Please encourage your daughter to be friends with boys
Yes, encourage your daughter to be friends with boys as not every friendship has a physical or sexual undertone. I am also a staunch opponent of single-gender schools—which I believe to be not an insignificant source of learned segregation. This exclusivity is artificial and done for the wrong reasons. Even though civil societies have moved at a glacial pace away from this model, it has moved. This separation teaches them that the opposite sex is a source of unhealthy distractions, and it leads to the manifestation of distrust and inequality. For my daughter, she’s not even marginally interested in the boys in her classes as she often finds them awkward, uninteresting and even smelly sometimes.
But she does like to hang out with a few of them because of the casual conversations that are spawned and team sports that they play in school. While my daughter has a group of girlfriends who are a clique, she often finds their conversations to be petty and insignificant; she’d rather engage in more substantive topics like how Ahsoka Tano was once Anakin Skywalker’s Padawan in the days of the Clone War. It could be that my daughter hasn’t fallen far from the apple tree, but I encourage her to develop a wide range of interest by exposing her to different things than to be solely concerned about vain materialism.
It’s a true dichotomy where people can be different but still be equal.
I also think that bifurcating the world into two sexes, much less separating their socialization is not reflective of our non-binary world. The rainbow flag has exploded into more colors and configurations representing an ever-expanding expression of pride. Encouraging children to mingle within their own gender and their own kind does not teach tolerance. If their exposure to other cultures is through a restaurant menu, then we, as parents, have failed. As parents, all know that keeping a toy away from a child drives them to want it even more. We should really rethink consciously keeping the other gender away from our daughters for our own reasons. Much of our actions are projections of personal prejudice and bias which manifest as tendency to fence off the unknown. Deviants notwithstanding, we should not use this approach as a broad tool to isolate our children. If we continue to do this, we, as a whole and collective society, have failed.
Unless our children grow up to pursue work in a lighthouse or other lifelong careers that are performed with limited human interaction, we need to teach that our diversified world requires them to collaborate across the sexes, nationalities, socioeconomics and creed. Children who are discouraged from being friends with members outside their own kind miss much. In fact, it might even take a lifetime (without any guarantee) to undo the damage done during these early years.
It’s a true dichotomy where people can be different but still be equal. And if we want to stop referring to (and judging) the opposite sex by physical characteristics, then we had better not avoid them because they are visually different, but embrace them because they are intrinsically the same. We should really try not to create another generation of sexist, racist sociopaths with limited experiences in dealing with others who don’t look like themselves.
