What are some of the things your children have been unable to accept about you?

Are you worried they’ll end up becoming investment bankers or something?

@bob_ Well, now that you mention it…Nah…I was thinking more along issues of gender and sexuality. Shocking, I know.

A huge shocker to my daughter, and this was a recent, is that I’m human and make mistakes. I guess she put me on a pedestal and learned that parents are human and sometimes, we make the wrong call on things. They forget they don’t come with instruction books.

The one thing she did was rebel against some of our family ideas. Now, a year later, after the rebellion, she apologized. teenage years can be interesting, to say the least.

@cak Yes, I am wondering how it will all go down…I just don’t know what to expect (other than the usual)...but it’ll be good to have the advice of friends.

When I say the word “no”. Then you have to then deal with the “why” and “why not?” I win every time! ;)

I didn’t approve of their girlfriend, and they married anyway, only to find out Mom knew what she was talking about.

I’m lucky this way. My kids sort of ‘put up with me’ when they were younger, they didn’t rebel much, and I was mostly pretty easygoing on things that I didn’t think mattered a whole lot. (Their mom had other ideas sometimes, so we had friction between us on how things ought to be with them, but the kids didn’t suffer from that friction; they just learned who to ask for what.)

As they’ve grown into their mid-twenties, they have frequently – and recently – expressed how lucky they were. So, they accept me more now than they ever did.

@Simone_De_Beauvoir ah, now you need to banish those anxieties from your head, kids pick up on them.

The first thing that comes to mind is their (sometime) inability to grasp the concept that their mother and I had lives before they were born, or that we might actually know something they don’t know…

…or that we know something they think we shouldn’t know.

“There’s so much I don’t know about you.”

What’s most amusing is the idea they carry that everything they’re doing now is new or exclusive to them (young people). Like, I’m not supposed to know anything about or have a Facebook page. And they can’t understand why adults would play something like laser tag (mentioned recently).

I had to explain to my daughters that adults have been doing many of the same things they do, or variations of those things for a long time. I went on to say that just because we age doesn’t mean we have to stop doing everything we enjoyed or participated in when we were younger.

Nothing so far, but I wonder how she will take it once she knows I was married once before.

They are very annoyed when I have a smart answer to something they’ve just said. If I disagree and it sounds right it irritates them. they picked this up from their father.

@Simone_De_Beauvoir Don’t worry. Mother’s love trumps mother’s nonsense. Lots of people repudiate some aspects of their parents’ worldview without repudiating their parents.

I read your parenting blog, and based on your account of your interaction with your son, I can see that one of the parties has been unduly influenced by other people’s ideas about gender roles—and it ain’t the boy. I just hope you can accept him when makes a stick into a toy gun or something like that.

@submariner I can accept him and always have. We’re all influenced by ideas about gender – you can’t possible think that I, as an adult, am more conditioned (after years of figuring this out and learning about this and teaching about this) than he, a 4 year old, who hears ridiculously limiting versions of gender from his caregivers and his friends. Believe me, before he met those adults, he never had a problem with his long hair and all the rest of the things not ‘typically boy’ but that made him happy – in my blog, I am honest about my feelings – don’t take that to mean I am in any way hesitant about how dangerous I think gender norms are – I will defend that to you on any level.

oh and as far as guns, I don’t allow those in the house not because it’s a ‘boy thing’ but because we’re anti-guns

Ah, but I do think it’s possible. At 4, he’s barely begun to grasp the sex/gender differences and classify himself. You’ve had years of conditioning.

But we’re talking about ideas. The issue is not so much conditioning as indoctrination. I suspect that you’ve found a mentor who has turned you on intellectually, and friends and lovers who have given you something you needed emotionally that you weren’t getting before, but part of the price of admission was that you wholeheartedly espouse certain core ideas and values.

You write about issues of sexuality and gender as if now, in 2011, we’ve finally figured it out once and for all. Don’t you think a little circumspection is in order? A scholar must believe in her work to be effective, but a stroll through the graveyard of exploded theories ought to make her realize that her sense of certainty is no guarantee of truth. Physicists and biologists are still making discoveries that surprise them—do you really think sociology is infallible?

My point is that a little intellectual humility now might spare you some pain should your son ever decide that he does not regard pansexual polyamorous androgyny as an ideal worth striving for, and that he would rather just be a man.

@submariner He doesn’t have to grasp it, he hears it all day long – if he didn’t hear it from the outside, he wouldn’t know what ‘being a boy’ means just from being raised by us. I’ve had years of conditioning, you’re right, and I have rejected it – please don’t make assumptions as to how I’ve come to believing what I believe about gender – it wasn’t one person and it wasn’t once instance…my journey dates back more than a decade ago and just like any other journey is multi-faceted. Finally, what I do as a scholar and what I do as a parent aren’t always the same thing – my parenting blog isn’t my work as a scholar and therefore can have certain hesitant moments – my activism isn’t about my children or me…though surely, certain parts intersect…I’ve been an activist for the trans community long before I myself identified as gender non-conforming…

And while I appreciate your paternalistic attempts, I do have that humility because my future as a sociologist isn’t what my future as a parent is about and this question, if you notice, isn’t about whether I will accept how my child will be (because of course he can be any gender), but whether he’ll accept certain things about me.