Boys and Girls are equal

It’s been a while since I posted anything here. Allow me to indulge in some parental bragging for a moment. I ended up wanting to write more than 140 characters in twitter will allow, so I decided to dust off this old blog.

I am so proud of my son. I guess that also makes me proud of how my husband and I are raising him. Let me give you an example of why from this morning.

As we do, our children are spending their Sunday morning watching cartoons on the Cartoon Network. When my husband and I came downstairs, they were watching an episode of Teen Titans Go. This episode: Teen Titans Go: Boys vs Girls

I didn’t see much of it, only caught the tail end. What I did catch involved cooties, and the boys not liking the girls (although Robin was conflicted because of his crush on Starfire) because boys are better than girls. The girls were saying similar things about girls being better than boys. In the end, they all had to work together to defeat the cooties and put them back in whatever box they’d escaped from. Robin makes a big speech about how girls are superior to boys in every way, and then Beast Boy points out that only a boy could make such an awesome speech. Ha ha ha. The End. It’s actually one of the funnier cartoons we let them watch.

The show ends, and my son says “I didn’t really like that episode. Boys and girls are equal.”

And with that simple statement, I know I am raising him right. I know my husband and I are setting a great example. Because for all of the girl empowerment and sexism bashing (and outright mean spirited attacking of old white men scientist guys who say stupid things) going on in social media, he knows that it’s not a competition. We are equal. Boys and girls. Men and women. We are all equal. That’s where I hope we are heading, and that’s what I hope my children are bringing into the world.