It's like my head

“Except they did find that while girls were being told they’re the smartest, biggest, best, whatever, boys were being praised for what a good job they
were doing. Even though parents praised both genders equally, boys were praised for their efforts 24.4 percent of the time; girls, only 10.3 percent. Boys, then, were being primed from early childhood to do something with their brains and skills and ability to remember to cover their mouths when they sneezed. And while girls, too, were told how smart and clever they were, they were more likely to grow up believing that they couldn’t build upon or develop those traits.”

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This isn’t the first time it’s happened. It’s actually the third. And yes, I am counting. This is the third time I’ve been in a situation when the parent of a boy has insisted that “we” don’t play wild, wrestle or tickle girls and that pisses me off. Here we are, in the year 2012, and my daughter is only 14 months old and already she’s being elbowed out of fun and frolic because she has a vagina. Way to move forward, society.

I don’t know who this nebulous “we” is, but I was the second-oldest out of eight kids, five of whom were girls (six, if you count my brother Zach, who can out-shop all of us). And here are the things we girls did:

• Wrestle with boys


• Clothesline sisters who thwart your will


• Gang up on stupid neighbor kids who taunt your brother


• Get into scrappy fights when some kid in high school calls your sister a mean name


• Scream and yell and bounce off walls


• Pretend to be soldiers and play war


• Turn sticks into guns


• Jump off roofs


• Climb out of windows during church and scale the side of the church


• Climb trees and jump out of them into various bodies of water


• Shoot a lot of inanimate objects

Here are the things we girls didn’t do…

• Murder

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A southern Manitoba elementary school has come under fire for allowing a Christian Bible program to be offered without following provincial rules.

St. François Xavier Community School had been offering Discovery Time, a series of Bible classes run by Child Evangelism Fellowship, without passing a bylaw to do so, which runs afoul of Manitoba’s Public Schools Act.

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