Gender Creative Parenting

Gender Creative/Neutral/Open Parenting is a new technique that more and more folks are using to rear their kids. You may have heard of Theybies: babies whose parents choose not to assign them a gender and request that their communities use the non-binary pronouns They/Them. 

In this episode I discuss the Gender Creative Parenting method and my own positive and negative feelings about it. My good friend, Mara, is using this approach to raise her awesome kid, Aster. She joins me for the second half of the episode to discuss her experiences. Fast forward to the 37 minute mark to skip straight to my chat with her.

Transcript

Today I’m going to talk to my friend Mara who is practicing gender neutral parenting. She and her husband decided not to reveal the sex of their baby before the baby was born AND even AFTER their baby was born, they did not reveal the sex of the child to anyone. They didn’t tell any of their family members, some of them would come to find out when caring for the child because of changing diapers - but Mara and Kyle weren’t like calling their folks from the hospital with gleeful cries “It’s a girl! Or It’s a boy!” Still today, two years later with another baby on the way, they haven’t revealed the first baby’s sex. We call the baby by their name - for the purpose of this podcast I’m going to call the baby Aster because we don’t want to use their real name. We use the pronouns “They and Their”. So They are hungry rather than he is hungry, that’s their ball rather than that’s her ball. Mara and Kyle dress their kid in all of the colors of the rainbow while maybe avoiding anything overtly boyish or girlish.  I’ll talk to them in a bit but first I’ll just talk a bit about gender and this new way of parenting. My friend didn’t want to come on here and pretend to be an expert about everything but she did say she would share their experience with us. So, I did some research on the topic myself to understand like how big of a trend this is, is this future, what does it mean, is it the right thing to do? That kind of stuff. 

 I first met Mara at a parenting class when our kids were three months old. The babies were basically blobs, they couldn’t crawl or walk or even roll over, I think. Like you couldn’t tell if they were really looking at you or kind of past you or if they could see ghosts or what was going on. But I remember Aster and Sawyer sort of reached out to each other and held hands and Mara and I looked at each other like oh my god they’re best friends they love each other! I’d never really seen my baby interact with another baby like that. So we’re all sitting around this circle with our babies in this parents group and introducing ourselves and our little blobs and Mara was like I’m Mara and this is Aster and we use the pronouns They and Their because we’re doing gender creative parenting. Later she would tell me that she didn’t want it to be a huge deal and something like.. that she just wanted to encourage Aster to be whoever they wanted to be without harmful gender stereotypes being placed upon them during these really important formative years. And that’s when I fell in love with Mara. 

So, as you know I live in Silicon Valley. I don’t live right in San Francisco, I live in a city just a bit south of there. And, no offense to the people who live here but sometimes I just find people here so fucking boring. Everyone loves tech. They are all early adopters of like they get the new phone and they have virtual reality headsets and they wear fitness tracker watches and they have Alexa or Google home in their houses. Then they watch HBO and walk their dog and line up for boba tea. Like nobody has any… pizazz. Ooo the other night Mara and Kyle and Shawn and I were talking about gender neutral names for their next kid I should have suggested Pizazz. Hi nice to meet you, this is my baby Pizazz, they go by they and their.  Anyway, most of the people I meet around here are basic as fuck so when Mara said that unusual thing about her kid not having a gender it was like I could feel fresh air just blowing off of this chick and I was just like gasping it in. Breath of fresh air. 

All of the people in the circle, I think we were all mothers there that day, there were probably like ten of us and a leader lady, we’ll call her Renee, who was slightly unhinged. I sensed that Renee, this parenting group leader woman resented me because I wasn’t desperate for her to save me from my baby but I digress. Also she was supposed to be our leader but she would say the weirdest things about how she had parented her now adult children and like how unsuccessful they were now. One time she told us she couldn’t vaccinate her son because he had an allergy to the vaccine, which is real and totally sucks, but she told us that he gave like his entire school the measles and everyone hated them. We were all like, ‘Oh wow, Renee that’s like… a weird story.” And then she told us that like he didn’t want to sleep in his own bed. So for like a year she let him sleep in a sleeping bag next to her bed . And she was like, and now he lives in an apartment in the city and he’s doing you know what he wants and he’s fine. We’re like okay? I was just thinking to myself she probably learned a lot since then.

So when Mara told the group that she wasn’t revealing Aster’s sex everyone in the circle smiled warmly and nodded encouragingly and made supportive little comments. So that’s what Mara saw.

