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Secure Daughters, Confident Sons: How Parents Guide Their Children into Authentic Masculinity and Femininity - Softcover

Stanton, Glenn T.

 
9781601422941: Secure Daughters, Confident Sons: How Parents Guide Their Children into Authentic Masculinity and Femininity
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1601422946 ISBN 13: 9781601422941
Verlag: PRH Christian Publishing, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

Raise secure, confident kids in a gender-confused world

In this eye-opening book, family researcher Glenn T. Stanton offers a clear vision for why gender matters in how we raise our children. His thought-provoking insights expose the problems with stifling stereotypes and damaging cultural assumptions, then highlight a practical pathway for guiding children into healthy manhood and womanhood.
 
You’ll discover…
   ·  what gender-appropriate behavior looks like at various ages—and why you shouldn’t panic if your toddler boy plays with his sister’s dolls. 
   ·  how to help your daughter become secure in her sense of significance—whether she prefers chasing butterflies or shooting hoops.
   ·  how to inspire your son to compete and take healthy risks—in ways that fit his unique personality.
   ·  how moms and dads complement one another as they discipline differently, comfort differently, and influence differently.
   ·  what you can do on a daily basis to nurture your children’s God-given design and help them resist the pressure to conform to arbitrary cultural rules.
 
With practical tools, well-researched insights, and real-life scenarios, this book equips parents to launch daughters who are secure in the power of their femininity and sons who are confident in their strength to make a difference in the world.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

GLENN T. STANTON is the director for family formation studies at Focus on the Family. He debates and lectures extensively around the country on issues related to gender, sexuality, marriage, and parenting. Often sought out by national media to speak to these issues, Glenn is the author of several books and numerous articles. Glenn and his wife have five children.

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Introduction: The Importance of Difference

Scott is all boy. At age six, he’s the apple of his dad’s eye. He learned quickly how to catch a football, kick a soccer ball, and swing a bat. Dad is itching to help him become a pro. The little bruiser loves to be with dad and soaks up every drop of his attention. But he also seems to have a great interest in caring for small animals, nurturing them as if he were their mom. When he and dad are playing in the front yard and a dog comes by, little Scott forgets all about the game and runs straight for the animal. This concerns dad…and mom too, but for different reasons. Dad wonders what normal boy allows anything to distract him from playing ball, other than perhaps a pretty girl. But certainly not this uncontrollable attraction to hugging dogs. Why can’t his boy be a little more boy? Shouldn’t he be caring more about “big boy” things by now? Has mom’s concern for his safety—what if the dog bites?—encouraged Scott to be a little too soft? Should dad get him a dog—or take him hunting instead?

Alisa is a princess. Not specifically one princess, but several in any given day. Sometimes she’s Cinderella, sometimes Snow White, other times Jasmine or Ariel. Most often, she’s any kind of princess she can cobble together out of her available dress-up resources and from the creativity of her imagination. For Alisa, the frillier and shinier the better. Her mom is uncomfortable with Alisa being so stereotypical. She doesn’t like the unrealistic role models of the Disneybots so prevalent among girls today. But what should Alisa’s mom do? She always intended for her daughter to be a strong and independent woman, and this road lined with glitter and satin isn’t the one she feels will ultimately take Alisa there.

Every one of us spends every day being either a man or a woman. But what does that really mean? What do male qualities really look like? What are essentially female characteristics? Do these qualities even exist? How do we be male or female—and how do we know when we aren’t?
   At its core, this book is simply about what everyone is. And that’s either male or female. For all the diversity we see in the world, the different sorts of human beings who have populated our world throughout history have been made up of only two major kinds. And all the infinite human variety around us stems from these essential two types. There are a zillion and three ways to be a healthy, well-rounded man or woman. But at the same time, there are behaviors, attitudes, and perspectives that we universally and specifically understand as masculine or feminine. Unmistakably.
   That brings us to the primary purpose of this book.
   With human sex differences, most often the discussion these days unfortunately runs to one extreme or the other. In one corner, we have the Nothing-to-See-Here folks who believe that sex differences are minor, biological “plumbing” issues and that gender is a concept created largely by cultural assumptions, prejudices, and sexism intended to keep people in their places.(1)
   In the other corner, we have the vigorous Macho Joes and the Pretty-in-Pinks. Pure and simple, neat and easy: a boy is wild, only interested in contact sports, hunting, and getting dirty. A girl is only a girl if she is captivated by makeup, clothes, babies, gentleness, and sweetness. They would have us believe that any boy or girl who doesn’t fit neatly into one of these two boxes isn’t healthy or well adjusted.
   Is there any territory between these two extremes? A space where we can talk truly and universally about male and female differences? I know there is, and it’s why I wrote this book. As parents raising little people whom nature signed up to represent one of these two types, shouldn’t we be more interested in helping them navigate the vast terrain in the middle than shoving them into either of the corners?
   This is the space we’ll be exploring together to gain a clearer understanding of what’s truly and authentically male or female and how this translates into parenting children who are distinctly unique from us, in partnership with a spouse whose essential makeup is fundamentally different from our own. I believe this task—raising daughters secure in their femininity and sons confident in their masculinity—is an important one for parents, and it just so happens that the natural and social sciences agree. This is the first book that addresses this important topic altogether, much less in this depth, drawing from the breadth of established and emerging scientific discovery and examining this research in the light of the Christian story. We explore this question by asking not just what masculinity or femininity looks like in your nation or part of the world but across human experience, because this is where we understand it best and most authentically.
   If each of us is male or female, then every day of our lives and every interaction is colored, indeed determined, by this first fundamental difference. No person is exempt or ever will be. And it has been this way since the first two humans arrived on the scene.
   The two underlying questions we need to explore that stem from this fact are:
   1. How do we develop from childhood to healthy adulthood along one of these two lines?
   2. What role does the gender or sex of parents play in guiding children in this process?
   Our singular goal is nothing other than a healthy family of well-adjusted, happy human beings, because to be human is to be gendered.
   So let’s start at square one.


Are There Really Essential Gender Differences?

Maybe your interest in this subject goes back to your own childhood. How did you develop? Your kids have a vested interest in this question. Before we get into this fascinating discovery, let me invite you to pause for a moment to think about your own gender and its virtue. No deep or heavy stuff. Just sit back, clear your mind, and think with me for a moment.
   For all of our differences and our unique stories about growing up in different places of the world—perhaps in strange and wonderful families—maturing into adults, we all started the same way: in the dark, warm security of our mother’s womb. I know this about you.
   You grew day by day with all the potential and promise you’d eventually realize. Within weeks, the news of your existence changed a number of people’s lives forever in important ways. Great consequence and significance came from your existence. Your mother’s first two thoughts of you were likely this, and in this order, probably not too far apart:
   I’m pregnant!
   Wow, I wonder what it is?
   She wasn’t the only one who wondered about your gender. It was the first question people wondered or asked about you! Which would you be: a rascally little boy or a precious little girl? In fact, at the news of a baby’s birth, people will typically ask, “What is it?” before they ask, “Is it healthy?”
   What’s more, everyone who meets you every day of your life following your birth will note immediately whether you are male or female. Every one of us immediately begins to form opinions, questions, and thoughts based upon gender. You do the same with everyone you meet, most likely without even being aware of it. No one has ever said, “You know, I didn’t even...

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Verlag
PRH Christian Publishing
Erscheinungsdatum
2011
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1601422946
ISBN 13 
9781601422941
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
288
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
preigu
mail@preigu.de

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