Heroes, Books, and gender roles
Annie at Reading is my SuperPower posted about her trouble with the current BTT topic, favorite male book hero, “Hero (Booking Through Thursday)“.
I commented about how parental attitudes and aptitudes pre-program a child to read for himself – reading parents – or be restricted to peer-approved topics. Ted replied:
Brad, Although parents are, of course, influential, people who study this stuff have found that peers are, in fact, more influential with regard to certain behaviors. …[ediit] Kids are subject to many influences, is my point, and conformity or the lack of it is influenced by various groups. Parents are important when it comes to education, discipline, responsibility, and ways of interacting with authority however peers are observed to be more important for learning cooperation, finding the road to popularity, and creating a style of interaction among people of one’s own age.
Ted, I was thinking of the base influences – the attitudes and aptitudes of parents between birth and age four, when research shows the ‘personality’ of the child is set. The child at about four to five begins to consciously develop at that point – when peer pressure and other cultural influences compete for attention.
Whether a parent reads regularly in the presence of the child is most often set in the parent’s school time, and certainly won’t vary during the hectic years of raising kids and the terror of providing for a family. The early social and family skills and attitudes that kids absorb and are taught in the early years set the stage. After that, any changing they do in their world view will be modifications of the ‘truth’ that formed them. Those earliest attitudes will provide the anchor, which will guide them directly or as something to rebel against.
Today we point at differences between family and social attitudes now and an earlier time when gender roles were more rigid. And we talk about gender roles were confining, impaired growth, were unfair and wasteful. Yet we still enforce those same, out-moded gender roles. Count the number of men and women teaching the early elementary grades, say, to 4th grade. Here in Ponca City, OK, USA, my observation is that women still predominate. A higher proportion of the male teachers in high school and middle school are involved in sports than are women. In the high tech companies I worked at in the 1980’s and 1990’s, clerical and office work was still predominately female – and I haven’t seen anything that seems to have changed there. The assumptions that men need to focus on higher pay still stands, and both men and women, with griping, still honor that. The truth that in decades past men were more likely supporting a family is no longer true, but the gender role identification model still exists – hampering careers of women, unfairly rewarding single and divorced men beyond their merit in the organization.
So, yes. Boys that at home find men have men roles, and women have women roles, will among their peers assume that boys do boy things, and boys won’t do girl things or read girl books. And peer pressure and sexism in the school system, even unrecognized sexism, will influence boys to be more likely to read sports books and avoid something like ‘Little Women’. But I have read and enjoyed “A Stitch In Snow” and read and re-read many times, “Nerilka’s Story”, romances by an author I came to love in general science fiction, Anne McCaffrey.
Does that mean that I think parents that read to their children will raise children more likely to be confused about gender roles? No. The children will see reading as a family value, and will choose mainly because a books seems interesting, rather than reinforcing (or rebelling against) the parent’s definition of gender roles. Now, if only one parent is seen to read, or to read for enjoyment, that might reinforce a gender-specific role for reading.
It is amazing what we do to our kids. It is amazing how we become our parents, and how few easy choices there are. We can perform thousands of discrete actions in a day, speak hundreds to thousands of words, write and read many thoughts. And occasionally, a child, a friend, a reader will see, or hear, or read a word, a gesture that has a profound impact. “Give me a lever and a fulcrum, and I can move the world.” Or, on a more sinister note, Hitler’s “Give me your children, and I will take your nation.” What are you and your school teaching your children?
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