But what Mara DIDN’T know was that each one of us women would go home and tell our spouses. Then we might talk about it at a dinner party. Or tell our mom when we called our mom to specifically tell our mom.  It was just new and interesting and a sort of fun topic because it raises a lot of questions and garners… really strong responses. Some people are like, “That’s fucked up.” Some people say that Aster will get bullied about this. Those people are like.. bewildered and some of them seem kind of angry about it. Then there’s people who just think it’s like interesting and fun. And then there’s people like me, who see the value in gender neutral parenting, it makes me question the way that I parent and influences me in a way that I think is really positive for Sawyer. I’m not raising my kid as a quote “Theybie” but I do take some parts of gender creative parenting and add it to my own style.

By the way, after I got to know Mara a bit better and it was clear that we were truly friends, I began to care about her and her family and deeply respect her - I stopped using her parenting as a little antidote. People have brought it up to me and I’ve talked about it but I’m no longer an asshole that’s like spreading the news. Well I guess I’m podcasting about it now but  that’s different right?

Let’s talk about gender stuff and then I’ll talk to Mara.

Gender is the psychological, social, cultural and behavioral characteristics associated with being female or male. The word GENDER exists to make a distinction between itself and biological sex… there’s two words because it’s different. A gender ROLE is what the society you live in expects you to be like based on your sex. Your gender identity is what feels true to you. A person with a male body can have a female gender identity and a person with a female body can have a male gender identity.  I’ll also just mention that the question of gender doesn’t necessarily have to do with sexual preference. Some people seem to get caught up on the sexuality part around this topic. They’re like “But the baby isn’t gay!” and it’s like guys, it’s a baby. We’re not talking about sexuality at all. 

There’s a couple of main reasons why people are not gendering their babies. Some of the parents who decide not to call their baby a he or a she based on their penis or vagina, are doing so because they want to encourage their to identify themselves as a gender that doesn’t match their sex or identify as a gender neutral person when they grow up if they want to. So these parents are saying, If their gender matches their sex, that’s fine, but it’s also totally great if they are trans or non binary.  The kid will decide which gender they are when they’re ready, jury’s still out on which age that will be, and they may change their minds as they grow up, and that’s okay too. So these parents are guarding against their child having any uncomfortable feelings surrounding their sex and gender in case they are trans. They’re guarding against the baby turning into a child and adult that feels they have been forced to be someone that they’re not - along gender lines. I feel like this is a overcorrection. Like it’s uncalled for.

 I watched a couple of short docs on Youtube.. one was from VICE called Raised without Gender and I also watched Raising Baby Grey from The New Yorker Documentary. The baby’s name was Grey, just sayinguh. In these small anecdotes the sets of parents interviewed were trans or intersex and had a lot of discomfort around their gender identities when they were growing up. It must be so hard to be a trans kid or if you are very intersex like born with one of the variety of conditions where your reproductive or sexual anatomy isn’t like.. quote/unquote normal. I guess 1.7%, nearly 1 in 60 people have anatomy that doesn’t fit perfectly into the male and female categories - they might not ever even know or they might find out as adults. But some intersex people totally know and it’s a big part of their identities.

 So, the parents in these docs… they want to make sure that if their own children are trans or intersex they won’t have to grapple with these disorienting, disturbing feelings without any support or context. But the chances are, your kid isn’t trans, dude. From a study by the Williams Institute from 2016, it seems that about 0.6 percent of the population of the USA identifies as trans. So if you gave birth to 100 children, you still may not have a trans kid. You know? They’re outliers. So, you’re identifying your kid as non-binary, you’re setting them apart, just in case they’re trans or have gender identity problems. But they probably aren’t and probably wouldn’t have gender identity problems, because the vast majority of people don’t and that’s good. The less problems the better. But now, just because you’ve done this, haven’t you made it inevitable that your child will at some point face a gender identity problem? At some point they’ll be like, “Am I a boy or a girl?” And you’ll say, “Well, what do you feel like? What do you want to be?” That’s a big confusing question for a little kid. I think the best parents are strong leaders for their kids, and when a little boy or girl looks up at you ask asks, “Am I a boy or a girl?” And you just shrug and tell them to figure it out for themselves, you’re putting them in the driver’s seat when their feet don’t reach the breaks and they aren’t tall enough to see through the windshield or rearview mirror. They couldn’t even drive if they were physically large enough because they are simply still too dumb to do something complicated like that.

