On Creating Fragile Children

Twitter/Amber Hartman

For the last couple of months, I’ve been thinking about our national focus on needing to feel safe. This is a project that requires other people to behave in certain ways, like not challenging or questioning our beliefs, or saying anything “triggering.” This seems to me such a profoundly unhealthy message to send to children. We are terrified of our children’s suffering, and teach them to be terrified of it, too. I want us to focus less on making them feel safe and more on making them feel fortified. It’s also what I want for myself. It’s not safe to be a heretic, therefore what I need is strength.

For Tablet’s newsletter The Daily Scroll, I wrote a piece about how I believe the combination of snowplow parenting (clearing obstacles out of kids’ way, rather than teaching kids to navigate those obstacles) and gender ideology (“misgendering is violence”) is creating fragile children, many who don’t know the difference between sex and sex stereotypes because of the teaching tools and gender lessons in schools.

I don’t believe that our current gender revolution has created more space for naturally gender nonconforming children. The conflation of gender nonconformity with gender dysphoria has ironically—or frighteningly—led to the idea that children who don’t conform to stereotypes should be set on a path toward medicalization that ultimately makes them conform, even if they’re not distressed over their differences. It’s our fear of discomfort—our own, our kids—that may be driving this.

When I interviewed dozens of women who’d been tomboys for my book, the vast majority of them had what seemed to me a startling amount of self-confidence—a feeling that has eluded me my entire life. I chalked this up to a) being reared with or as boys, who are socialized to believe in themselves, and/or b) getting used to following their own paths and being different from the others; that is, they developed a strong sense of themselves and, accordingly, thick skin. They had to keep marching in the direction of their own true north in a world that tried to pull them toward a different pole.

These women all had such similar origin stories and such diverse adulthoods—a few transitioned, many came out as lesbians, some were straight women. The more wiggle room we leave for these kids who are different than the vast majority of their peers, and the more we teach them to navigate difficult terrain, the more chance that they will grow up to be adults who are resilient and confident. But today’s gender messages make that harder.

Please head on over to the Daily Scroll to read the rest.