The Swedish Way to Parent and Play

by Kristina Henkel

  Parent: As a parent, how can I generate interest in gender issues and gender equality without being seen as tedious? I’m worried my child will suffer if the staff is annoyed with me.

  Most teachers are professionals who can keep their opinions about parents separate from their work with children. Be honest, straightforward, and raise the issue even if it’s hard. As a first step, talk to other parents; most likely, there are several who agree that gender equality is important. That way, you can raise the issue together. Try giving the teachers a book on children and gender equality as a present. There are a number of books on this topic and most people are happy to receive a present. Organize a school meeting on gender and gender equality and suggest a speaker who can inspire and inform. Ask about the preschool’s agenda for activities and their guidelines for the equal treatment of children, and ask that the staff present these at a meeting. Make an appointment to see the head of the preschool and explain that you think gender equality is important for your child and ask what the preschool’s approach is for promoting gender equality.

  For teachers: Consider a request from a parent an expression of interest in your work and an opportunity for improvement. Parents and preschools are in a codependent relationship that can be difficult for parents to handle. Many parents worry that their children will suffer the consequences if they themselves start asking uncomfortable questions. Demonstrate that you are a professional and can talk about your work. During the introductory period for new children, tell parents that you welcome their comments and questions about the preschool. Parents who are engaged with their children and with gender equality are an asset for both the children and the preschool.

  The Gender-Equal Preschool

  In a gender-equal preschool, all children would be treated gender-equally and respectfully. The children would be given a diverse range of role models by the staff and through the materials the preschool uses. All children would learn methods for knowing where their own limits are, what feels good, and what does not. At a gender-equal preschool, children feel confident and know that all children are fantastic just the way they are. The school is a place for understanding and respecting each other. No one has to compromise their own integrity for fear of not being accepted or liked. The children would get to be the way they want to be and like whomever they want to like. Everyone would have the same worth and the concepts normal and abnormal wouldn’t exist.

  Practicing Gender Equality

  Open Your Eyes

  Gender frames (noun) = Two sets of ideas about what’s considered acceptable behavior for, and about what’s expected of, girls/women and boys/men.

  We’ve been talking about gender traps and cruxes that create inequalities—inequalities in how children are treated and the opportunities they are afforded; when they play, how they are dressed, how their hair is styled; and how they are spoken to and about, are expected to speak; how and with whom they are expected to be friends, how they are expected to feel (and behave when they feel that way), and how they are supposed to feel about, use, and touch their own bodies. Bringing to light these inequalities and their consequences is a first step toward improving gender equality. We’ve also offered suggestions for how adults can fairly simply offer children more opportunities in everyday situations. These suggestions focus on how we can help our children challenge and go beyond the narrow gender frames society imposes on them. Like gender traps, gender frames are insidious, restricting choices and controlling behavior in all areas of life, everything from clothes, to body language, to career aspirations, to romantic partners. Girls and women are expected to be and behave as prescribed by the “feminine” frame, and boys and men are expected to be and behave as prescribed by the “masculine” frame. And nonbinary people are often presumed not to exist, at all. These frames are often invisible and implicit—they’re taken for granted—making them hard to change.

  Within the Frame

  Generally speaking, we’re not aware of these gender frames until someone colors outside of them. At that point, we’ll often quickly respond to “police” them and direct them back inside the frame. The policing can be subtle or blatant. A boy wearing a dress can be made invisible, erased, disregarded, ignored. Or scolded: Boys don’t wear dresses!; mocked: Halloween was last month!; or threatened: I’m gonna hurt you, you little … !

  Parents, other adults, siblings, friends, and books and films are responsible for policing behavior that challenges gender frames. Very young children can be quite quick to correct other children and adults who venture outside the frame. Children learn that they will be praised—they’ll receive positive affirmation from the people around them—when they stay within the prescribed frames. Staying within a given gender frame can feel safe, because the frame provides us with a ready-made set of rules for what to do and how to be. The policing and the praising serve to transmit gender frames from one generation to the next and make them part of what we call our culture. If we want to promote gender equality, we need to pay attention to when we police and correct children and when they police and correct each other, and why.

  What Has Value?

  Gender frames come with expectations about characteristics and behavior, but also with attributions of value. Characteristics and behaviors traditionally considered “masculine” have long been considered more valuable than those that are labeled “feminine.” In most cases, girls and women who approach the masculine are perceived as advancing to the next level. Boys and men who transgress against the male gender frame are not afforded the same latitude. Instead, they’ll be told that they’re weak. The idea that the traditionally masculine is more valuable than the traditionally feminine is firmly entrenched in our culture. Creating gender equality is in part about questioning and changing this power imbalance in private and public life.

