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Thinking about this with our daughters (2 & <1), I realized the most prominent man my girls interact with other than myself, the granddads, and occasionally other kids' dads... is our priest. He's a great guy for them to know, but it's a bit funny that their interactions with men are largely in vocations they aren't able to pursue themselves (fatherhood and priesthood respectively).

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When our five children were little/younger my hubby's company held Take Your Child to Work Days once a year. Most of the company shut down for at least half a day, and the employees offered a tour of the different areas where they worked. The attendees saw both men and women at work, got to touch things at the labs, manufacturing facilities, etc. so that the idea of mom or dad working isn't just some abstract thing for them. They even had activities geared for kids, bite sized experiences where they got to experiment or play with or try out kid-oriented versions of the actual work being done, including handling raw materials and putting them together to make a finished product. It was cool and unforgettable, and led to them pursuing engineering careers. They no longer do this (don't know why) which is a shame.

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Right?? I remember this as a kid, and I couldn't do it at a remote job, but it *is* something I thought would happen as a mom, and I haven't heard of any friends doing it.

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My husband used to take our children for this day. He's a scientist, so he would show them cool experiments, and let them help. It stopped after Covid and never resumed.

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Wow, I didn’t realize it was unusual it is how many good men working my kids interact with. Their pediatrician, more than half of their elementary school teachers so far, a catechist, house painter who has worked in our home lots.

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The library profession faces a similar problem to the teaching profession in terms of routinely paying extremely low salaries (while requiring master's degrees of professional librarians!). In fact, part of the reason libraries started hiring women back in the late 1800s was because they could be paid less than men. I've had various male colleagues during my decade of library work, but if any of them had underage children, I never heard about it. A number were single. And considering that the pay in the local library system is worse than in the local school system, it's no wonder.

That's what frustrates me whenever a certain sort of person starts going off about how the lack of male elementary school teachers is discrimination against men, etc. If you want men to work in a profession, you've got to pay decently! And school and library finances are built around the assumption that they don't need to do that. When I was studying education for my undergrad degree, everyone seemed well aware that the local schools were DYING to have male elementary teachers. The problem wasn't that the schools were turning men away; the problem was that men weren't going into the field to begin with! If someone wants male teachers, then they need to take some of the time they're spending on yelling about discrimination to yell about improving teacher pay instead.

I'm reminded of a story I read about boys' and girls' schools in Jordan. The girls did very well in their schools, but the boys did terribly despite having all male teachers. Reason? Because women in Jordan had few other employment options, the women who worked in the school were extremely talented. But teaching wasn't considered a good job for men in Jordan, and the men who got the jobs in the boys' school didn't care about their work and tended to mistreat the boys. Teaching has to be seen as a solid career option, or decent men won't be interested.

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Thank you for this post! I'm a mom of 4 sons (now ages 17, 20, 22 & 25) - and I have a brother who was an EXCELLENT early childhood teacher who was pushed out in large part due to stereotypes & fear.

One of the most important sentences in the post, in my opinion, is this: "When kids are in school from a very young age, and in wraparound care to stay busy until the end of the grown up work day, they’re fairly siloed off from the adult world and adult work." That's a loss for all of our kids, for all our communities. It's also why Chap. 9 of my book, Building Boys: Raising Great Guys in a World That MIsunderstands Males, is "Connect Him to the Real World."

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Perhaps it's growing up and raising children in the Midwest, but I feel like this is not such an issue for us. For instance, my kids play in the local Little League filled with dad coaches who are linemen, factory workers, mechanics, realtors, CEOs of hospitals, and various other professions. We have always seen Family Practice doctors rather than pediatricians, of which 2 out of 3 have been men. (I have preferred the male doctors we've had over the female ones, but I always opt for female pediatric dentists.) Being Catholic also opens up a wide variety of examples. We are family friends with male school Superintendents, teachers, professors, doctors, carpenters, lawyers, priests, a pilot for SW, military veterans, farmers, etc... but we all share in the parish potluck and work on projects together.

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I know that doesn't exactly address the toddler angle, but quite frankly early childhood years are generally woman heavy and always have been. Ironically, job descriptions involving men and women never come up in our household even as our kids age. And I think it's because it's a nonissue for us. We live around people who do things. Men and women work, some women stay home full time, and even some men. We talk about advantages and disadvantages to situations, but never in the context of what men or women "can" do.

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The more I reflect on these issues, the more I think it would be better to have a divided society with clearly defined duties for each sex---the women sow and the men reap, the men grind and the women brew. I don't know what that would look like in a post-industrial world, however. We have all become meaningless cogs, and sex has no connection to our activity in the world, except that---because we do not recognize sex as meaningful---women who have periods and pregnancies are thereby defective men. Egalitarianism always means women get the shaft.

