What are your thoughts on this interesting topic?
You are probably wondering what this is all about?
This topic has been coming up over the past few weeks and when my sister suggested it last week, it got me thinking.
You are reading this either as a mother, a father or a mother who is interested from a parenting point of view.
My daughter is always having lots of fun with her dad which is something that doesn’t come easily to me.
You may feel the same and have wondered why that is?
The only explanation I have is that women are more complex than men.
I don’t mean that in an arrogant way but in an admiring way.
Mothers are often burdened with more when it comes to raising children.
The fact alone that we carry the child inside of us for nearly 10 months and then watch our bodies go through childbirth, come out the other end and often ask: “How did I do that?”
My own births left me speechless over the intelligence of how nature performs these miracles.
You may have similar questions to the way we are built to carry so much and then sometimes feel such intense guilt when we give out to our child and say: I should know better.
Why is that fathers are so content with the way they parent their sons and daughters? - is a question that came up in my last parenting course.
I would love to be able to understand this myself.
I sometimes drive myself crazy over the way my parental guilt gets the better of me, while my husband tells me not to worry so much.
What difference in our DNA, that makes me worry so much more about my children?
What has become of us as mothers and fathers to ask our daughters to go to their dads if they want to have some fun?
Am I too lazy to have some fun?
(I am making myself laugh writing this.)
My observation has been that I simply carry a lot of the emotional support for my daughter and the role has been assigned to me to hold space when the other emotions of the spectrum need support - other than fun.
Did I assign this role to myself?
For years I felt very burdened with this task.
Recently, I had to make my peace with it.
I understood that women are currently really challenged having to define the new ways of being in the world.
We were victims for so long in a society that was based on patriarchal values mostly that it sometimes feels like that we are left alone with this job of having to redefine how men and women are to move forward together.
We heard so much about white male supremacy over the last few years that we need to be careful to not create a new victim in our way of living.
Are the mothers of this world the ones who have to bring the men with us who had benefited for aeons for being the dominant part?
Again, I am for a balanced and harmonious new definition of the masculine and feminine.
We can only adapt and evolve if we agree that the old is complete and the new way of parenting is a balanced approach where fathers and mothers share the emotional weight of parenting.
If everything is left to mothers, mothers will burn out as their duties in this modern world are too much to sustain.
You will have your own opinions, of course.
As always I would love to hear from you.
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To sum up what I believe needs to happen now is that fathers need to step up and actively participate in providing emotional support for their daughters.
The fathers who read this are ahead of the game.
The majority of male providers - unfortunately wouldn’t dream about showing this level of vulnerability and would engage in a conversation about feelings.
You may disagree with me because at the end of the day, these current fathers were raised by women.
So what I have been asking myself lately is why is our society so averse to allowing men to feel?
What I am observing at the moment is that I give into my own son because I don’t allow the firmer side of myself to show.
So I concluded that when my son walks all over me, I am teaching him that women’s boundaries are low.
Admitting this to myself was a very harsh reality a couple of weeks ago but it may explain and answer my question above why it is so hard to treat sons the same as daughters.
Having a son and a daughter opened up my eyes to everything that is wrong in this world.
A friend and parent to daughters asked me recently: what are mothers doing to their sons?
That’s when I discovered that I give in when I suppress my masculine firmness that all women have and then I sway back and can become really controlling.
When I become controlling, no more gentleness can be found.
Thankfully, I have enough awareness and tools which I acquired through falling into the mud over and over again to realise that only the balanced approach of “firm and kind” is going to unite this world.