Raising Feminist Boys: How to Talk with Your Child about Gender, Consent, and Empathy

"This book does something similar to the previous one, but focused on how parents can raise boys who are feminist. Again, an important starting point is this idea that it would be wrong to do nothing. Neutrality is a myth. You can’t just think if you don’t talk to your children about these issues, then they’re just going to turn out not to be non-racist and non-sexist. Actually, Wegner says, in a culture of toxic masculinity, it becomes extremely important to raise boys who are consciously aware of the pervading sexism and taught to challenge it. One thing that I really like about all the books that I’ve recommended, all of the more practical books, is that they talk in age-specific steps. There’s a combination of the psychology, and the need to do this, with the recognition that how we do this has to be age-appropriate. This goes all the way through from avoiding gendered toys right through to talking to teenage boys about sexual consent. I find this very valuable because it focuses on the importance of building up empathy. And again it comes back to that all-important parent-child relationship: it’s about how you build that up so it’s possible to have these discussions. This is an important question, whether we’re talking about raising kids who are anti-racist or anti-sexist or, as I do in my book , about raising them to be good global citizens more generally. By that, I mean raising them to recognize the common humanity of all their fellow human beings and to understand the implications of that in terms of our moral responsibility to address (rather than perpetuate) core injustices like climate change, institutionalized discrimination, or global poverty. I think it is really important to cultivate that in our children. It’s not a matter of brainwashing: it’s not about bringing them up bound to some controversial ideological view or even what philosophers call a ‘comprehensive conception of the good’. In some ways, that makes this a much simpler question, morally, than the ones we were talking about earlier about parents’ rights to bring up their children in their own religions. Essentially, bringing up good global citizens, like raising anti-racist and anti-sexist kids, means raising our children to recognize their fellow humans as humans, like them, and to respect them as such. However, it’s also crucial how we have these discussions, in terms of not undermining autonomy and, practically speaking, succeeding in raising good citizens. That’s not going to happen if we dictate to them or teach them by rote. All the psychological and sociological work I’ve looked at on this is clear: this has to be about having a dialogue with your children. In other words, we need a Socratic approach to learning which is about exchanging ideas and not judging kids for what they say, but encouraging them to think things through for themselves."