I enjoyed a discussion last night at my children’s school classroom meeting. The parents were brought up to date on the discussions that were happening in the classroom and we were then invited to engage in a similar discussion amongst the parents in small groups. The topic was discrimination with an emphasis on men’s and women’s prejudice. Can a boy wear pink, can a girl be Spiderman, can a boy play princess, can a girl play football? The children were making these distinctions and were discriminating based on their judgements about what boys can or cannot do (and vice versa with the girls).

The two questions that they asked the parents to discuss were “growing up, what things were you taught were only ‘boy’ things and only ‘girl’ things?” and “what gender specific things do you want to pass on to your child?”

I was surprised at how hard the second question was to answer. Most everything I came up with was actually gender neutral. If I said that I wanted to train my son on how to treat/date a woman/wife with respect is that not just a tangent on the gender neutral idea of learning to value, love, and respect humanity? If I said I wanted to train my son to be a leader would I not see it valuable to train my daughter similarly (especially since she seems to evoke strong leadership qualities even at the age of three)?

Miroslav Volf in his amazing book Exclusion and Embrace suggests that we have very little to differentiate gender roles aside from the body itself. Essentially, according to Volf, we teach our children how to be healthy, whole, loving human beings over and above the gender distinctions that our culture currently buys into.

I’m intrigued to find out what many of you think. Can you identify gender specific elements that you’d like to guide your children into?