Wednesday 21 December 2011

The struggle against gender stereotyping

Boy – get back in your box!

One sultry autumn afternoon as I sat amongst my fellow mothers singing and clapping with my infant son, enjoying the usual mother and baby experience that so many mothers cherish the world over, a passing comment made by the class instructor pretty much changed the way I dressed, played with and educated my son - forever. With a simple smile the words rolled off her tongue, in my head the children in the room parted like a mythical sea from a bible tale with myself and Noah plonked in the middle looking slightly like a rainbow threw up on us…

                “Kathleen, I look around the room and I see a sea of pink, a sea of 
blue and then Noah…”

She gave Noah a reassuring pat on the head and carried on with her chat to the class. For me it was a momentous occasion, I had (quite obviously), been more than aware of the clothes marketed towards children and their parents alike. Putrid pinks with a few flowers or some sparkle for the girls, jeans and jeans and a bit of khaki thrown in there for the boys. What I hadn’t noticed until that very second is just how much our beautiful little treasures were becoming clones of each other forced into gender specifics before they even knew what gender was. I looked at my bright, smiley little dude, awash with colour and vibrancy and vowed to make sure he stayed as unique as he was that very second. Who was I kidding? That tender moment I shared with Noah that day was no match for the commercial world he is being raised in. As much as I try to avoid the enemy that has become society’s expectations of him as a boy, this is a battle I cannot fight alone and cannot fight if it means forcing him to become an individual so much so that he becomes isolated from his growing peer group.

As Noah developed from a rug rat to a little boy he has subconsciously and consciously been exposed, more and more, to society’s expectations of him as a male. The global empire that is Disney, to me, seems the most glaringly obvious dictator of the sexes. As much as I try to limit his exposure to overtly gender specific adverts, clothes and representations I have to admit (even though it pains me) that he has been exposed and has begun to turn his back on certain activities and even colours because “they are for girls.” I often wonder how and why so many parents follow these trends - then Christmas or a birthday comes around and I watch Noah unwrap another Bob the Builder t-shirt or another Thomas the Tank Engine locomotive and I realise people just don’t feel comfortable giving a little boy a tea set, no matter how much he loves to pretend to make a brew!

I understand so many people probably think our kids have it all and where am I going with my hippy, gender-bending ideals, I don’t want to raise a generation of boys who wear dresses and girls who pee standing up. I would just like to see the children’s market as a whole make just a little room for unisex learning, dressing and educating. For the time being I suppose, I will have to continue in my fight to expose my son to as much diversity as is possible and let him lead us towards new experiences based on his raw and innocent enthusiasm rather than based simply on the fact that he is a boy and thus he is expected to follow a certain path.

Someone said to me when my son was born, “he is a blank canvas, it’s your job to pain a beautiful picture”. Little did I know at that point that our pallet would be limited and our audience – so often – blinkered to his natural beauty and expressionism. I just hope I equip him with the tools to be his own artist and his imagination as free as it was that morning we parted the waves. 

This post was gifted by Kathleen, an Ireland-based, London-born mum of one little boy. She owns a company that sells tights for boys. You can visit her at Slugs and Snails

Monday 19 December 2011

#MedalMonday - 19th December 2011

Welcome to the last #MedalMonday of 2011.

Medal Monday is where we celebrate the victories of the parenting war. We say hurrah for days where we have won! Celebrate the little incidents where we came out on top.

To join in, enter the link to your blog post into the linky tool below. We will swing by, say hello, and congratulate you on being the wonderful, victorious parent that you are.


medal

So this week will be our last of this year. We will see you back on the 9th January. 

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all!

Thursday 15 December 2011

#FailFriday - 16th December 2011

One, two, one, two, one, two!! 

Hello and welcome to Fail Friday. If you want to know more about this linky, please click here. To join in, the linky is at the bottom of this post.

We are in to our third week now, and each week we have had some fantastic stories of shoddy parenting. Last week was no exception. So hang around and prepare to be dazzled by the sheer awesomeness of parenting disaster.

Last week, our very own Sergeant J had to borrow money from her own child in order to provide her troops with sustenance. We heard how Here Come the Girls was late collecting her child from school, something we have all done, or will do from time to time. The children still have a way of making you feel like a failure though. The Real Supermum linked up with her story of her toothy mummy fail, involving swellings, ice and trusty old Google.


This weeks flag-flying failure is Life, Love and Living with Boys, whose child managed to do something undercover, and well.....you'll have to see the pics. Well done, you are indeed a BIG FAT FAIL.

fail badge

If you deserve the same honour, then link up your parenting fail blog post below, grab the badge from the right hand column, and display it proudly. We will all come over and agree that you did indeed fail, but will try and provide you with all the emotional support a competent and willing soldier deserves.