So if that’s why you’re doing the gender creative parenting, I think your heart is probably in the right place but that doesn’t change the fact that you’re correcting for a problem that doesn’t necessarily exist for your kid and creating problems along the way. And I don’t really like that.

The other reason that parents choose to do Gender Creative Parenting is way more logical. So the 2nd reason is to really try to  protect babies and children from being stifled and molded by an unfair, outdated system of human classification and let’s be honest, a hierarchy that is social gender roles. Many of these parents believe that gendering your kid is harmful and it very well may be. So, these parents don’t want their female baby to believe they aren’t good at math or that their prettiness is of utmost importance, that they are destined to bear children. Parents don’t want their little male baby to be shamed for crying or forced to be a sportsmen if he does not feel inclined to be. They want their little humans to be just that, human, with all the wonders of the world open to them and the freedom to grow however is natural and explore as their curiosities lead without adults constantly telling them who they are as boys or girls in a myriad of different ways.

Adults treat boys and girls very differently, even as babies. The more you look for it, the more you realize it’s present in almost every interaction - it’s crazy! There’s a two part doc that the BBC did called No More Boys and Girls - Can Our Children Go Gender Free, you can find it on YouTube. They do an experiment. They dress a boy baby in a dress and put him on a blanket surrounded by toys. A person comes in to play with the boy in the dress, and shows him a soft little pink bunny.. doesn’t really touch him. They call him Sweetheart and tell him he’s such a nice little girl. They use a little soft cat puppet and show the boy a doll. They speak softly. The little boy seems relaxed and happy with this arrangement. Then they swap out the little boy in the dress for a little girl in boy clothes, jeans and plaid shirt. This time, the caregivers show the little girl a robot, a spinning top, a puzzle toy - the toys are bit more technical. One caregiver picks the boy up and puts him on a rocking horse. The little girl in boys clothes was happy with this arrangement. Then the participants were told that the children were the opposite gender, the baby in the dress was a boy! The baby in the button up was a girl! and all the participants were stunned at their own behavior. They weren’t like appalled, it wasn’t that deep they were just like, “Oh wow yeah I guess I did give him the soft pink toys.. I didn’t really think about that.” So this is kind of a fun experiment, but if you extrapolate that out to every single day of the person’s childhood - you can imagine how it could mold a person. And remember, the kid also absorbs that children of the opposite gender are treated differently.

I guess there’s a couple of ways of looking at this. One would be that we are leaders for our children, we literally teach them how to eat solid food, how to poop in a toilet, how to speak our language. So we also teach them about who they are, including their gender - which, some would argue is also biological - not just a social construct. The second way of looking at this is that we have been artificially conditioned to categorize people this way, and we unconsciously pass that conditioning down to our children even to their detriment.

Sweden is arguably the most progressive country as far as gender neutrality is concerned. They have a third pronoun which is “HEN” so instead of saying he or she they would call a child “Hen”. When I first heard that I was like… Oh is it because roosters are boys and chickens are girls and are hens non binary… poultry or something. No idiot. Swedish for he is “Han” and for she is “Hon” so “Hen” didn’t just come out of nowhere or it’s not about chickens - it kind of sounds like it belongs among the other two pronouns in Swedish.  

There’s this woman named Lotto Rajalin, excuse my accent, who is the head of Stockholm’s gender neutral preschool called Egalia. From what I understand, in this preschool they don’t use the pronouns he/him or she/her to refer to the children at all. They use “hen” and they encourage the children to do so with each other as well. I listened to her Ted Talk and I found the foundations for her endeavors straight forward and like pure. 

She draws a circle and talks about something she called the Life Spectra. I love how she names everything. Egalia. Life Spectra. It’s so hot. There’s a line down the middle and on one side of the circle is for girls and one side of the life spectra circle is for boys. Now what about colors? On the girls side there’s like four or five colors they get to experience and identify with, and same with boys but they are different colors. You know what these colors are. Another row in the life spectra circle is for clothing…

