Boys Don’t Cry: The idea that girls are harder to raise than boys

About a week after my daughter Zoe was born, my husband called up Centerlink to register her birth. A little while later, he got off the phone to the Centerlink lady who had helped him, and he came up to me with a confused and disappointed look on his face. I asked him what was wrong, and he recounted to me what the lady on the line had said to him.

“So when was your baby born?” the lady asked, and my husband replied with Zoe’s birth date.

“And did you have a boy or a girl?”

“A little girl,” James replied.

“Oh I’m so sorry,” said the Centerlink lady without missing a beat.

James told me he was taken aback.

“Why?” James had asked.

“Well girls are just so much harder than boys. You have a lot of work ahead of you!”

Now, James recognises that the lady was just trying to make conversation, she didn’t say it out of malice, but he felt like she had stepped out of line. When he came to be and told me what the Centerlink lady had said, he looked so frustrated. James had always wanted a girl, and instead of this complete strangersaying something nice like “Congratulations!” or “You must be so happy/proud/excited etc” she immediately jumped to the conclusion that life was now going to be difficult. “She’s only a week old!” he sighed, “Now I know what you mean.” He said this because this is not the first time this notion of ‘girls are harder to raise than boys’ has been presented to me.

Not regularly, but at times throughout my pregnancy, I was met with this same attitude. “Oh I’m so sorry”, or “well, good luck! You’re gonna need it!” or “Just you wait until she’s a teenager!” were repeated to me and my daughter had not even been born yet. Before she had even come into the world she had the odds stacked against her. Before she was even born society was pigeonholing her into a box marked ‘TOO DIFFICULT’.

But why do we think this? Why do we think girls are harder to raise than boys? I would argue that boys and girls are just as hard to raise as each other. Okay, I have not had experience raising children as much as I only have a 10 week old daughter. But being a high school teacher I have had to educate both teen boys and girls, and I find both just as trying as the other. Some people might argue that the reason girls are harder is because of all of the social issues. Issues with friendships and boyfriends and peer pressure. However, having taught Year 7 boys for almost a decade now, I can definitely tell you that they are just as backstabbing, excluding and catty to their friends are girls are. There is just as much peer pressure, social media pressure and bullying. But let’s dive a little deeper.

For the most part of childhood we could argue that boys and girls are pretty much the same to raise. Baby boys, baby girls, toddler boys and toddler girls don’t really differ that much. We could probably agree that the issue doesn’t really come into play until the kids are around 10 to 13 years old. This is obviously that transitional time where boys and girls are on the cusp of puberty, and as we know, girls hit puberty earlier than boys. Handling girls in puberty is definitely not easy, and I am in no way saying that it is. Navigating their sea of emotions as well as their periods can be rough. But we seem to tie the tag of “just being hormonal” to only girls and not to boys. When boys go though puberty they have a steady increase of testosterone that accelerates rapidly in peak teen years (16, 17). Granted, testosterone levels are not as fluctuating as oestrogen is when it’s period time (which goes up, down and all over the place), but those stages of boosted testosterone can be just as frustrating and difficult to handle. Both oestrogen and testosterone can make teens very moody, emotional, and difficult to handle from one day to the next.

But hormones aside, it is not just periods that supposedly make girls harder to handle. We have to teach girls so much about the world that oppresses them, because other than puberty hormones and periods there is a lot of emotional and social things going on as well. Both boys and girls have to learn about how the world works, and about the following things:

- respectful relationships (be it family, friends, or boyfriends/girlfriends)

- safe sex, reproduction, LGBTQI+, sexualisation in the media and porn

- their own physical and mental health

- trust and positive risk taking

- society and how it works (things like politics, social media impact, etc)

- preparation for the world, like getting a job, driving a car, and taking responsibility

- resilience and standing up for themselves

- how they fit into the world

And the list goes on. This list also differs from family to family, culture to culture, and household to household, but generally speaking, these are the things all teens have to learn in order to function as adults. But the way they are taught from boys to girls can be very different. The way boys understand how they fit in the world is very different to how girls come to that understanding, because the world has already made assumptions about them and tells them where to go.

