Last week me and my boyfriend were talking with his aunt about the difficulties of disciplining children if you are naturally mild-mannered. Then she said “then again maybe you’ll end up having girls, so you won’t have to worry about bad behaviour”. This attitude makes me so angry, as I feel like it diminishes the hard work my parents put into raising me and my sisters, knowing that we caused them every bit as much trouble as our male cousins and classmates caused their parents. I also remember my aunt once complaining to my mum about how hard it was being a parent when her boys were playing up. My mum said “oh, I know”, and my aunt replied angrily “no, you don’t know how I feel, you’ve got girls, it’s not the same”. (My mum had had to pick my sister up from the police station only earlier that week).
I also encountered this attitude while working as a classroom assistant – every teacher I worked with had an assumption that boys were naughty and girls were “good”, but it just didn’t match what I saw. As far as I could see, the girls were every bit as capable of being rude, disruptive, disobedient and mean to other children as the boys, but it wasn’t acknowledged by the teachers. It was quite surreal.
I feel like it’s an insult to girls, because while “good girls” receive praise for being obedient, there is also an element of assuming that they are boring, and lack personality and spark. At the end of the day, these assumptions of girls as meek and obedient make girls less visible and it minimises their personalities and individuality.