The Kids Could Be All Right

Michael Ian Black just wrote a piece for the NYT called "The Boys Are Not All Right". In response to this and to general cultural hand-wringing about the state of the youth, from tablet-addicted toddlers to violent young adult beta males to the "lost generation of millennials", I submit this.

Call it a hunch, but from the very beginning, we figured that our first-born twins would be girls. When the news came that both were boys, we went through a period of resetting. For my husband, this involved a minor crisis of conscience. I remember him reluctantly admitting, “But I don’t know how to teach boys to be men. I’m not that kind of man.” I was too overwhelmed to say this to him then, but, with the benefit of hindsight and time travel, I would go back and say, “That’s precisely why I love you. You’ve never been that kind of man.”

My spouse is compassionate, strong, earnest, and brilliant. He is steady and loving. He provides. He is not handy – at all – and he did not know how to drive until I taught him. He might not know how to attach a fishing hook or run a band saw or change the oil in the car, but he loves tenderly and with his entire being. When we started raising our boys – three of them now – we each realized that we may not be doing gender the way other people do it, and in fact we might never have done gender the way other people do it. The two boxes – male and female, masculine and feminine - just never worked.

In the wake of a growing societal interest in toxic masculinity and the way that our culture fails boys, many of our friends who also are raising boys have expressed worry. After each school shooting, my social media feeds are inundated with the question “How do we make sure that we are not raising monsters?” As Michael Ian Black points out, our culture has done wonders in changing some of the ways that we limit girls. The work is not done, but girls are taught that there are many ways to be a girl. There are not many ways to be a boy, though. Boys will be boys.

Parenting styles develop through a series of choices in the moment, spontaneous decisions that reveal underlying themes only in retrospect. We have endeavored to raise our children in a way that feels genderless. They are all male, and they are between the ages of ten and thirteen. When they were younger, whenever I needed to intervene in a behavior or teach the children a task or a moral or ethical lesson, I would consider the question: “How would I teach this if this child was a female?” Often, I was surprised that I felt the lesson would have been different if a different gender were being considered. In those cases, I made sure to teach the children both ways. Our sons know I will not let them off the hook for behavior just because “boys will be boys.” They know that, in our house, a full range of emotions are acceptable and expected, and that boys absolutely do cry sometimes. We teach them that emotions are not negative or positive, but that we can be attentive to both our emotions and our expression of those emotions, and that our actions have consequences. We teach them that everyone needs help sometimes, and that the people in relationships sometimes take turns being the strong one.

When they were small, one of them showed a preference for trucks, and we indulged that preference. In addition to trucks, we made sure that they all had a range of toys from both gendered sides of the toy aisle. They had a variety of clothes to play dress-up in, and we consumed media with both male and female protagonists. As soon as I found picture books that showed other ways of expressing gender, those were on hand as well. This all worked perfectly in our home, but there were some bumps in the road whenever we interacted with the outside world.

There have been many moments when we have been confronted with the limitations that society puts on boys, but one stands out and clenches my heart with each remembering in a way that time has not softened. My youngest chose pink as a favorite color from the moment that he could make his preferences clear. He did not reveal this to just anyone, though. By the age of five, he knew that it was uncommon and, in some circles, unacceptable. When we were at a mini-golf center that summer, the older man behind the counter asked my son to choose his favorite color of golf ball. My son paused thoughtfully, and I watched his eyes move from the beautiful pink ball on the counter to the man’s eyes, and then I saw the decision being made, and he carefully said, “My favorite color is blue. I’ll have the blue one.”

We have talked with the children from a rather young age about the performance of gender, always trying to gauge what is developmentally appropriate, and adding more content as the time felt right. We have talked with the boys about toxic masculinity, and we have talked about #MeToo. I want them to understand that society has perceptions about what traits are masculine and what traits are feminine but that these ideas have changed across cultures and across time, and that they really are, essentially, meaningless. We are all a spectrum, and we can all embody the traits that we feel make us whole. When we get our entire identity from a small gender-based definition characterized by power, strength, and aggression – or by softness and caregiving - our options are limited.

Our children are sometimes misgendered by the people with whom we interact, sometimes to interesting effect. There is an older male orthodontist that we go to who always complements me on my beautiful, brave daughter. He calls her sweetie and apologizes any time he thinks he has done something that might cause pain. The same orthodontist works on my other son, thinks he is a boy, does not call him terms of endearment, and tells him to “man up”. We have asked our sons how they want us to handle these kinds of situations – do they want us to intervene on their behalf? They do not. They do not care, right now, how they are perceived by others or what gender is applied to them. It does not matter to them at all.  We follow their lead.

Now that the boys are older, we make sure that they have access to male role models that express a variety of ways of being men. For example, we are all big fans of Lin-Manuel Miranda, not in small part because he wears his heart on his sleeve. He is powerful and strong and brave, and he weeps with joy and delight. He talks openly about love and compassion. He uses his power to help others, raising funds and awareness around important issues. This new season of Queer Eye was a different kind of delight. The five men on the show all had very different ways of expressing their masculinity, and, on a couple of the episodes, they helped broaden the perspectives and emotional expression of the men with whom they were working. We cried along with the men of Queer Eye, and we blew through those few new episodes embarrassingly quickly.

At our church recently, one of the ministers talked of how he had a crisis of conscience when his first daughter was born. At that moment, holding his newborn daughter for the first time, he realized that what he knew of fatherhood and masculinity was too small. At that moment, he realized that his love was boundless, and that his very power as a man came from his ability to love strongly and unreservedly. These are the role models we seek for our sons: Men who know that power comes from sharing your strength with others and from compassion and empathy. Men who teach, men who guide, men who love.

I have sons who knit and crochet. I have sons who dance and sing and play instruments. I have children who can experience a full range of human emotion. And still, sometimes I worry that I have raised children who might not be able to fit into a world where, elsewhere, boys are being taught to “man up”. Honestly, I worried about this a lot when they were younger. Now that they are on the cusp of becoming young men, I see that the children that we have raised are strong and compassionate. They are brave, authentic, and powerful. They are smart, creative, and expressive. They are going to be all right.