Also, please do visit those that have linked up and show some love. And leave us a comment below too if you can - we love them!


We will be taking a break next week due to the Christmas holidays, but please come back on the 6th January and share with us all your Christmas and New Year fail stories. Don't forget we have #MedalMonday coming up, where you can share your parenting success stories. Assuming you've got some, you pathetic little lot!!

Tuesday 13 December 2011

Know your enemy: head lice

Head lice - the little creatures who decide to invade your little treasure's hair within a week of returning to school after the holidays. They are relentless little buggers who are indiscriminate in their choice of who to attack next. 

At our house, we once spent the whole of the six-weeks summer break successfully ridding ourselves of them, only for us to have to dodge another potential attack within two days of going back to school in September. Our then 6-year old daughter caught them off a certain child of a certain family (probably) at school during the last week of term. It was the first time we'd ever had them. I hadn't even had them myself as a child, and it was awful to think of my own child getting them. We tried one treatment, which was a faff. It was one where you left it on overnight, which was a real pain. Asking a six-year-old not to touch their hair while in bed and not to roll about too much is asking a bit much. I dared not even suggest trying it on my 3 year old. 


head lice and nit treatment

The nanny was un-fazed. She had worked with children for over ten years. She had caught every bug going, including the hair variety. I felt a bit bad that she also caught them off my child this time too, until I found a mahoosive one in my own hair - aaaarrrrrggh! Be gone you horrible multi-legged little git! I only found the one, but it was ginormous. You could see every one of it's wriggly legs. For about three weeks, the nanny and I were continually conditioning our hairs and combing through, in a combined act of defiance. 

So the nanny went to the shops and bought a better treatment. One that you applied before shampooing. It was excellent. We did everyone's hair and crossed our fingers. The solution was Full Marks. You apply it to dry hair, leave it for a few minutes, comb through and then shampoo. Then you do another treatment a week or two later. 

It worked! Just in time to go back to school for the start of the new year. Now we use Vosene nit-repellent kids shampoo religiously, and it seems to be working. We have had no more repeat attacks. Although it could also be because a certain child from a certain family has moved to another school. I still find myself itching though whenever we get 'the note' from school in one of the book-bags.

Facts about head-lice
  • Nits are the eggs of head-lice. Nits take about a week to hatch and become fully-fledged head-lice
  • Head-lice develop to the colour of the host's hair - which is why they can be hard to spot (for the record, all of our head-lice were ginger, which was a bit freaky).
  • They can live in any type of hair, including clean or dirty.
  • They are easily spread by direct contact with others - hence why school is an excellent breeding ground.
  • To get rid of them, you should treat everyone in the household at the same time, and wash anything that could be contaminated, like bed linen and towels.
  • They need human-blood to survive, so will not survive for long in other places, like on an animal, or a sofa.
By Sergeant J

This is not a sponsored post. I just found the above products to be a great weapon against the wriggly hair-nit army. 

If you like this, please sign up to follow our blog, and leave us a comment or two - we love them!


Kiddycharts Blog: Parenting Tips Linky

Monday 12 December 2011

#MedalMonday - 12th December 2011

GOOD JOB PRIVATE!

Welcome to #MedalMonday. Today we celebrate all that is good in parenting. 

Last week we had parenting success stories from two of our most battle-hardened parents. First up was Here Come the Girls who was proud of her crafting success. They looked great, whatever the hell that last one was supposed to be!

Taking the victory spoils this week, is our own Sergeant J, whose success at reaching the 8-month milestone of breastfeeding twins has to be saluted. Good job! You indeed deserve the victory medal.

medal


So this week, link up your blog posts at the bottom of this one and we'll all come by, cheer, and marvel at your parenting prowess. You might as well milk it for as long as it lasts - I know I do! Don't forget to grab the badge (on the right of this page), and tweet us @ParentFrontLine. A chosen post will lead out the victory parade next week. 

The post can be an old one or a new one. It can be on anything from baking to crafts, health to education - anything that you do as a parent, nay as a human being, that you are proud of. Read the full details of #MedalMonday here.

Thank you for joining in. You are a fabulous parent, and we all salute you!

Friday 9 December 2011

#FailFriday - 9th December 2011

LEFT, RIGHT, LEFT, RIGHT, LEFT, RIGHT, AND HALT!!

Hello and welcome to our second Fail Friday. If you want to know more about this linky, please click here. To join in, the linky is at the bottom of this post.


