As an 11-year-old who fought for women-eating-before-men at the wedding ceremony lunch of one of my aunts, I was raising men even before I was aware of my womb.
So eventually, when I begat a boy at 41, the bar was already set very high.
I imagined my husband and I would raise him together, share responsibility, decisions, role modelling etc. But that was not to be. I was a single parent since my son was four and all he saw was me being in charge. Since then, we have moved at least six different homes, lost four cats, several teeth (his), believed in Santa and the Tooth Fairy and then pretended we had grown up.
I don’t know whether his feminism and respect for women came from a single-mom ecosystem (we were surrounded by them and their children) but it has to be more than that. With his absent father, a scarcely communicative grandfather, and a maternal uncle who lives continents away, I didn’t exactly have “male role models” on speed dial — a thing that was recommended to me when he was growing up.
As a child, he has been woke for as long as I can remember. Almost a poster child for feminism, his icons had always been women — ranging from Dora to Sofia to the Winx Club. He wholeheartedly rejected the pink-and-blue world and we always found a middle ground — he created it and I made space for it. Treating feminine-coded play as natural was one way. As a child, whenever he was offered Kinder Joy toys “for girls” or when people referred to him as “baby”, thanks to his long ringlets, I never bothered correcting them. If we had to smash the patriarchy, this was as good a place to start as any.
As a teenager and feminist, he is quick to call out toxic masculinity, particularly those complicit in sexism, misogyny and homophobia. When he turned 10, I gave him a house key, taught him how to cook the basics for survival, do his laundry, run errands, manage money, etc.
Men in my family never got brownie points for cooking (at least not from me) or caregiving. Both my father and brother have been excellent cooks. Food had no gender in our home. I find this “maa ke haath ka khana” to be the biggest roadblock in raising kids — boys or girls. The minute something acquired a prefix — “my mother’s hummus”, for instance — I shied away from making it. When he was younger, I would burst a capillary whenever he addressed something as “nani’s green dal” or “nani’s tomato chutney”. “It’s just a palak dal!” I would scream. It was time to talk about the connection between food and patriarchy. I started involving him in prepping meals as early as age eight. Some of my friends took on the stance of “I don’t cook” while parenting, but then they invariably got other women to cook for them, so all the children saw was a woman as a provider of meals. I knew too well what happens when women are relegated to being providers of meals and then it becomes a baggage that children carry forever. “I miss my mother’s cooking” is no way to say that you love your mother.
Money is a big one too. Women who say “I don’t know anything about finances, my husband handles it all” are probably conveying to their sons and daughters that financial power always rests with the man. But when your child goes to higher grades, particularly when he becomes a teenager, suddenly, there’s no place for a middle ground. There’s just different forms of toxicity. You either blend into the herd’s notion of male-hood or you are excluded, you cease to matter.
So, then, what does it mean to raise good boys? I asked my son.
“First of all, you have to go beyond the binary,” he said. “And second, maybe you can start by teaching them how to talk to girls.”
Instead of focusing on that single or singular path of “raising a boy”, what if we gave them the agency to opt out of the traditional (and often damaging) ways of being a boy or a man? Sometimes, even using the term “little man” for boys speaks so much about our struggle with masculinity.
A good place to start is rejecting a gender binary, revisiting our own gender assumptions, having vulnerable conversations with our children, even if we come undone in some of them. Allowing them the space to voice unpopular opinions teaches our kids that resisting peer pressure or popular conceptions is okay, especially in environments of intense masculine pressure.
We need to change the narrative around what it means to be a man and focus instead on raising good humans. Remember that they will mirror us, so we have to watch what we do.
In the end, masculinity is a box that traps those that stay within it. We can’t entirely free ourselves (and our children) from the box, but we can begin to pry it open. Maybe we will never be able to erode the limits of patriarchy completely, but in our own worlds, we can make a dent, however small.
Iyer is a Kodaikanal-based author, educator and sourdough baker