Perhaps that is all the more reason to not lean on work as determinative of worth but on parish life! The men serve the altar, the women clean the linens; the women fill the bags of food, the men hand them out. Something like that.

I have nothing descriptive to share because there is no example my girls have of a man who does anything a woman doesn't do first. Alas. Alienation is cruel.

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I just finished The Forgotten Girls by Monica Potts, a book about growing up in Clinton, Arkansas and a reflection on the choices girls and women make and the environment that shapes them, especially in her rural community. Very relevant to Other Feminisms readers. And an interesting companion read to Uprooted imo (both authors moved back to their families' towns!). One interesting point Potts makes is that rural boys have a clear path to well paying careers in the trades if they don't graduate high school or go to college, while women who don't graduate high school and college see their only option as wife & mother. In the world she describes, roles are significantly siloed like you describe here.

And, to put it mildly, the result of that role siloing can be terrible. When men are taught to be the leader of the household and women his helpmeet, the church condones (sometimes explicitly!) domestic abuse. When men can't provide the lifestyle they think they should be able to, they are more likely to become violent. When women don't want their identity to be solely 'young mother', they are more likely to drown their despair in drugs.

One of the things that sets Potts book apart compared to similar books I've read is how she delves into her experience as a child and especially a middle schooler in this environment. How seeing such a limited view of the possibilities of who you could be and what your life could hold, reinforced by the community, church, school and family led kids to alcohol and drugs, boys to rape, girls to pregnancies and not infrequently child marriages (including to grown men). Drastically limiting people's roles and who they can be based on their gender never really worked for a lot of people, and still doesn't.

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Economic life is not real life. I blame that domestic abuse on the pursuit of Mammon in an industrial age, and on the men who do the abuse. I am not saying women are to be chained at home: Did you read my examples? Are the men farmers or are the women?

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Women have worked in fields as long as there has been agriculture. Women hunted and foraged and facilitated meetings and built homes well before the industrial age. Some societies have had extremely gendered roles, some have not. And for those that did have gendered roles, there's always been someone who broke them (and they were sometimes ostracized, sometimes killed, sometimes ignored, sometimes celebrated).

I agree there are many ways our society saps the life out of people. And that the cause of much of that alienation and despair is rooted in our economic system. But in my opinion more lines in the sand about who gets to do what based on their gender isn't the answer.

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You are gracious to agree in part. I contend, however, the lack of these lines is causing children, disproportionately young girls, great harm. Taking cross-sex hormones is only the most recent development, but it is a clear one.

I do not suggest that lines need to be drawn, any more than a marriage should have rules. A marriage that needs rules is already failing to be governed by love. Same with gendered societies. Our society does need casual norms, understood to exist only in times of peace. When there is necessity, like war or death, of course they can be set aside.

I think it takes very little to reassert a gendered society. If we would listen to our natures, and not grasp at what is hidden to us, these norms would reassert themselves.

Which, I think, is indicated by the title of the above post. Toddlers live in a world of professional women. Other than the word "professional," that is how it has always been.

Thank you for your replies! We can keep going, but I don't want to take advantage.

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Yeah I am not in the medical field but I am not really sure what the doctors do. They breeze in for 2 minutes charge you a bunch and then leave.

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I am lucky in that my children see good men doing good work regularly. I own my own business with my family. My children have basically grown up here. We are oriented towards the trades so my kids see men doing trade work all the time and making a good living doing it and being cool driving big trucks. I am a father of 3 boys. What I have notices though is that when my oldest was a toddler all the new cartoons had female leads or the female was in charge. We had to watch older stuff to find fun boy leads. All there daycare teachers, when they went, were women and all their elementary teachers have been so far. Our main medical person is a nurse practitioner and he is a man. He is older but he is the best. I find my wife and l like him more than the actual doctors. I think his age gives him a bit more wisdom than the younger doctors. The doctors have been a mix of man and woman but more women than men. Both my brothers are white collar workers and my boys love their uncles. Their grandfather works on a farm. Our priest is of course a man.

I am kinda rambling now thinking about the interaction and jobs my children see and the break down between men and women. I don't live in a big city but live on a homestead also. I do wonder if the rural city divide does effect what we see. There are just some jobs my wife is not physically strong enough for her to do on the homestead. I am taller than average and in better physical shape than a man around 40.

All in all this thread really has me thinking and wondering now.

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(I almost always prefer the nurses to the doctors)

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