We know that some of you are heading over to the Tots100 Christmas party this Friday. We hope you have a fantastic time, and we want to hear all about it. The karaoke and everything. Today's Fail Friday is open until Tuesday, so you have plenty of time to link up your posts. Anyway....

Last week, we met some brave, but unlucky soldiers. They told us their parenting fails in the name of making you, the reader, feel better about your own occasionally sad, little parenting existence. Our aim is to make the rest of you feel normal. We hope we can fulfil this to your satisfaction.  


Last week, we had a story of slugs from our very own Sergeant J. We heard how Here Come the Girls can't help but feel nasty thoughts when bombarded by stupid questions about her twin girls. Life, Love and Living with Boys told us how she managed to get three parenting fails into her day, before it even turned 8am. It was an epic tale of crappy nappies, flooding and activities worthy of the Andrex puppy. 


Putting us all to shame this week was Musings of a Stressy Mummy, who tried to do more than one thing at a time (ambitious!), and who's only, seemingly small failure to answer the phone to Grandad led to a tale of a locksmith, a broken door, and a not insignificant repair bill. FAIL, FAIL, FAIL. Stressy Mummy, you indeed deserve the Big Fat Fail award.

fail badge

If you deserve the same honour, then link up your parenting fail blog post below, grab the badge from the right hand column, and display it proudly. We will all come over and agree that you did indeed fail, but will try and provide you with all the emotional support a competent and willing soldier deserves.


Also, please do visit those that have linked up and show some love. And leave us a comment below too if you can - we love them!

Don't get too rowdy at the Christmas party. Yes, I'm taking to you, soldier!


Roger, over and out.

Wednesday 7 December 2011

On night watch duty.

This post has been provided by la mujre libre, who writes over on Primeras Canciones. She is the mother of five children aged from 8 to 21 years.

A Tale of Underage Drinking...
Teenagers are nuclear meltdowns waiting to happen. Or maybe that is just the teenagers in my house.

Having said he was having a sleepover at his pals (we have never had any reason not to trust him), baby giant decided to go to alcohol-hell last night. He staged a mid-teen meltdown all of his own. Decided to surpass his (marginally older) mates drinking exploits. By downing a 70cl of vodka. 70cl just for him. And neat. No dilution of intoxication for my lad.

Now, I am no angel. I have been drunk. On numerous occasions (in the past). I have seen many others drunk. And in truth, some drunks are amusing. In fact, whilst drunk I too have thought I was touched by comedic genius. No doubt in a what an arsehole kind of a way. Other drunks are angry and ugly. But most of the drunks of my acquaintance have been capable of wording their slurs and activating their homing-pigeon abilities to get them home.

Not my lad. My lad passed out in an I need my stomach pumped kind of a way. Then he lay, unconscious by the roadside in the wet and sub-zero temperatures, without benefit of jacket. Whilst his pals pondered in their own drunken way the dilemma of what do we do with him. And whilst his Reynauds Disease went to work on cutting off the circulation to his hands and feet.

They couldn't move him. He is 6ft 4" and 13 stones. He was a dead weight. Eventually they went through his mobile and decided to call his 70 yr old Papa. Not his mother. And certainly not his father. And Papa, thinking how drunk can he really be? decided to go get him on his own.

So, Papa (ex-ambulance driver and paramedic) raced to the scene. Papa checked the lad for vital signs and then got the pals to bundle him into the car. Easier said than done with a dead weight.

When he arrived here, lad was upside down with his head on the rear floor, stuck between the front passenger seat and the rear seat. That is what happens when your bones have dissolved in the alcohol soup circulating around your body. You cannot sit up. You are jelly.

It took 30 minutes to remove him from the car. He was become a giant amoeba. Insentient. Eldest son and father eventually dragged him to the house. He was hauled to my bedroom (the nearest and on the ground floor of this 5 storey house). His clothes - sodden with urine (his) - were peeled and then cut from him. He suffered the ignominy of his mother washing him. He could not utter any intelligible sounds. His hands and feet were blue (Reynauds). We placed him in the recovery position.

We spent the night - his father and I - warming and nursing and watching him. Debating whether we should call an ambulance. Until 3am, when he decided to pee my bed. Destroying duvet and mattress. At that point he woke sufficiently to stand in a shower and be shouted at.

Nobody ever said parenting was easy. There are never any guarantees. And I have never ever smugly thought my child wouldn't do that. Because we never know and cannot ever be that sure. We can imagine we have passed the right values. And that they have listened. But the siren call of hormones and peer group pressure and learning from your own mistakes - these are powerful pulls on our children. And, in the West of Scotland the alcohol culture is persistent - oppressive - omnipresent.

