posted
Kat, no one is being slandered or flamed in either of the two threads. So, I don't know why you aren't participating now.
Posts: 13123 | Registered: Feb 2002
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posted
As to the traditionally male jobs and female jobs, I think it has something more to do with the fact that traditionally males have needed to support a family and that traditionally females were either supporting only themselves or supplementing the income the male earned.
In modern times when things are not always so, it is difficult to have businesses raise market pay rates. It will take a few generations.
Posts: 3495 | Registered: Feb 2000
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posted
Saxy, it's actually hard to find examples unless you want to get down to policy. I hate standardized testing. But I agree with the premise they stand for -- we have to have SOME way to measure the effectiveness public education.
As for fathers, I think it's inherently different, which is not to say that there aren't fathers who break that mold. There are darned few societies in history where the father was the primary nurturer in a child's early years. I think that points pretty clearly to a general tendency for parental roles. I don't think tradition alone can cover it...it's too pervasive. I love that we live in a country where those gender roles can be reversed with minimal hubbub. I don't like, however, the idea that because we have that freedom, it means that the whole idea of gender roles is purely social pressure. Mothers bring gifts to the parenting table. Fathers bring different gifts. Neither is better than the other...they're just different. Generally speaking, of course. Posts: 5948 | Registered: Jun 2001
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posted
Just want to point this out, for what it's worth:
I charge more for babysitting than for yardword.
I have nothing else to say on this topic, if only because I can't figure out what is actually being debated here.
Posts: 6367 | Registered: Aug 2003
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I am a little amused that I have now been involved to a great extent in three gay marraige threads, and in my personal life, it really isn't an issue. I tend to favor Religious Threads.
Posts: 1034 | Registered: Mar 2004
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quote:Just to make it clear, I don't hire out my yardwork because I'm a girl. I do it because it's not a job I enjoy...
That's my point. I'm saying that NO teenager likes yard work, but that of the two genders, it's almost entirely boys who are pushed into it. So it's not that girls are being denied equal opportunity to pull weeds and mow the lawn (for equal pay, in most areas, as babysitting), it's that girls have the choice between the two, and boys usually don't. How often are teenage boys hired for babysitting? How many parents would choose a 16 year old guy to watch their children over a 16 year old girl?
Posts: 2220 | Registered: Jun 1999
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quote: I think it is reasonable to apply greater weight to a mother when deciding on custody, especially when the child is very young. It is reasonable, because in those early years the mother generally plays a much larger role in the child's life than the father. That's not to say the father has NO role, or that the father's role is unnecessary -- I believe small children *need* fathers in a huge way. But if we must choose one or the other, generally, I believe the child is better off with the mother.
Why not decide on the merits of the individual case? Why are generalizations necessary or useful at all? Just decide each case and let the chips fall where they may. As a father who left work to care for my babies, and as a father who still does most of the day to day child-rearing, I very much resent the thought that the system should automatically consider me inferior at the job because of my gender.
As you said:
quote:The trouble comes, however, when someone tries to apply ideas that are true in general, but may not be true in relation to a specific person. Imposing specific consequences on general truths strikes me as a bad idea.
-o-
I didn't read this as a gay marriage thread at first, since storm has started many threads on gender roles in the past. He can correct me if I am wrong, but I thought this was another discussion on gender roles.
I regret that this has turned into a gay marriage thread . . .the gender roles discussion is more interesting to me. As can be seen in gay marriage threads, the side opposed to gay marriages sometimes likes to make posts which make no arguments, but instead condemn the other side for theoretically flaming them, when no actual flaming has taken place. Sorry Kat, but the only flaming I see in this thread is by you. And if you were truly afraid of being flamed, then what good does it do to still come in here and identify which side you are on, but not give arguments?
I certainly haven't seen anything rude in the posts to this thread specifically favoring gay marriage, by saxon75, Dan_raven, ak, Bob the Lawyer, and Storm Saxon. Certainly not slander and flaming. And so it seems to me rude to suggest that it's going on here.
I love you dearly, and I think you take much more crap than you deserve. But I'm not with you on this one.
Posts: 1112 | Registered: Jan 2003
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posted
If we move to gender roles, here is a question...
Are there ideal roles that parents/spouses should assume? My mom, as a single mother, had to be both the bread winner and nurturer. She was very competent in assimilating the "male" role, but I don't think she would have done it by choice.
Icarus, where you thrust into the nurturing role or did you choose it? Do you think gender roles are biological or created by society? Can a child have the same type of relationship with its' dad as its' mom?