  Complementing Each Other

  Gender frames include ideas about who is supposed to fall in love with whom. Many people take for granted that girls should fall in love with boys and vice versa; heterosexuality is made normative. Homophobia becomes a way of policing people whose choice of partners challenges gender frames. The idea that everyone is heterosexual is based on the notion that women and men are opposites and that masculinity and femininity complement each other to form a whole. This way of thinking will often reduce gender equality to a number. Once there are an equal number of men and women in a committee or on a board—presto—gender equality has supposedly been achieved. But numbers don’t necessarily speak to content. A group with an equal number of men and women may still be one in which only the men are really heard. That’s not gender equality. Similarly, when men who, for instance, work at a preschool, are assigned all the tasks traditionally labeled “male,” like playing ball or doing carpentry, that’s not gender equality. In order to promote gender equality, we have to challenge the idea that men and women are each other’s opposites that complement each other and realize that individuals can complement each other irrespective of their genders.

  What Kind of Society Do We Want?

  Some people claim that gender frames are based on biological differences between women and men. But if that were the case, why all the policing? Why is so much time spent teaching children to be girls and boys? And why do the ways in which the labels “girlish” and “boyish” are applied change over time? There are, of course, differences among people: we’re different heights, have different color hair, and so on. Some people are cautious, extroverted, happy, sad, responsible, reckless, angry, or kind. But these characteristics don’t readily sort into girlish and boyish, womanly and manly.

  Some people point to history and claim that men and women have always been different. But history is always interpreted based on the interpreter’s own experiences and their culture. For example, previous generations of researchers missed the fact that women used to hunt. The weapons in women’s graves were interpreted as gifts. When we try to understand other animals and their lives, our own filters become obvious. Most a
nimals have been described as heterosexual—a proposition that’s being called into question by more and more research. Both nature and history allow for a lot more variation than we might have thought. Furthermore, irrespective of what we think is biologically determined, there’s no reason to let biological differences justify discriminating against girls, boys, women, nonbinary people, or men. Suppose someone is forgetful and this characteristic is genetically determined. Legally speaking, they still need to pay their bills when they’re due. Similarly, we can’t explain to the police that we have a natural urge to speed and expect not to get a ticket.

  Not all boys are tough. Some are small and thin, and others are large and round. Not all girls are pretty and nice. Some are temperamental and take up a lot of space. Others are cautious. Despite this obvious variation, many people stubbornly insist on referring to those outside traditional norms as anomalies. Children are told that they are tomboys or “a little different.” As adults, they’re called unwomanly, unmanly, mannish, or effeminate. If we were to validate diversity and stop trying to doggedly force people into rigid gender frames, we would probably be able to see that the variation among girls or among boys is just as great as that between girls and boys.

  Different Strategies, Same Goal

  “When I read Winnie-the-Pooh, I usually let Tigger and Owl be girl animals, since there are hardly any girls in that story.”

  —moses, parent of a three-year-old

  “My daughter has a pink gymnastics uniform with a tutu. I tell her she can jump higher than anyone and is super cool in her pink suit.”

  —åsa, parent of a five-year-old

  “I don’t want my daughter to be seen as a cute princess. I don’t think girls need any more of that. What they do need is to develop their self-esteem and understand that they’re important. People tilting their heads at them and telling them they’re adorable isn’t part of that.”

  —klara, parent of a four-year-old

  The suggestions in this book have included three kinds of strategies for improving gender equality: redistributing, reconceiving, and rejecting. Redistributing is a quantitative strategy that can be used when the numbers are very imbalanced in terms of girls and boys. Redistributing is a first step toward gender equality and can involve changing songs and stories so that the protagonists include girls, nonbinary children, and boys by replacing some of the he/him roles. Reconceiving seeks to give new meaning and values to clothes, toys, and feelings, in order to expand our conceptions of what children can be and do and unskew the power dynamics between masculinity and femininity. Rejecting means setting aside toys, clothes, books, and other things that reinforce gender frames, because not everything can be reconceived. Adults may feel that children are better off without gender-stereotyped items and attributes. The three strategies can be combined. Which ones we choose will depend on how we think about gender equality and the kind of environment a child is growing up in. Giving new meaning to colors and other things can be a lot easier if the environment is somewhat open and gender equal, because children won’t be as strictly prodded into gender frames in those situations.

  Letting children adopt and adapt to a gender frame can seem like a simple short-term solution; they’ll probably receive positive affirmation from the adults and children around them. The tricky part of gender traps is that changing them requires taking action. Often, it’s simply easier to stay trapped and let the gender frames rule. But when children are forced into a rigid frame, they cannot develop fully as unique individuals. Supporting them and their ideas may feel hard at first, but, for the children, it’ll be worth the effort in terms of their confidence and self-esteem.

  Reactions to the three strategies typically vary. Rejecting is generally taken as more of an expression of a political ideology than the two other strategies. But isn’t giving children gender-stereotyped toys and clothes as ideological as it is to reject those items? Rejecting sugar or additives that aren’t good for our children’s bodies is not at all as controversial as rejecting gender stereotypes. The important thing with all three strategies is to see that the same ambition underpins each one: to create more opportunities for all children and a more gender-equal society.

