Girls can do anything boys can do (yawn!) but girls really should do everything boys do do (and vice versa!)

Yes, girls are different. You’ve been raising one for years now. If you also have a male child or have friends with male children, you can talk endlessly about the differences of boys and girls physically, cognitively, emotionally and socially. The way our society is, we tend to stream them onto different tracks. Whether we do this consciously or not, we started this process when the child was in utero. The color of clothes, the way we speak to them and what we expose them to is based primarily on their anatomy. But increasingly we are accepting that gender can be ambiguous; it can be a spectrum of possibilities defined by the brain and not we what pack between our legs.

Raising a ‘conventional girl’ is infinitely simpler than if I had a child whose gender lies elsewhere on this spectrum. But nevertheless, I make her do everything regardless of what her gender is. And being a single, custody sharing dad, there are no such things as gender based chores in our household; so you do it all or it doesn’t get done. To that end, not only do I simply talk the talk and tell my daughter that she is capable of doing anything boys can do, I also walk the walk and tell my daughter to learn to do the things that are generally perceived as male tasks.

It made no difference whether my child came into my life as a girl or boy. I would still teach this child the same basic life skills. This way, if she chooses not to do something, it is not because she doesn’t know how. She doesn’t need to be experts in everything, but this should never be the reason not to learn something new.

When I went to school, all the kids (guys and gals) had to take woodworking, metal shop and two other home economic courses: sewing and cooking. It’s too bad that many schools don’t offer this anymore. I’m of the opinion that not only should they bring it back mainstream, it should be broadened to include auto mechanics and domestic sciences include personal finances. I get my daughter to help me with the cooking, serving and cleaning. But her chores aren’t confined to domestic ones. I get her to help me with pumping up bike tires, taking out the garbage, gardening and even fixing broken things like a phone. Just like an earlier article about kid’s menu where I wrote that there is no such thing as kids’ food versus adult food, I believe there is no such thing as a man’s job versus a woman’s job; it’s just a job. She may not have to change a tire (mechanic) or fix broken phones (technician) as a career choice, but a decade into the future, if she is stuck 100 miles away from a service station with a blown tire, I would feel comfortable having taught her to safely bring the car to the side of the road, jack the vehicle, loosen the lug nuts and replace with the spare. Calling the Triple-A is a safety consideration, but there’s no guarantee that AAA will reach her in reasonable time while she is exposed to unknown intentions of road side strangers. She has to be her own backup plan. For the same reason and at this age, I expose my daughter to things without her even knowing about the deeper intentions. I give my daughter an allowance not to reward her for chores performed, but to teach her about the concept of money. In an aftercare program, she is enrolled in programming for one day a week. She’s not writing a bubble sort algorithm at the age of 7, but she is exposed to object oriented programming and logic gates without actually being exposed to a single line of machine code. She is learning without evening realizing it.

The same must be said for boys growing up in our macho world who are taught to shun things feminine. I went to an out-of-town college and was surprised by the number of guys I had shared a house with who simply didn’t know how to cook. They ate out most of the time and when they did cook, it was boiled or microwaved foods. These guys were my age and most of them came from the same school system. How can they not know how to sew a button to a shirt or make French toast for breakfast? Don’t these guys know that it’s far more attractive to cook a real meal for their girlfriend?  Learning to negotiate a needle pulling thread makes guys more versatile and well put together. These guys didn’t know that doing women’s work is far more appeal to women than to wait to bring a bag of dirty laundry back home to mom?

I have parental responsibility for one child. It made no difference whether the child came into my life as a girl or boy. I would still teach this child the same basic life skills. This way, if they choose not to do something, it is not because they don’t know how. They don’t need to be the expert in everything, but this shouldn’t be the reason not to learn something new. And not learning something because it has an arbitrary gender connotation assigned to it, is….well, prude and old-fashion.