I am tending to think there are gender roles. If nothing else, breastfeeding has got to change the dynamics of early relationships in a way a man could never achieve. But I could go either way..as I have seen plenty of successful mixed-role parents of both genders.
Posts: 1034 | Registered: Mar 2004
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posted
Breastfeeding does create a different dynamic in the early years, but after the age of weaning equal consideration should be paid to both parents in custody decisions. And btw we pay our sitter $8/hour (for three kids). Yes, we do use a male sitter sometimes.
Posts: 2711 | Registered: Mar 2004
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posted
Ic, let's play "let's pretend". Pretend you're a judge sitting a bitter divorce case. It appears to you that each parent has equal amounts of concern for their children. They both appear to be competent in the care of those children. In fact, it's clear they both love their children so much they're willing to fight to make sure they get to take care of them. (Nevermind that they don't love their children enough to figure out how to work out their marriage... Back to pretending...)
You don't know these people. You only get a surface impression of them based on paperwork and "the facts". You don't get to see them in parenting action.
How do you decide who gets the kids and who doesn't?
It really does come down to cases.
For me, if the children are very young, I'd weigh toward Mommy. If the children are a bit older, but not old enough to decide who they will go with, I'd side with boys going with Daddy, and girls going with Mommy. Age 14 and older, it should be up to the child if they're willing to decide.
I really hate divorce. The whole idea of making a child decide which parent they want to be with makes me sick. The idea of taking a child away from his daddy just because he's only 3 years old makes me sick. The idea that a 9 year old boy has to live apart from his Mom because he's a boy makes me SICK.
Posts: 5948 | Registered: Jun 2001
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posted
Of Course there are biologically defined gender roles. Duh. How could millions of years of evolution not take advantage of sexual dimorphism? We know via a number of studies that females and males have different ways of visualizing the world, orienting themselves spatially etc. One would expect these differences to be more pronounced in areas that males and females evolved to do differently eg child rearing, protecting the familty etc.
Posts: 4548 | Registered: May 2001
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posted
Hey, I once had a situation where I needed a babysitter, and my coworker found out about it. I had not asked her for help, nor any of my other coworkers, but I had mentioned to someone in a random conversation, and she overheard us. She said to me, very cheerfully, that her boyfriend could watch my kids if I ever needed a sitter.
I told her thank you, but that my husband and I didn't feel comfortable letting a man watch our kids, unless it was one we knew pretty well.
She was EXTREMELY offended, and said that I was cruel because I had insulted the man she loved (keep in mind I had never even met the guy before). She said it would have been better for me to say "thanks", but make up a better excuse that wouldn't hurt her feelings.
I was surprised that anyone would prefer I lie to them to spare their feelings, especially over something like that. And what kind of lie was I supposed to make up?
I told her that I thought she was being too sensitive, and used her vegetarianism to make an example. I said that I wouldn't feel offended if I offered her a burger, and she turned it down saying that she didn't believe in eating meat. I wouldn't consider it a personal offense to the burger. I would understand that she had made a choice to exclude meat from her diet, just as we had made a choice to use female babysitters.
Do you guys think that I was being cruel? Or was she being over-sensitive?
I think if I had known she was going to take it so personally, I may have tried a different tactic. But it certainly seemed to be out-of-the-blue to me.
Posts: 6367 | Registered: Aug 2003
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posted
Two things: She's volunteering the services of someone else without consulting them first? And whew, that's creepy that she would take offense. Please say she doesn't have children.
Posts: 5948 | Registered: Jun 2001
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posted
Not at the time, she didn't. I haven't seen her in a while.
Added: She wasn't weird or anything, and that's why I was so surprised. She was generally a very kind and smart person. That's why I thought I might have been out of line. You may be surprised to learn that I occasionally do offend people by accident.
quote: Icarus, where you thrust into the nurturing role or did you choose it?
We both chose it, because we both agreed that, of the two of us, I was the more nurturing, particularly in the kind of nurturing that little kids need.
(Why? If I had not chosen it, would that lessen the fact that I do it, and that I do it reasonably well?)
quote:Do you think gender roles are biological or created by society?
I think they are largely created by society. Which does not mean that there were not at some point good reasons for the roles we are familiar with, but does mean that, to me, there is no intrinsic reason why the roles familiar to us are the right ones.
I have always found the evidence that traditional gender roles are programmed into is guilty of begging the question.
quote:Can a child have the same type of relationship with its' dad as its' mom?