One of the things that I hate but I don’t really have to deal with is that clothing for boys and girls is so different. Boys clothes are designed for comfort and movement, durability… they can run they can climb they can explore in their clothing. A surprising amount of the clothing made for girls is restrictive and uncomfortable. There’s tutus, heavy dresses, headbands with adornments things that could easily be lost or damaged during play. When my niece was born, a few months after my son, Sawyer, I was really excited to get to shop for little tiny girl clothes. Megan’s lucky she had a girl, I thought, she gets to dress her up like a little doll! I bought her all of these crazy impractical dresses and I even bought her like a faux fur stall for Christsake and when my sister opened them up she was really nice about it, but her mother in law looked at one of the dresses and said, “Oh this will look great on her at her job interview.” I see you Colleen. My heart was pure but the gifts were asinine. Also, the phrases on little girl clothes are rude as fuck. I didn’t buy any of the ones with the dumb sayings on them, that is one of my number one pet peeves as a parent even to a boy but the girl’s clothes are the worst. I’ve seen tops that say, “Pretty like Mommy” and one that said, “Sorry boys, Dad says no dating”. Like that’s a baby. The boys clothes will say like Watch out Boobies, here I come! Or “Ladies Man”. I dunno maybe that’s funny? I feel like it’s not just not funny because it’s inappropriate because most funny things are inappropriate in some way, for sure, I just feel like it’s not funny. But everybody’s different I guess. Something I didn’t realize is that little girls and babies clothing is SMALLER than boys clothes, even though the physical body size discripency between the sexes at that age isn’t remarkable at all, the boys clothing is still larger. That sucks, dude. You’ll never find me buying a little girl a stiff dress ever a fucking gain. It’s not fair. It’s not fucking fair. She should be able to run and play with mud and climb the trees and fall over and do all the same shit my son can do and should not be put her in place by her clothing. Then again, if she wants to dress like a princess or something that can be very very fun - but a kid under like 1.5 years old is not having these types of preferences. You should choose comfortable, practical clothes for your babies and tots - second hand if possible.

I always thought that girls could benefit more from gender neutrality than boys could. I just thought that girls were always told to be pretty and be servile and shit and that girls were just groomed to be bored, vapid mothers and housewives. So in the workforce and professional life, this is really bad for women, right? And for everyone because women have great ideas too and can be great leaders and yada yada yada you know where this going whatever.

BUT I think this next aspect of gendering children is super fucked up for boys particularly: emotions. This is the next part of the Life Spectra circle that Lotto Rajalin - the Swedish woman who founded the gender neutral schools - emotions is the next aspect she talks about.  She says girls they are assumed to and allowed to feel frightened, sad, calm, emotional whereas boys are supposed to and assumed to feel anger, frustration, fury and violence. So babies of both sexes cry when they are hungry but the caregivers, the adults if they don’t realize that the baby is hungry and they’re like trying to discern what the baby is feeling, if it’s a girl they will assume the little girl is frightened. If it’s a little boy, they will assume he’s frustrated. 

Of course, I had heard before that boys are taught to suppress their emotions, but it never really clicked for me how bad this actually is for boys and men. I was kind of like.. okay men don’t cry as much. We don’t need a bunch of grown ass men walking around with quivering chins and snotty noses like ugly crying. Like if the dude is crying, who’s gonna comfort me when I’m crying?

This next little bit about emotions is going to be super heteronormative, sorry. But this is kind of based on my personal experiences with straight guys…

I remember in the first year of dating my husband, I was 22 and he was 25 at the time. It was Hallowe’en but we weren’t going out for some reason and we were at his place about to watch Kubrick’s film The Shining. I started asking him questions about himself growing up and his relationship with his parents. I won’t divulge like what he said but he said this thing. And to me, the thing he said was basically nothing. It was something I would just bring up to everyone at a dinner party or something. The equivalent of saying like I couldn’t wait to move out and go to University. Just normal teenage stuff with your parents. After he said it, he kind of looked at me meaningfully and said he had never talked to anyone about this before and like he looked, a little emotional he wasn’t crying but maybe there was a little shine on his eyes, you know? And my mouth was like gaping open like HUH? He had so many friends and he had been in a couple of relationships before, I couldn’t believe that to him this counted as like a deep and meaningful conversation. I had cried with and in front of a for and on like every single one of my girlfriends. They knew the minute details of my personal tragedies and triumphs, they processed my life with me. How could I be Shawn’s number 1 confidant and feel like I had barely scratched the surface? Sometimes it seems like men are emotionless humans which can be perplexing for the people in their lives who love them. I on the other hand, cried myself to sleep and then woke up in the morning to cry again only like two weekends ago. 

