How Having a Son Changed Me
Some people like to claim that there is no real difference between boys and girls; that the differences that develop between the sexes aren’t nature, but nurture.
I think these people haven’t been spending very much time with toddlers. Because the drop-off scene at my 2-year-old son’s daycare tells a different story.
When I bring my son to his classroom in the mornings, the boys will be playing loudly with toys, having a tantrum or two, yelling garbled words, piling onto each other and generally behaving like small, eager puppies. Wild puppies. A sort of joyful chaos reigns.
The girls, meanwhile, are talking in full sentences, sitting calmly in their seats and, for all I know, filling out their applications for Dartmouth (early decision).
This isn’t a question of nurture. These little girls are doing their thing, and right now, their thing is being about 19 steps ahead of the boys.
"You’ll never guess what my llama did the other day," is what I hear when a friend with a toddler girl describes her child’s progress, the NASA spaceship that she constructed the other day from scratch while filing her taxes and finishing up the first draft of her novel.
Yes, the difference right now is so profound that as the mother of a son, I’ve stopped paying attention to the girls entirely. (Sorry, little girls! I feel like I’m betraying my own sex, but right now, I’ve got a small man to raise.)
Different sexes? For the time being, we might as well be dealing with a different species.
If I compared my son to these girls, I’d go down that rabbit hole of doubt and start to worry, wondering how he could possibly compete with these super-powered little ladies. Wondering if he could ever catch up. And I know that he will catch up - at about 25.
Before having a son, I was always one of the ra-ra girls. Confident, ambitious, and not afraid to call myself a feminist. I’m still like that. But after having my son, I no longer want to crow about female superiority. I don’t laugh when I see books called “Are Men Obsolete?" or think it’s clever when I see articles that talk about how marriage rates are down because there are no "good" men, no men that are "worth" having.
Those articles used to make me proud, thinking about how far women have come in just a few decades in the workforce. Now, they just make me feel protective, not wanting a generation of little boys to grow up hearing about the many ways in which their gender somehow falls short in today’s society. That feeling grows tenfold when I read the articles that casually blast men for their “prolonged adolescence” or low earning potential — and indeed, men came out behind after the most recent recession, with 2010 unemployment numbers concentrated for the first time on men, rather than women.
Now that my son is here, I check myself before making the kinds of comments women always make — the many things that men are “hopeless” at, the ways in which they screw things up. I might still joke about it over email with my friends, but I try to make sure I never say anything like that out loud around my son.
The differences between little girls and boys won’t change. But I want to make sure we’re giving boys the same encouragement we give now to little girls; the same reassuring words that they can do whatever they want to do - whether that involves being a stay-at-home dad or a CEO.