Lets take probably the hardest one from the list and unpack it. Here is just some of what we teach girls (both consciously and unconsciously) about safe sex: Make sure you have protection, this is how the pill works, yes you can still get pregnant on the pill, don’t be drunk or he’ll take advantage of you, make sure you lose your virginity to someone you love (preferably when you are married), make sure you say “no” really clearly and multiple timesif you don’t want to do anything, don’t feel pressured, this is where to get the morning after pill if an accident happens, pee after sex so you don’t get a UTI, don’t have sex on you period, real sex is nothing like porn, never send naked photos of yourself to anyone, yes you can still get pregnant if you have sex on your period and NOTHING about the 12- 24 hour ovulation window (until last year I thought I could get pregnant any time of the month).

Here is what we teach boys about safe sex: here is how you put on a condom, you can’t pee and ejaculate at the same time, and stop when she says no or else its rape.

Now there is a lot more in there that I haven’t listed, like women expected to do the emotional labour in relationships, the double standards of men sending unsolicited dick pics vs women sending pictures of their breasts, or the lack of autonomy a woman has over her body in society, but I think we are all educated enough to see the subtext within the lists. The bottom line is that the onus is on women to protect themselves rather than on boys to be accountable for their actions and their behaviour. (We see this time and time again with the message of “don’t get raped” for girls as opposed to the -only recently emerging message of- “don’t rape” for boys.) For example, how many boys are pressured to lose their virginity to someone they love because it is a precious gift that should never be squandered. How many teen moves are based around that common idea? HA! But girls are expected to protect their ‘most valuable asset’ at all costs. It’s the girl’s responsibility after all to keep her legs together, right? (something else I was told during my pregnancy- apparently I’m a slut for getting pregnant to my husband who I’ve known for over 13 years!)

Charlie Pickering's famous "Don't Rape" clip, which words what I'm discussing very well

But this double standard is why we have issues of rape culture, domestic violence and men’s mental health issues: because we don’t teach our boys the same way we teach our girls. We teach boys to bottle it up, that the only emotion worth showing is rage, and to let women do all the work (like contraception). This is toxic masculinity at its finest. And that’s the thing about toxic masculinity- it cuts both ways. That’s the whole point of toxic masculinity: it’s just as poisonous for boys as it is for girls. And you know what? It is hard to raise someone to fight against that. It is hard to teach girls how to fight the TM and patriarchy every single day. It’s hard, it’s tiring and it’s overwhelming when you think about the gravity of it and how it affects our lives. It’s been in place for a veeeeeeery long time and it isn’t going anytime soon.

One of the issues is that we have this idea in society that you kind of leave boys alone to sort out their own issues and that they’ll figure it out on their own. This coincides with the idea that “boys will be boys” (ie: don’t hold them accountable for their actions because they’re “just boys”) and that boys fight out their issues, and that they just kind of float along in life without any problems. But we all know that this is both not true and not right. Boys, just like girls, need help at times to sort though their emotions and problems, so that they can become resilient adults. There a lot of boys and men in my life that I know who have just been left to their own devices and have to figure everything out on their own. Some of them have turned out great, but some of them haven’t. We have a lot of strategies in place to help girls though issues, but it seems to be lacking in the male department. This develops a breeding ground for toxic masculinity which is poisonous as it teaches boys to be aggressive, not handle and talk about their emotions, communicate physically (and as a continuation of that, communicate though violence), be ashamed of showing vulnerability, and that their feelings done matter to others as they have been left to sort out their own issues for so long. Conversely, this also has the clear flow on effect on girls, as this teaches them that boys are supposed to express their anger, sadness and frustration physically though fighting, that boys are supposed to suppress their emotions in a stoic show of manliness. Remember, boys don’t cry.

So where does this leave us? Are girls harder to raise than boys? As I sit her cuddling my baby girl, I can see how raising her is going to be hard. If it’s going to be harder than raising a boy I cannot say. But I don't think it's not going to be hard because she is “more emotional and hormonal” than boys. It’s going to be hard because I have to teach her how to be strong and fight in very subtle and underhand ways. I am going to have to teach her a myriad of strategies for fighting every single day; from being cat called on the street, to dealing with a bozo at Centerlink who tells her that her unborn daughter is going to be “difficult”. But I think that teaching a girl to prepare and fight against patriarchal pressure is just as hard as teaching a boy to break down the walls of toxic masculinity. Maybe girls are harder to raise than boys and maybe they’re not. But maybe they’re harder to raise than boys because we have made them that way and expect them to be.

Love, The Feminist Mum