the tales from my peers of the challenges of raising girls. Far cry from 60+ years ago when the fear was whether your boy would literally survive adolescence.
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I guess that, even if she is talking bollocks, the books maybe give parents and kids somewhere to start addressing anti-social behaviour (or is this social behaviour?) and a common vocabulary to get going with. The fact that there is a published book about the subject, maybe gives the discussion some authority?
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But the fact that it’s easy to see that the information in the book isn’t as universal as she claims means it’s hard to take her arguments seriously, even if some of them might apply.
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The fact that these social dynamics are usually created and fostered in school, it seems reasonable to seriously consider having kids spend less time temporarily memorizing arbitrary trivia so that tests can be administered for the benefit of adults, and more time engaging in activities/discussions/exercises designed to teach kids how to respect each other and how to disagree with each other respectfully.
I tend to agree with Roger Schank that “There are only two things wrong with the education system: what we teach, and how we teach it.”
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Unless there has been a minor miracle in standards since I went through; it is certainly true that anything that draws blood, leaves visible bruises, or gets the nurse involved tends to be pretty tightly discouraged(though, not that I’m bitter about personal experience or anything, you can get punished for ‘fighting’ even if your role was entirely confined to getting ambushed without provocation and not even managing to take defensive action, which is always good for a sense of justice well administered…); but as long as you avoid that, pretty much anything else flies under the radar; and even stupid bullies have enough low cunning to realize that and act accordingly.
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Rosalind has another book called The Guide for Guys actually! It’s a free download here http://www.theguidefor.me
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You can “not buy in to roles” alll you want, but that doesn’t make them go away.
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I never said it would.
Nothing stays the same. Ideas are always shifting and changing. I can’t wait to see what happens next.
Give whose stubby fingers are on the button… probably this.
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Perhaps I wasn’t specific enough; I don’t think gender is “superficial” - I think there are significant differences between genders, and while those differences are not categorical, they are common enough that generalizations can be made. I also think that they are fundamental enough that trying to repress them rather than address them would be detrimental.
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There is a great deal of space between not subscribing to a social construct and trying to repress it.
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I cancelled my subscription to Evolutionary Biology, but they keep billing me!
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