Gender, ethics and parenting

by Virginia Ramey Mollenkott

Parenting the Strong-Willed Child
by Rex Forehand and Nicholas Long, NCT/Contemporary Publishing Company, Lincolnwood, Illinois, 1996.

Sissies and Tomboys: Gender Nonconformity and Homosexual Childhood
ed. Matthew Rottnick, New York University Press, 1999.

The Case Against Spanking: How to Discipline Your Child Without Hitting
by Irwin A. Hyman, Jossey-Bass Publishers, San Francisco, 1997.

When I bought the Irwin Hyman and Rex Forehand-Long books about parenting, I had no intention of reviewing them for this or any other publication. I read them simply as the grandmother of two dynamic little girls, seeking ways to support my son and daughter-in-law in their decision to raise their children without resort to corporal punishment. But while Witness co-editor Julie Wortman and I were brainstorming about gender and sex ethics, it struck me that these parenting books throw some important light on those topics.

Irwin Hyman, who teaches school psychology at Temple University, is nationally known for his campaign against spanking on such television shows as Oprah, Today, and Good Morning America. In 1996 when California legislators voted on reintroducing corporal punishment in their school systems, the motion was defeated in part by Hyman’s photographs of bruised and welted children who had been legally paddled in one of the 23 states that still permit such abuses. Any adult who assaulted another adult and left welts and bruises would be prosecuted; why would it be legal to do to helpless children what adults are not permitted to do to one another?

Hyman provides a 27-question Parent Punitiveness Quiz so that readers can find out how their attitudes about discipline compare to others’ in our society. He describes exactly how to use positive reinforcement and punishment techniques (praise, money, stars, privileges; verbal reprimands, unpleasant consequences, withdrawal of privileges) as well as negative reinforcement and punishment techniques (removing unpleasant conditions to reinforce good behavior; time-out from play, family activities, or television for unacceptable behavior).

Since over 90 percent of American parents admit that they have spanked their toddlers, Hyman’s suggestions could spare little children a great deal of misery. And might even save lives: Of 201 documented cases of the murder of children by parents or caretakers, 31 percent occurred as a result of punishment procedures for such misbehaviors as "refusal to eat dinner" or "blocking my view of the TV."

Rex Forehand and Nicholas Long, both pediatric psychologists, provide a very specific five-week program for addressing strong-willed behavior through "attends" (descriptions or imitations of what the child is doing right), rewards for desirable behavior, ignoring (withholding physical, verbal or eye contact because of undesirable but not dangerous behaviors such as tantrums and extreme showing off), learning to give clear and effective directions, and precise procedures for administering time out.

What does all this have to do with the ethics of sex and gender? Of course there is the obvious recommendation of non-violent interaction between human beings no matter what their age. (As a compliant person who was nevertheless whipped on the principle of "spare the rod, spoil the child," I find it pathetic that toddlers are in danger of being hit more often than anyone else in our society.) But beyond non-violence, these parenting books emphasize attending to children, trying to grasp the reasoning behind children’s misbehaviors. They demonstrate the ineffectiveness and the brutalizing results of yelling, inconsistency, and modelling inappropriate behavior such as lack of respect for the child. (If the medium is the message, how is a child whose parents hit and holler supposed to learn not to hit and holler? How are children whose parents showed no respect for them supposed to learn respect for themselves and others? I am convinced that the rage of many adolescents and adults stems from what they were subjected to during childhood.)

Which brings me to the third book, Sissies and Tomboys. It is those children who do not or cannot conform to our society’s binary gender system of "masculine" males and "feminine" females who are in the greatest danger of being so punished and shamed that they run away. Some are turned out into the streets by their own families. Sexual predators await these children, many of whom lack any skills to support themselves and therefore become sex workers. HIV/AIDS is a common fate. Although neither Hyman nor Forehand and Long take up transgender issues, if their advice about parental listening and respect for their offspring were followed, many gender injustices could be avoided.

It’s called "receiving the children" as Jesus received them: just as they are. And when those children who are well received have grown up, they stand a better chance of establishing relationships of mutual respect and supportiveness with other adults – and with any children they may in turn acquire by birth or adoption.

But for those parents whose children do not and/or cannot conform to our society’s gender norms, Sissies and Tomboys could provide additional insights. Based on a conference sponsored by City University’s Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (N.Y.), the book is a collection of essays by leaders in various aspects of the transgender movement. My advice to parents would be to start with the final section, "Sissies and Tomboys Speak," before circling back to the sections on "Gender Identity Disorder (GID) and the Normal" and "Theorizing Gender Nonconformity." It is easier to reject theory than it is to resist personal narratives such as Arnie Kantrowiz’ "Such a Polite Little Boy." Arnie’s mother gave him hormone shots and urged his friends to assault him in order to stop him from laughing at too high a pitch and swaying his hips when he walked. Now in his 50s and the 16th year of his partnership with Larry Mass, Arnie Kantrowiz is glad to be "the particular mix of male and female that I am ... I feel like a person in a human being’s body." But Arnie was one of the more flexible ones, able to retrain himself to "act in an acceptably male manner" that satisfied his mother’s – and society’s – dictates.

A theological question here might be, suppose God wanted to manifest Herself/Himself/Itself within a Jewish boy who laughs with a high tone and sways when he walks? (Why else was Arnie created that way?) Who are we to risk a child’s internal well-being by insisting on conformity to human-made standards that have nothing to do with health or decency? Although Kantrowiz has achieved self-approval in his middle age, there is a bitter tone in his "Thanks, Mom!" that betrays a great deal of alienation and struggle along the way.

The personal stories put human faces on the more theoretical essays, which perhaps could be summarized in this remark by Ken Corbett: "By not examining boyhood femininity [and girlhood masculinity] across a broader range of mental health, gender is sustained as a system of conformity as opposed to a system of variation. The emphasis on conformity sustains the shaming attribution of a nonconforming, damaged, or abjected gender to those boys [and girls] who step over the normative line." Although young tomboys are well tolerated in our society, the prisonhouse begins to close around girls at eleven or twelve, when they are urged to adopt restraints in order to be "more ladylike." By contrast, boys are warned away from femininity throughout their childhood through words that "scapegoat women, flowers, or fruit ... swish, nelly, fruit, fruitcake, pussy, pansy, fluff, sissy, Nancy, Molly, Mary, and Mary Ann." Why should we be surprised that many grow up with misogynistic attitudes?

As the introduction to Sissies and Tomboys makes clear, "Differently gendered lives – their individual variation, their differences from the majority – constitute a normal diversity of gendered experience." But acknowledging such diversity is difficult because by its very nature, diversity resists categorization. Democratic pluralism tolerates only social groups that have achieved recognition as coherently conforming to some dominant social principle or another.

My suggestion of a dominant social principle that would embrace differently gendered lives is a very old one: the Golden Rule. As Richard Rorty wrote in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1996), "human solidarity is to be achieved not by inquiry but by imagination, the imaginative ability to see strange people as fellow sufferers. Solidarity is not discovered by reflection but created. It is created by increasing our sensitivity to the particular details of the pain and humiliation of other, unfamiliar sorts of people" (emphasis mine). Such an increase of sensitivity can best be stimulated by listening and attending.

Even to tomboys. Even to sissies. Even to toddlers.

Virginia Ramey Mollenkott is a Witness contributing editor and the guest editor of this issue, <jstvrm@warwick.net>.