I'm not quite sure what this means. I think each relationship is unique. Not only do I not agree that a mother is necessarily around for nurturing while a father is necessarily around for . . . gosh, I'm not sure what a father is around for . . . I also don't agree that any sort of duality is necessary at all. In other words, I don't see the need for one parent to be like one thing while the other is like something else.
-o- Jeniwren,
quote: You don't know these people. You only get a surface impression of them based on paperwork and "the facts". You don't get to see them in parenting action.
I would say that such crucial decisions should not be based on such flimsy evidence.
Why not have some sort of appealable independent psychological evaluation/observation? Or why not make it the responsibility of a parent seeking primary custody to provide evidence that he or she is the one best equipped for this role? If all things are equal, why not some sort of shared custody? If the parents seem equal, how about focusing on other aspects of the child's life . . . like if one parent is going to move the child, while the child would be better off staying where he or she has already learned to fit in?
I've never been through anything like this process, thank goodness, and so I'll freely admit that my "answers" might not be terribly valid ones. But I do know that the thought that I could be automatically considered to be less well equipped to parent based on my gender seems very wrong to me.
I would also not be comfortable automatically sending a ten-year-old boy to live with his father, FWIW. I think each decision should be based on specific evidence that it is the right decision, not a general guideline based on gender.
Posts: 1112 | Registered: Jan 2003
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posted
I think women are better at nurturing infants because they have less body and facial hair which grabby-handed little boys like to grab and yank.
<looks at bare patches on chest and cringes>
Posts: 4625 | Registered: Jul 2002
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posted
My opinion about mom roles versus dad roles are that they both offer nurturing and growing in different ways. It depends on the family, but most often you have the early love and self-confidence best instilled by the mother, whereas the later shaping and growing tends to be best facilitated by the father. I have nothing to back this up, this has just been my experience. YMMV.
Zan.......... . . . .......Jes might disagree with you.
To me, cruelty implies deliberateness. Since you didn't set out to offend, I don't think you were cruel. Depending on your priorities (honesty vs. diplomacy), I think you might want to phrase things a bit more circumspectly in the future, just to avoid the hassle of potentially offending someone.
As to whether or not that sort of comment is offensive, I would think it depends on how close a relationship you have with the person. If a good friend who didn't know my wife turned down my unsolicited offer for her to watch the kids on such grounds, it would probably bother me that this friend didn't trust me a little more not to be married to a psycho. If a total stranger did the same thing, I wouldn't care at all.
Posts: 4534 | Registered: Jan 2003
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quote:If a good friend who didn't know my wife turned down my unsolicited offer for her to watch the kids on such grounds, it would probably bother me that this friend didn't trust me a little more not to be married to a psycho.
No matter how well I know somebody, the trust that I have for that person does not extend to somebody they recommend, no matter how highly, and regardless of how closely related they are--at least not when it comes to taking care of my kids. If I were in Maureen's place, I would have turned down the offer regardless of gender. My kids' safety requires a higher level of trust than my trust in someone not to marry a psycho.
Posts: 1112 | Registered: Jan 2003
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posted
Icarus, in an ideal world, decisions like that wouldn't even be necessary. I know a lot of divorced families -- I have one myself. Most people I talk to now have joint custody, which can mean a bazillion different things.
Crucial decisions, where the parents themselves cannot unbend enough to make the decisions themselves, of necessity have to be made with too little information. No matter how much you get, it's still too little. As I understand it, the courts can't afford to spend the time required to do a full, in depth analysis of the parenting skills of both -- and even if they could, who is to judge which is better than the other? Some people are death on spanking, while others say it's a necessary discipline tool. Even scientific studies are unclear.
Basically, it's trying to pick the best of the bad situation, and it seems to me that a judge, clearly expert in law, may not be the best judge of what is best for children. He needs guidelines. It's not a great solution, but it's something.
Posts: 5948 | Registered: Jun 2001
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That is a completely justified and reasonable way to feel about it. However, I would hope that this hypothetical good friend of mine would find a slightly more diplomatic way of telling me this.
I think that your caution in such a situation makes a lot of sense and is indicative of you being a good parent. I would imagine, though, that rather a lot of parents entrust the care of their kids to babysitters with whom they are not completely familiar, and it seems unlikely that all of them are bad parents. I know that I've babysat (though the term in this case may be a bit misleading as I was never actually caring for an infant or even a toddler) for friends and co-workers of my parents with whom I was not previously acquainted. What, to your mind, constitutes a reasonable minimum level of familiarity and trust at which a parent should trust a potential sitter?