Do you love me? Women ask. “Yeah, of course. Didn’t I tell you that already?” Men respond.  “Are you excited for our wedding?” Women ask. “Yeah, it’ll be good.” Men respond.  “How did that movie make you feel?“ Women ask. “Uh I dunno.” Men respond.

NOT ALL MEN, ok? NOT ALL WOMEN.

Have you ever felt jealousy? Like you see your partner talking to another attractive person, and you imagine that they are just clicking. Your partner is looking at that person in a way that you again, imagine, is like… they are obsessed with this person they are talking to. And they’ve never looked at you like that. You can hear them talking and their voice sounds different like they’re putting on a little show for this stranger. And it rises. Your cheeks and the tips of your ears flush red. You swallow. Your jaw clenches, your brow lowers, like the moon just rose and you are now a wolf.    Beneath the bravado and violence, jealousy feels like torture. It’s like a jumbo slurpee made of loneliness, betrayal, confusion, and self loathing. I want them, but they don’t want me anymore? I would do anything for them, but they don’t even care about me anymore. They don’t respect me, they don’t even like me. And why would they?

Men are allowed their jealousy, they’re allowed their violence. And what could be more flattering to a woman than two men beating each other bloody for the honor of standing next to her? Her and golden pussy.

Sadness? Fuck no. If they could just deal with the sadness, express a little self doubt once in a while, explore their partner’s evolving soul with grace and empathy - the way that women want to do if manly men would just let them the fuck IN. Maybe they wouldn’t be so closed off, so prone to violence.

Women are also taught to LIKE emotionless men. It’s a signal that this is a MANLY man. Effeminate men aren’t sexy to a lot of us. We say to each other that a man who cries a lot is gross. Like women literally say that to each other.  It’s one of the reasons a lot of us don’t want to be lesbians, we’re like.. that’s too many emotions for one bed.  But who among us doesn’t want to see this hulking beast shed a tear when he views his newborn baby for the first time? Or get choked up giving a eulogy. Or Get a little misty when he walks his daughter down the isle?  So, suppress your emotions and your ability to cry for your whole entire life, gentlemen, but then just at the right moment, at that one moment, let a little teeny tear gather in the corner of your eyes, so we can get a glimpse into a heart that was surely there all along. 

Also, women say that we don’t want our dudes to cry but when it has happened, and to be honest in the ten years I’ve been with my husband he’s maybe gotten choked up a few times and I’ve only seen him cry once and that was when something truly harrowing happened to us. But when I have seen men break down and cry, I’ve always felt EXTREMELY honored. Like we were on sacred ground. Like I was the high priestess.. Sort of like you knew your neighbor was a CIA agent the entire twenty years you lived next to her, even though no one believed you and you never had any evidence to suggest she was. And then one day when you’re walking your dog at night passed her house, you catch a gimpse of her in  a lit window, she tosses her gun and badge on the coffee table and collapses onto the couch. You knew it! You knew there was more to her than everyone else saw! And you beam with pride and respect for her. Then of course you have to pack your bags and get the fuck out of there before….. but I digress.

 Life calls for an array of different emotional responses from healthy people. When you get a promotion, you can grin from ear to ear and laugh, you can jump up and down and be like “Woooo! Fuck yeah!”.  No wonder men are obsessed with watching sports, it’s the only time it’s not considered effeminate to act all excited like a girl. When your beloved mother dies, you cry and grieve and grow closer with those around you, you don’t shut yourself up in the garage and tinker with your old car engine until you go blind. When your child is diagnosed with Down syndrome, you grapple with your disappointment, you kill some of your dreams and mourn them, you reimagine your parenthood and express these complex pathways of emotion with your partner… you don’t pretend that nothing has changed and stay too busy to attend the uncomfortable appointments. 

We may think we want these manly men to fit into the gender role, it’s so comforting when things turn out the way we expect them to. But aren’t we a little disappointed when our sons and friends and husbands and father’s don’t emote, at all? Don’t we feel unloved? Don’t we feel like they just aren’t listening, they aren’t engaging with us and their lives?

I think… too many men die without ever being known the way a woman can be known. 

Of course, this is all assuming they actually have emotions they are suppressing. Seriously though, men DO feel things, right? The same way women do?  I think they do.

