Gender and Family Life

Have you ever heard someone tell you that, "your actions affect others?" While you may think of your mother criticizing you when you hear this, it is a true statement. For the purpose of this blog post, we are going to focus on how the decisions made within a family system affect the entire family. More specifically: the rules, actions, and decisions made between two parent figures have the greatest affect on a family. Family structure and gender issues have a huge impact on a family system. 

We can see examples of this in a family consisting of two mothers, or two fathers. When the decision is made to live a LGBT lifestyle, the future children will be affected. In the past, it was unheard of to have two father figures, or two mother figures. However in our modern day this is becoming more common. So why does this have such a large impact? In our class thus far, we have learned that with each parent figure, we see different roles assigned. These roles have nothing to do with stereotypes, but everything to do with genetic makeup and growth. Women are made to be more comforting and more of the "caregivers." Fathers on the other hand are made differently. Fathers are made to be more of the "providers." This takes us to the next lesson we learned this past week. 

In this week's class we also discussed gender in depth. We discussed what role gender plays, how gender is determined, and gender typical behaviors. We got the opportunity to watch multiple videos and read articles on this topic. The thing that stuck out to me the most is gender typical behaviors. We got to watch a video that discussed how parents could become "gender neutral." However, the movie then went on to say that even when parents tried to rear their children in a "gender neutral" environment the children still showed more interest in the things we typically see as girl and boy items. So here is an example: parents used gender neutral colors in the children's rooms, bought toys that weren't specific to one gender, and went out of their way to not use items typically associated with one gender. However, the children were still more interested in things that we typically see as boy and girl items. The girls were interested in the barbies, pink and purple colors, and liked to play pretend and dress up. The boys were more interested in the toy cars, camo, play guns, and blue and darker colors. This happened even when they were raised in a gender neutral environment. The movie also gave another example of this. They discussed how stores had received complaints of the toy aisles being "gender discriminating." The stores would place all the toys they thought were "girl toys" in one aisle and all the "boy toys" in a separate aisle. To act upon the complaints they were receiving they decided to take away the "gender" aisles and just mix all the toys together. Scientists then went on to collect data to see what toys the children were drawn to since the toys were all mixed together. They found that admist the mixed toys, the girls were still drawn to the toys that were originally found in the "girl's aisle." The same results were found with the boys. This study goes to show that gender roles are not something that children grow up learning, but rather something that they are genetically drawn to. Boys and girls are made differently thus allowing them be appealed to separate things. 

From everything I discussed above, you can now see how when one of the parent figures is taken out of picture, the family structure changes. While you can work your hardest to make up for the gender that is gone, the child that is within that family will always be missing out of essential lessons taught from one of the parents.