I recently read this amusing story and refrained from replying because I'm just not up for figuring out how to engage with it on Reddit. I'm so sick of people acting like I'm trying to steal the show or my remark is otherwise somehow wildly inappropriate.
But I laughed at the story because I've joked for years about "back when I had a pet dinosaur and rotary phone." That joke is rooted in human psychology, especially child psychology. From the perspective of my children when they were little, BOTH rotary phones and dinosaurs were equally "prehistoric" because it's before THEIR lifetimes.
These days, they know better. But as small children, anything before their time was psychologically in one vast undifferentiated bucket.
That joke is also sort of a Flintstones reference and subtext for "I grew up in a bass ackwards time and place socially." I had a 1950s style marriage in spite of being one of the top three students of my graduating high school class and then spent my twenties checking out feminist literature from the library -- too poor to BUY those books -- and trying to sort out what went wrong that I failed to end up with a modern two career couple lifestyle in spite of me personally being the best of the best of the best, SIR!
If you have to explain a joke, it's not funny but please do note that line is a reference to a movie scene from Men in Black and the point is the guy saying it has no clue what he is talking about and gets rejected and memory wiped because he's an idiot.
I don't know what needs to happen to achieve real gender "equality" and I don't even LIKE that word for this use case. I don't think it's reasonable to shoot for "men and women living ALIKE" and I write on various other blogs about how we need to come up with female pattern career plans and other forms of housing etc. to escape this heteronormative pattern that imposes a lesser life on women and people of color and the LGBTQ crowd.
I used to have bad dreams sometimes about my husband being a Tyrano Pachycephalosaurus Rex. That roughly translates to "tyrant butthead lizard king."
I used to have dreams expressing my fear that my sons would grow up to be dinosaurs like their father and incapable of doing any women's work and incapable of genuinely treating women with real respect. I no longer remember the dream in question but when my oldest was something like twelve or fourteen, I had a dream that I felt meant this possibility was dead and I never again dreamed of dinosaurs as symbols of that particular fear.
When my oldest was something like eighteen months old, he began CHUNKING his dishes into the kitchen sink because he was too short to handle it another way. He saw mom putting her dishes away and wanted to act like a grown up.
I knew he would get taller and time would cure his treatment of the kitchen sink like it was a basketball hoop. I didn't want to tell him "Don't put your dishes in the sink" as my solution to what was obviously a temporary problem he would soon outgrow because I was concerned that his takeaway would be "I'm a BOY like my DAD and THAT'S women's work." and it would do long-term damage that would be hard or impossible to undo.
So to make sure he was safe and doing no harm, I boxed up breakable stuff and temporarily removed it from the kitchen. For a few months, we used mostly plastic plates and bowls and cups and I didn't bother to buy extras even though I only had a few pieces of plasticware.
Years ago, someone on Metafilter ASKED a question about "How do you foster independence in your children?" and I told that story. They enthusiastically replied "I LOVE that idea and I'm going to immediately start MAKING my child put their dishes in the sink!!!!"
Um. Yeah, no. You're an idiot who cannot come up with two functioning brain cells and have MISSED the point ENTIRELY.
My CHILD independently came up with this idea on his own and I decided to handle the problem in a way that protected his budding mental models and sense of self determination and proactive decision making without first asking an adult "Am I allowed to do that?" or whatever.
I wanted my son to proactively make his own decisions and did everything in my power to give him opportunities to make decisions in childhood with real world meaningful consequences while protecting him from getting hurt during the practice of this critical skill that many adults seem to think children don't need to practice.
I wanted my son to NOT grow up to be like his FATHER who TALKED a good game about being for women's rights but then EXPECTED a 1950s style little wifey to have his dinner on the table when he got home and NO amount of arguing could get it through his thick skull that "Your words and your deeds do NOT match up and YOU are a large part of why your wife, who has a better academic record than you, is merely the little wifey and CANNOT manage to escape that prison."
I wanted my son to do things like put his dishes away without it being a big source of friction where I had to crab at him and badger him into doing this and here he was doing it on his own, so I RESPECTED his decision to see his mother as a role model and mimic her actions in that regard and I chose to handle the minor short-term problems involved without making it anything he needed to worry about.
I was concerned that he could potentially break something or get hurt by doing it that way, a problem that would CLEARLY and obviously go away all on its own without me doing anything about it simply because time would pass and he would get taller, and I handled it without saying one word to him about how chunking his dishes might be a bad thing or have a downside. I chose to make his experience of taking responsibility for cleaning up after himself all upside and something his mother approved of and supported.
I felt strongly that actions speak louder than words and stopping him from proactively and enthusiastically putting his own dishes away and feeling all grown up! would instill ideas it would be challenging or potentially impossible to walk back around messy human rights issues that a toddler would not understand words about and that I did not wish to try to discuss with him.
I didn't want to introduce the idea of gender roles and women's work to a child that young, much less hang heavy baggage on him about how the future of humanity hung in the balance on his tiny shoulders and it was important he not be a sexist pig at the tender age of eighteen months or whatever.
He clearly wasn't yet thinking "That's women's work and I'm a BOY and BOYS don't do that." So he wasn't yet a budding little sexist pig and I wanted to keep it that way and made decisions accordingly.
He just went "That's a GROWN UP thing to do and I feel like A GROWN UP doing that!!!" AKA he was being responsible and that's the part I wanted to encourage so I thought about those things in deciding how to handle my concerns he might break something by chunking his dishes into the kitchen sink, too short to see into the sink at all.
And that's what this blog is about. It's about stopping and thinking about HOW you are raising your children and is it likely to lead to the kind of adult you would like them to be or is it a "convenient" short-term solution with potential long-term consequences you will regret for years to come while wondering why in the hell no matter how much you flap your jaws about certain things, the kid just isn't getting it.