For the past two weeks, we’ve been having work done on our house. Every day as we’re leaving to get in the car, my son looks around at the work crew and asks me, “Mommy, where are the women?”
“What do you mean?”
“Where are the lady builders?”
“There aren’t any lady builders working today,” I reply, opening the car door and motioning for him to get in.
“But are there lady builders?” he asks, not budging.
“Yes, some women work in construction. But there aren’t any here today.”
“Well, why not?”
And on and on and on. I was this close to calling the company and asking them to send out some women to finish the job so my son could hush!
But then I realized he does that with everything. If he sees a group of guys doing something, his first instinct is to ask me where the women are and if they’re allowed to do it too. He spends most of his time with me and his sister and his grandma and his aunts, and so he sees women in charge a lot. It’s natural for him.
Recently, my husband bought our son a ruler with all the presidents on it. My son looked at it for three seconds and asked, “Where are all the lady presidents? They must be on another ruler, right?” He just knew there were “lady presidents” and wanted to see them.
And I love that about him. I want to encourage him to continue to see everyone as capable and equal. We talk about gender a lot (which kind of surprises me since he’s only 4) and we talk about what women do, what men do, how the sexes are supposed to treat each other and so on. It’s important that we have these conversations so that his line of reasoning never changes. I want him to be supportive of his partners’ dreams, to be fully invested in his family’s well-being and to recognize that men and women deserve equal treatment and opportunity. So far I’d say he’s well on his way to being an awesome young man.
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