He is sitting across from me as I type. Having foregone the Motherwell game today (not much of a sacrifice - but still). Having handed his money over to pay for replacement bedding. Having accepted that he will be grounded until the New Year. Having handed me his Facebook password for deactivation and his mobile phone.

He has cried - with shame. Can give little explanation beyond - they were all drinking and he wasn't working today.

As his father has wryly pointed out to him he will have little excuse for poor prelim results in December with all the study time he now has before him...

I feel sad. Oh, I know, no-one has died. He has learned a valuable lesson or five. But we have a way to go before trust and respect are earned back.

ShowOff Showcase

Sunday 4 December 2011

#MedalMonday - 5th December 2011

medal
EYES FRONT SOLDIER!

Welcome to our very first #MedalMonday. Today we celebrate all that is good in parenting. We give thanks for all those things we have done that have turned out well. This may be our little treasure's fantastic performance in the school play, a successful mealtime, a battle won with the po-faced health visitor, anything that you are proud of this week. 

Link up your blog posts at the bottom of this one and we'll all come by, cheer, and marvel at your parenting prowess. You might as well milk it for as long as it lasts - I know I would! Don't forget to grab the badge (on the right of this page), and tweet us @ParentFrontLine. A chosen post will lead out the victory parade next week. 

The post can be an old one or a new one. It can be on anything from baking to crafts, health to education - anything that you do as a parent, nay as a human being, that you are proud of. Read the full details of #MedalMonday here.

Thank you for joining in. You are a fabulous parent, and we all salute you!

Saturday 3 December 2011

Put on your tin hat - TAT INCOMING!!!!

Guest post by an undercover lieutenant.

Image Credit
The conversations have started already in our family. What do the children want for Christmas? Every year it fills me with dread. We are lucky we have lots of generous aunties and cousins who buy lovely gifts for the children. It takes a bit of the pressure off, as we can't afford to spend a lot.

I give a list and most of the relatives buy something from that list. It means the children get something they actually want. The problem is some of them ask for the list then go and buy something completely inappropriate. We don't have a lot of space in our house, we really don't want a ball pool, a plastic car or a rocking horse. The thing is if you say it you sound really ungrateful. Last year it caused a huge argument because the oldest was given a play house. It was a beautiful toy but it wasn't what we had discussed. Also Father Christmas had bought that child a few books and jigsaws. Somehow the two presents didn't match up.

You see even saying it here makes me feel ungrateful. I was always taught to say thank you for gifts even if you secretly don't like them. I should be pleased to have my house filled with tat the children won't play with and will probably go in the charity bag in the New Year.

So this year I've made a stand. I have listed exactly what we do need for the children, some of it is practical things like a new school bag, and bedding. Anything plastic, disposable or noisy is off the list. The family aren't happy and there have been mumblings of scrooge, but I'm unrepentant. This is my Christmas wish and hopefully this year I'm going to get it.

Thursday 1 December 2011

#FailFriday - 2nd December 2011

AT EASE, TROOPS!!

Hello and welcome to our very first linky - Fail Friday. If you want to know more about this linky, please click here. To join in, the linky is at the bottom of this post.

To kick things off, I will share with you a pretty crappy parenting fail. My baby, when she was eight months old, tried to eat a slug. Yes, a real one. A live one. I am not proud.

It was a normal Sunday morning. One of the twins decided it would be a good day to get up at stupid o'clock. I would've tried to keep her in her cot and teach her that Sunday mornings are for lying in bed, but I didn't want to wake the other twin prematurely, so I took twin one and we went downstairs. We have had a slug problem for a bit so I did a quick check of the floor before I put her down. I gave her a couple of toys and put my feet up on the sofa and tried not to close my eyes for too long, just in case. I think I succeeded. Mostly.

When I heard the chomping noise, it was all a bit of a blur. The greedy little cherub had found a slug under the sofa and couldn't resist. At that age everything ends up in the mouth, and she had made no exception for this unusual looking visitor. I think the slug now regrets his actions. He did come out again, whole, but he didn't look very well. If I hadn't been so knackered it might not have happened, but hey, these things are sent to make us all stronger. Apart from said slug. For this palaver, I respectfully award myself the Big Fat Fail badge.

fail badge

If you would like the same honour, then link up your parenting fail blog post below, grab the badge from the right hand column, and display it proudly. We will all come over and agree that you did indeed fail, but will try and provide you with all the emotional support a competent and willing soldier deserves.


Also, please do visit those that have linked up and show some love. And leave us a comment below too if you can - we love them!

Roger, over and out.
Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...