Posts: 4534 | Registered: Jan 2003
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posted
I don't know how to quantify level of trust. I'm lucky in that I know a lot of teenagers, including some who are very trustworthy. Two of my neighbors have teenagers whom I trust, and I have also hired students and ex-students of mine to babysit. I guess if you don't personally know anybody you can trust to babysit (not just teenagers--I often use my father for this) then the next best thing is to hire people who are trusted by people you, in turn, trust.
But unsolicited offers make me uncomfortable, because I'm more likely to say no than yes. So I try to avoid bringing up my babysitting needs around people who are likely to offer that I would not say yes to. Still, sometimes the offers come up and I have to struggle to tactfully decline or put off. Usually, saying that I already have babysitters does the trick.
Posts: 1112 | Registered: Jan 2003
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posted
My wife and I struggled with this very question. A very sweet guy in our neighbhorhood has offered to babysit our now 4 year old daughter. We have refused and did so in tactful ways but we felt bad doing it. This is a guy who bends over backwards to help out all the neighborhood folks in doing yard work, helps with home repair, takes care of an elderly neighbor, has 4 step kids and watches their children and pets and yet...he is a dude and our baby is a girl. I wish I had more because for the most part, my wife and I are extremely open and cool with all sorts of gender roles and think our neighbor is the nicest guy.
As for teenage boys, I would never let them watch my young daughter. Why? Because, having been one, I can sincerely say that teenage boys are dumb. I know, generalization, but of the many teens I have seen as a teacher or in my neighborhood or in my church, while I think most are really neat, smart and clever people, they are at some fundamental level not as quick in the uptake as equivalent aged young women. It evens out as folks get older, but teenage boys are just...well, boys.
This brings up a point in gender roles. Maybe I am wrong, but I have noticed that young ladies "mature" (subjective word, I know) at an earlier age than boys. We went in with another couple to pay a 14 year old girl to watch our daughter and their daughter. She was great! Very smart, fun to talk to, up on a lot of things going on in the city, great with our kids (we spent an hour with her and the kids just hanging before going out) and had a lot of folks vouching for her. A great find.
At 14, though, I find boys to be at their loosest ends whether it be hormones, middle school or just the Y chromosome. I don't see these lads reaching the same level of "maturity" until middle to later teens.
Just a thought. I know there are plenty of exceptions. We had a 10 year old neighbor boy where we lived when we moved up here and if he offered to babysit, I wouldn't hesitate and his sister I would find a way to put off...but this seems to be more the exception, not the rule.
posted
A bigger question is where does gender roles begin? Our 4 year old is a hoot with gender identity. We are very strict with the amount of tv she watches, so she doesn't get much from that point of view. We have a lot of gay and lesbian friends and has no problem talking about folks with two mommies or two daddies. We buy her toys that she seems interested in be it trucks or princess dolls. We read a ton to her and really leave it open to her to find her way. We answer questions honestly (especially her new desire to...sorry to say this...grow a penis...she saw a boy's while changing in swim lessons and she is obsessed...eek) but appropriately for age and yet...she is still a little princess.
Which is cool. It wasn't like we were trying to create this little tom boy or anything...we just didn't want to emphasize anything and wanted her to find her place in the world.
The funny thing is, she totally gets the gender stereotypes. My mother took my family to Disney a month ago. Great time and four is perfect. It was still heavenly for her and she completely bought into all of it. Anyway, when we got back we asked her what she was going to share with her pre-kindergarten classmates.
"I will tell the girls about the princesses and the boys about the dinosaurs." What is up with that? Aaaaagh! I think it is cool that she is so into her world and picked these concepts and ran with them, but I have no idea where she gets it. Most books and even most movies are pretty gender neutral. We love recent Disney movies (Beauty and the Beast, Little Mermaid, Mulan, etc.) and these tend to have strong women protagonist who make decisions on their own, are adventurous, smart and decisive. Yet, she will still talk about the day the prince comes and saves her and carries her away. Too fun. We love it and she is so cool to talk to about it but it is amazing that with so much out there to bust the stereotype out there, she not only bucks it but seeks out the old-school knight in shining armor routine!
That said, she is a sassy adventurer, sleuth and avid reader so the good stuff is there but it is funny how easily she "falls" into the stereotypes set for generations.
posted
I'm weird about picking babysitters. With my 2 year old daughter I *really* have to trust the person. My girlfriends (with daughters babysitting age, usually) think I'm way overprotective. The way I grow in trust is to hire them to 'sit while I'm home but need a break. I stay out of eyeshot, but can hear everything. Usually this means I'm working in my office while they play in the family room.
I discovered this method by accident, but it has really worked for me for finding out which 'sitters I'll call again, and which I won't.
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