Okay so we talked about colors, clothing, emotions. There are also Characteristics in Rajalin’s life spectra. Girls are cute, pretty, sweet, good, weak, helpful, sensible, orderly, careful, caring and beautiful. We describe them this way to themselves and others. Boys are strong, cool, brave, tough, loud, wild, naughty, messy, hard, and fast. Sawyer’s best little friend is a girl named Hailey. They were born two weeks apart and their parents have been friends with Shawn and I for years and years. I do find myself noting the difference between the toddlers, on a gender basis or a sex basis - whatever. It seems whatever differences the babies have, often I’ll identify those difference with their genders. I think of Hailey as beautiful, she’s very sweet, super smart, vocal - chatty, good - helpful. She’s neat and tidy, she truly is. We’ll sit the kids down to eat and they’ll have the same food, the same tools, the same bibs and by the end of the meal my son is covered in sauce, it’s an absolute disaster. And sometimes Hailey just looks even tidier than before. Like her mom barely has to wipe her face. When they go to the beach together, Sawyer turns into a sand monster. He’s desperately trying to run straight into the ocean. He gets all wet and then crawls and rolls in the sand. And Hailey sometimes will just sit nicely with her mom. I think she doesn’t want to get any sand on the blanket that they’re sitting on. By this time our blanket is gone its like sailing off on the crest of a wave, Sawyer’s like teeth have sand on them. Where Hailey is super vocal and talkative, and Sawyer hasn’t progressed as much that way, he seems to be a better climber and runner than her - so far. But these things all track along gender roles so their friendship often affirms my stereotypes. I’m like, see… boys are boys and girls are girls. But this is the smallest case study EVER and have we been conditioning these tots to be this way despite our best intentions?

Activities for girls in the Life Spectra are household play, dolls, crafts, singing, ballet, and gymnastics.  For boys we have football, running and jumping, technology, construction, cars, climbing, mechanics, ice hockey and dinosaurs. 

The girls role is PASSIVE. The boys role is ACTIVE. 

Which somehow reminds me of intercourse. Like how the penis enters the vagina. And how the sperm swirl and swim to infiltrate the pretty little egg that’s just sitting there. 

Gender neutral parenting in Lotta Rajalin’s purview is not limiting children by anything, but adding to what each child can be. It is not changing the nature of children, but changing our own adult mindsets. So we look at the circle, we take away the line that divides the boy stuff from the girl stuff, and we make life available for all children taking gender out of the color, clothing, emotion, activities and roles. So there’s still princess costumes and footballs, and passive personalities and active personalities but they aren’t determined by the child’s genitals.

Okay that sounds fine but are there biological differences between the sexes even in children that just make them lean more towards these gender roles naturally, and that’s how these gender roles came to be. It’s been clinically observed that girls are more interested in people - like that baby girls have better facial recognition and boys are more interested in things. There’s the influence of hormones on babies and kids. Steven Pinker in a debate with Elizabeth Spelke talked about how fetal testosterone was linked to reduced eye contact and facial recognition in boys at 12 months, at 18 months reduced vocabulary, reduced social skills and narrowness of interest at 48 months.

So have we just observed this over generations and that’s how these stereotypes have become so rigidly carved out? People calling for an end to gender in babies and children seem to feel like our expectations and stereotypes cause the differences between the sexes, not the other way around. Is this wrong? we have a stereotype that UFC fighters have more muscular bodies than league of legends world championship competitors. That doesn’t mean our stereotype MADE the UFC fighters muscular. Did you know that people are actually good intuitive statisticians? Cognitive psychology seems to have a lot of literature to support that regular people’s intuitions about genders track pretty well with the real world.

Then there’s cognitive neuroscientists like Gina Rippon, who says the structure of girls brains and boys brains are basically the same - you can’t tell them apart from the brain scan. BUT the brains are VERY elastic. So if boys, for example, are encouraged to play Tetris video games and play with legos and look at the little lego instruction book for putting together the lego ship or whatever, this is a type of play is training for their brains. Cortexes literally get thicker. So this experience at play, is it encouraged by caregivers or naturally gravitated towards, either way it makes them better in math and spatial awareness challenges in school, because they are good at it they enjoy doing it more and it builds on itself. 

Also, gender roles are pretty universal. There’s no society on Earth where the men are the main caretakers and homemakers, the women are the sole aggressive bread winners. Why is that?

Either way, whether gender is a social construct or part of our DNA, or both as I suspect, I think gender creative parenting is rad. I think it would be healthy for American boys to learn about their emotions and for American girls to have confidence in their physical and mental abilities. Whoa that was a lot. Let’s get to the conversation with Mara now.