I wrote an article this week about getting your preteen to read when your preteen hates reading. It's really a shame that it was such a short article, because I could have gone on and on.
When I'm writing an article, I like to poke around first and see what other people are writing in their articles that hit the same topics. I want to make sure I'm not repeating what's already out there (as much as that's possible), and I want to see the state of the conversation which I'm entering. But this week's article took me by surprise because so many of them revolved around the topic of "What to do when your boy child hates reading."
From just reading the titles, my interest was piqued. I usually hear about how girl children decide they hate science and math. This is especially prominent once they hit middle school and suddenly there are all sorts of social pressures that tell them they shouldn't be good at math anymore because this is a masculine thing and they need to be focusing on feminine things. (Like...pants? I was very concerned with finding the perfect pair of pants in junior high because I thought they'd make my ass look awesome and get me a boyfriend, and I had this idea that that was a thing I wanted. But now I'm thinking about it, "pants" aren't really that feminine of a thing.) It's pretty clear that this decision to hate numbers and graphs is a product of indoctrination from societal forces and not because the girls are particularly bad at math (with their girl brains and their...nail polish? Nail polish makes you bad at math, right? The fumes?) So I thought to myself, Oh! Is there a similar effect on boy children who decide in junior high that it's not cool to read because our culture has decided that that's a feminine characteristic? How fascinating!
But no.
That is not what these articles were about.
They, in fact, just fed the monster, not mentioning (until I dug deeper on a second go around) that there are societal pressures, and thereby ignoring that they exist and what the real problem here is. Almost all of them encouraged parents to find books about trucks and sports and "not girly" things, because MAN FOLK READ MAN BOOK! (Boy brains are made of snails and snails can't read. It's science.)
So, okay, I get that if your boy child is feeling the need to be all macho, and you want to appeal to his interests, he's going to gravitate towards stereotypically masculine topics. (Like whiskey. Or the first world war.) But why phrase it as "not girly" topics? (That's a quote, by the way.) Why not phrase it as "topics in which your kid is interested, whatever that happens to be?"
(For example: your kid is interested in pie, even though all baked goods are inherently girly. But wait. Are they? I'm confusing myself. On the one hand, I assume all pie is baked by 1950s housewives with aprons and lipstick and heels, which would make pie a feminine thing. But then, that's insane because, like I said, everyone likes pie. Placing food on a gender scale is stupid. So is labeling things like sports or space travel or pants.)
By this logic, would Harry Potter or the Chronicles of Narnia or A Series of Unfortunate Events be masculine enough to get recommended to an apathetic middle grade reader? (Is Jesus more or less masculine than pants?) This is baffling to me.
One article suggested getting your son a mainly space in which to read, like a tree house (or a leather arm chair). This is so the boy child's masculinity remains firmly intact even as they do the less-than-manly activity of reading.
So this advice is basically saying, if your boy child is suffering from the fallout of gender stereotypes, you should help them by pushing them even further into those gender norms!
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