  When Worlds Collide

  “Come on, Dad, let’s play hotel! You be the guest, and I’ll clean. Filip can be the manager.”

  “Don’t you think you ought to be the manager? Filip is only two.”

  “No, I can’t be the manager.”

  “Why not?”

  “Dad, I’m a girl. Girls can’t be managers.”

  Sometimes, our desire to offer children equal opportunities clashes with the reality they see and experience. In general, the world they face is not gender equal. More men than women are bosses; more firefighters are men, while more nurses are women. We can choose to insist that girls can be managers and boys can be nurses, but the incongruity between what children see and what we say can make it hard for them to understand us.

  If we instead start from their experience of the world, affirming it, we can help them understand what we are saying. Yes, more men are bosses, but women can also be bosses. To make clear that things can change, we can say, Yes, people used to believe that only men could be bosses, but now we know that’s not right. We can talk about parenting in the same way: In the old days, daddies weren’t allowed to stay home with their children because almost everyone thought that mommies were better at taking care of children. But now we know that both mommies and daddies can take care of children. The older the child, the more we can talk with them about what gender equality is and about how things can change and aren’t set in stone. Challenging ideas about what’s girlish and boyish, and giving children the strength to find their own paths, becomes easier and easier.

  Children Do as We Do

  “We think gender equality is very important in raising our two kids. Julius and Minna both help their dad whenever he’s fixing his car, and they both help me with the cooking.”

  —annika, parent of a four-year-old and six-year-old

  Change can be scary. We prefer the known to the unknown, so we resist change. By continuing along in our old ways, we don’t have to handle the uncertainty that comes with change. We let whoever is better at baking brownies bake the brownies, and the one who’s better at mowing the lawn mows the lawn. The alternative is for us to challenge ourselves and try new things. Gender equality requires role models. If we as adults don’t increase our repertoires, we won’t come across as credible to our children when we talk about and try to promote gender equality. Being able to change things—stepping outside gender frames and trying new things—is only possible if we feel safe and secure. This sense of security can be generated when we validate each other—when we let each other know that we’re fine just the way we are. Positive affirmation helps create an atmosphere where there’s plenty of room for daring to try, where failing is an accepted part of the process. This makes it easier and more fun to try new things and to make change. With a gender-equal approach to both adults and children, we can erase the two gender frames and create more opportunities, more ways of being. We no longer need to police ourselves and others for fear of not fitting in. We have more fun, more fairness, and more adventures this way, when we parent and play.

  Advice on the Road to Gender Equality

  Take the initiative and make sure things turn out the way you wish they would. Start from a basis of assuming that everyone thinks gender equality is a good thing.

  Don’t apologize. You don’t always have to explain why you do things a certain way. Try to be as casual in going beyond gender frames as others are in staying within them.

  If something’s a good thing, validate it, and build on that, even if it’s small and seems inconsequential. Positive affirmations matter.

  Constructive suggestions are good. Offer alternatives rather than only highlighting problems.

  Accept that some will consider you weird and tedious. Essentially everyone who challe
nges things that others take for granted will experience this kind of response at times.

  Feeling like you’re alone in this can be hard. Find support from others who share your perspective.

  Ask other parents, relatives, and teachers to explain their behavior and reasoning. This lets them share their thoughts, and you don’t have to be the one who has to justify your approach all the time.

  Respect the fact that not everyone will share your view or want to act on it the way you do. There’s room for a range of views.

  Be prepared for people to be defensive. Do not take it personally.

  By creating gender equality in your everyday life, you are doing a lot. You only have a direct influence on what you yourself do; serving as a role model for others goes a long way.

  Talk. Discuss. Highlight gender-equal role models and exciting topics debated in the media.

  Choose not to participate in activities and events that you don’t think are positive for you or your children.

  Challenging norms takes energy. Pick your battles. Some days, you might have to just go with the flow. Don’t be too hard on yourself.

  Checking In

  Every now and then, someone will wonder whether gender equality has gone too far. We, the authors, find this odd. Do people who worry about gender equality going too far also worry about people being too healthy? It’s frightening to realize that advocates for extending suffrage to women probably were asked the same kind of question, at the beginning of the last century. Today, we’re certainly glad they didn’t pay any attention to those voices of “moderation.” As advocates of gender equality, we’re also told that we’re impatient, and that we ought to think of how much things have already changed and be happy with that. Naturally we’re happy. But that doesn’t mean that we can a turn a blind eye to the fact that our children’s opportunities are still tied to their biological sex. Just because something has improved doesn’t mean it’s good. We can clearly see that gender inequality affects our children if we consider how gender traps and cruxes show up in all aspects of their lives, molding them.