Sometime in the past couple of months, our little boy has started to identify more with men and boys. He's aware that his body is not like mine. I'm not sure how much of that is due to going into women's changerooms with me and men's changerooms with his dad when we go swimming. I had a bath with him a month or so ago for the first time in a while (his and my bath times haven't been converging that often), and he spent a bit of time pointing at my bits as if to say "hey there's no willy there!" and "you've got those two lumps there!" (he hasn't had a breastfeed for over 5 months now).
So here's who E-chan hangs out with: that's 2 days a week with me, 3 days a week at child care, every weekday morning and most weekday nights he sees his dad (and me), and then he has all weekend with both of us. I can honestly say that E-chan's Dad and I are equal in the division of parenting "tasks" and time when we are both around. Due to the fact that we're geographically isolated from our family, he spends more time with some of our friends than he does with his grandparents. Most weeks I'll catch up with other mums and bubs at a playgroup, in the park or at each other's places. The child care centre he goes to is staffed entirely by women. In fact, I know of only 3 childcare centres in the inner west of Sydney that have one male child care worker (and I know at least 20 mums in the region, mostly with kids in different centres). So it's not entirely suprising that when C-chan goes in to pick up E-chan from child care, he usually ends up with a throng of baby boys around his ankles.
So I suppose what I'm saying above is that he's not exactly deprived of male contact, but most of his male contact is with his Dad. I've started noticing lately that whenever I'm in a waiting room (weekly at the moment for my allergy shots), E-chan will happily play away with whoever is there, but he will make a special point of trying to make eye contact at "chat" with adult males. On Monday in the park, there were 2 older boys (around 7-9 years old), and Ethan spent a lot of time watching them play, and giggling along as if he wanted to join in. He can tell who is a girl and who is a boy. Don't get me wrong - he's not a total bloke, he does like playing with women and girls, and any kid I have is going to have the opportunity to play with girls and boys and non-gender-stereotypical toys. All I'm saying is his sense of gender is well formed already, and he's eyes are open wide looking for multiple male role models.
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I'm going to be really interested what happens with Seth about this stuff. We don't really have that much contact with men on a regular basis and I'm not sure whether this will be something we'll have to work on or not. I'll be interested to see if the same thing happens - where he's actively looking out for other boys/men. I've got a friend with a 6 year old and we met in Bali when he was 3. He definitely is always very interested in what other older guys are up to - in Bali he kept sidling up to teenage boys and wanting to join in their swimming instead of hanging out with the 3 women he was stuck with! I'm glad my very close friend up here has a little boy nearly the same age so they can play together.
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