sons to be feminists ,To hear my mom tell it I always wanted children from the longest time she can remember. I don’t quite remember things that way but I’ll take her word for it.
In my 20s I was extremely far off from kids. I had nieces and I loved them to death but watching them made me realize I was nowhere near ready to have a child and I recognized that it was a huge responsibility
But whenever I did think of my future fictional child I always assumed that I would have a daughter. I just felt like I had way too many life lessons passed down from my mother, my aunts and my grandmother that I could not possibly not share that with my daughter. So imagine my surprise that I ended up with 2 boys!
But I’ll tell you this I would never have it any other way. Because the burden has been on women for far too long to hold up society. I am teaching my sons that they have to learn all of the same lessons that women learn so that they can be advocates for them in their lives. Having a son is a great responsibility because you have to teach them about consent, you have to teach them about advocating for those less fortunate than them, you have to teach them about strength but you also have to teach them about vulnerability and sharing their feelings and that those things are NOT weaknesses. I see the most amazing vulnerability and caring spirit in my oldest son .sons to be feminists , If he sees a child get injured he is the first one going over to check and make sure that they’re OK. I did not actively teach him that, he is just naturally an empathetic spirit and that makes me so proud and RAISE your boy to feminism.
These are the lessons I’m hoping to teach my sons. These non- traditional lessons that boys aren’t typically taught, sons to be feminists ,
If you could teach your son, one lesson that would guide his life, what would that be?
For moms of daughters, what would you hope that moms of sons would teach their boys to make the world a better place for your daughters?
Sons to be feminists
Then I had sons. It may sound naive, but I hadn’t really thought about how that would work. I had a vague plan that my husband, Mike, and I would divide the labour, that it would be equal and fair, that I would raise a bunch of lovely equal-opportunity children and that my life would more or less carry on as before. Feel free to snigger – I deserve it.
But he had a job, I was freelance. There was no question about whose work would take priority. No matter how much Mike pitched in, the day-to-day reality was me, at home, trying to hold back a tsunami of washing-up and laundry and mess and boys and nappies and Lego.
sons to be feminists , I loved being at home with the boys. But this was not what I had expected and at times I felt caged and desperate. sons to be feminists , In all my years of blithely touting feminism, I had understood it only in an abstract way. Now I got it, understood that because I was the one with the womb and the mammary glands, I would be the one carrying the children and then feeding them. It was a startling window into other times and worlds, where, if you had no birth control and your body belonged to your husband by law, then you could just be impregnated over and over again, sidelined and kept at home. Suddenly my feminism was visceral.
To be clear: I don’t think you only understand feminism if you have children. But the embarrassing truth is that, in my case, this is what happen.
