I was a child in the bourgeois family era. How child-centered it was is debatable by current standards, but I am sure more child-centered than pre-WWII.
"Parenting" has taken us off the rails. Like many other movements and trends that I remember, at first it served to correct issues in the previous way, but then careened way out of balance to the over-scheduled, outsourced, and hovered-over childhoods that many children in the 1990s and on have endured.
Personally, I don't consider "gender" a human quality, and think that parents worrying about their child's "gender" is doubly troublesome. First, it pathologizes sex-based stereotype non-conforming play and secondly, it subconsciously affirms "gender identity" as a concept, which is part of how we have gotten to the mess we are in today.
Until recently, "identity" was constituted by people's tribe, actions, and relationships. This is adaptive, socially and communally. While we weren't looking, academics have shifted "identity" to be a sense of self as avatar, and its branding is as gender feelings, mental health diagnoses or trends, and nonsensical alliances like "queers for Palestine." In my opinion, these identities are maladaptive individually and in communities. Identities now must be "affirmed" because they are not empirical, rooting a (fragile) sense of self in others' consensus rather than actions, relationships, and positive contributions to society.
Children need to sort their own conflicts for the most part. They need to take calculated risks and learn to dispel their own boredom. There's no wrong way to be a boy or a girl, and there is no "gender identity."
Yes yes yes!
I was a child in the bourgeois family era. How child-centered it was is debatable by current standards, but I am sure more child-centered than pre-WWII.
"Parenting" has taken us off the rails. Like many other movements and trends that I remember, at first it served to correct issues in the previous way, but then careened way out of balance to the over-scheduled, outsourced, and hovered-over childhoods that many children in the 1990s and on have endured.
Personally, I don't consider "gender" a human quality, and think that parents worrying about their child's "gender" is doubly troublesome. First, it pathologizes sex-based stereotype non-conforming play and secondly, it subconsciously affirms "gender identity" as a concept, which is part of how we have gotten to the mess we are in today.
Until recently, "identity" was constituted by people's tribe, actions, and relationships. This is adaptive, socially and communally. While we weren't looking, academics have shifted "identity" to be a sense of self as avatar, and its branding is as gender feelings, mental health diagnoses or trends, and nonsensical alliances like "queers for Palestine." In my opinion, these identities are maladaptive individually and in communities. Identities now must be "affirmed" because they are not empirical, rooting a (fragile) sense of self in others' consensus rather than actions, relationships, and positive contributions to society.
Children need to sort their own conflicts for the most part. They need to take calculated risks and learn to dispel their own boredom. There's no wrong way to be a boy or a girl, and there is no "gender identity."