The Gender Trap: Parents and the Pitfalls of Raising Boys and Girls

One: Wanting a Girl, Wanting a Boy: Conceptual Building Blocks

27 one Wanting a Girl, Wanting a Boy Conceptual Building Blocks From the earliest moment potential parents contemplate raising a child, they wander into a social landscape filled with gendered images, a key feature of the backdrop against which they eventually raise children. For that reason I began my interviews by asking the parents of preschoolers whether they had ever preferred having a son or a daughter, either before they had planned to have children or while awaiting the arrival of the child who would be the focus of our interview. For the many parents who did express a preference, we talked about what a son or daughter meant to them and how they anticipated that parenting would be a different experience depending on their child’s gender. The heart of my analysis is the exploration of five configurations of parenting that emerged among the parents I interviewed and their implications for the gender trap. First, however, I establish the analytic building blocks that later define parents’ varying approaches to parenting: gendered anticipation; beliefs about the origins of gendered childhoods; actions that reproduce or resist gendered outcomes for children; and the motivations parents report for taking those actions. A preliminary glance at these categories and how each links to the scholarly literature on gender provides a crucial foundation for understanding how I use the tensions between these categories to differentiate the five types of parenting practice explored in detail. Conceptual Building Blocks 28 “I Wanted a Soul Mate:” Gendered Anticipation When asked about their pre-parenthood preferences for sons or daughters , these parents echoed the results of decades of surveys in the United States: if surveyed adults could only have one child, men with a preference have favored sons by more than a two-to-one margin, whereas about half of women preferred a daughter and the other half a son.1 Among the parents I interviewed, most recalled having a preference, and most men preferred a son, with the women split fifty-fifty.2 In the explanations parents offered for their preferences, gendered images came to life. Across different races, classes, and sexual orientations , parents seemed to base their preferences on traditional gendered assumptions about their future children. Although issues arose concerning race and sexual orientation, they did not arise in a manner that appeared to predict preference. For example, two Asian American mothers reported cultural pressure to want a son, but only one of these women actually had that preference herself. One gay father reported that, in awaiting adoption, he thought others might consider it more acceptable for him to adopt a daughter, but he expressed only a tentative preference himself. At this early stage, on the relatively frictionless plane of imagination , parents from all backgrounds expressed a strikingly consistent narrative of traditionally gendered offspring. They recounted envisioning iconic scenes of mothers shopping and talking with daughters and fathers playing catch and watching football with sons. They spoke about sons carrying on the family name and protecting female siblings, and daughters staying close emotionally long after childhood. These parents assumed that their children’s interests and tendencies would be determined by whether they were male or female, indicating that they anticipated a highly gendered child. For parents who ended up having a child whose gender they preferred, these anticipations are potentially self-fulfilling prophecies, as they began constructing their child’s gender even before the child was born. Even those who did not have a child with the preferred gender may well have laid the foundation for assumptions about what their eventual child would not enjoy, given their gendered assumptions about the preferred child. Conceptual Building Blocks 29 Future chapters include specific examples of the kinds of images that fleshed out parents’ preferences. My purpose here is to introduce and outline the concept of gendered anticipation. For example, in explaining the preference for sons, fathers tended to stress three themes, the most common of which was patriarchal tradition, particularly the continuation of the family name. Almost equally frequent were references to traditionally masculine activities that men look forward to sharing with a son such as sports, roughhousing , hunting, fishing, and camping. The third common theme was the belief that the preference for a son expresses something essential to manhood . As one father noted, “Well, sort of you want to have your own kind, to have experiences with him as a man, I guess.” In all three...