Both parents, male and female, show the child what to expect in sex roles. A man teaches a child how to deal with aggression and ideally helps build resilience through rough-and-tumble play. And a child feels empathy and comfort from mom. Mom is a safe place to regain power, while dad uses play to help the child separate and individuate. The bonding is different for fathers than it is for mothers. Men gently hassle children and use the resilience-building tactics of physical play, while mothers encourage bonding and regulating the child back to homeostasis.[110] 

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Virginia Satir (1964) studied institutionalized kids and described the poor self-esteem of parents as one dynamic that occurred in confused kids. It is important to know that a child learns about their sexuality through interpersonal relationships and are often given cues and affirmed in the behaviours by the opposite sex parent in the home as to who they are in their sexual role. Lesbian couples can reinforce the maleness of their son by reinforcing close relationships with men in the family, involving their son or daughter in sports, and considering the separation needs of the child. The role of the father is important for the child’s separation from the mother. It is important to acknowledge that role in homes with two moms. A balanced family has both the yin and yang, male and female role models.

 

In the field of education, an intervention to close the gap between boys and girls has, paradoxically, had a reverse effect. By reducing freedom and safety for women and children and introducing men into their private spaces, girls have fewer opportunities than they did 30 years ago. “On the basis of clinical experience, Lothstein (1983), speculated that parents who have been influenced by cultural zeitgeist to use non-sexist socializations techniques may have inadvertently induced gender identity conflict in children.[111] Some parents have indeed reflected praise for the androgynous child, believing that the extremes in male and female are something to be overcome. Indeed, aggressive males and emotionally sensitive girls may be the norm, as shown in developmental literature.[112] But, this difference may not be a gap to overcome as much as a reality to embrace.

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This preference for androgynous children in developmental literature, since about the 70s, may have swayed teachers and parents to stop affirming children in their given sex roles. To not affirm a child as the sex they were born into will cause further anxiety and confusion. sexuality is often more precarious for girls, who generally have lower self-esteem than boys, which is often attributed to the beauty standard set by their cultural script.

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Generally, females who develop early experience less support and more negative attention compared to boys, who have more positive experiences when they develop early. Also, girls tend to ruminate more in adolescence than boys.[113] A cultural emphasis on size for boys invites greater responsibility and freedom and a decrease in social and attention problems.

 

Erikson believed that the wider society, not just immediate parental figures, played a significant role in personality development. Erickson’s stages of development, which generalize across cultures, are used in this guideline as a measuring stick for the health of relationships and cultures.

 

“When relationships fail to sustain people they may turn to addiction as an emotional crutch.”[114] Parents and teachers should examine the media surrounding boys and girls. For example, not only do girls learn about pornography early, warping their sense of identity, but girls learn which sex is more likely to be poor. And that women are likely to do more unpaid work. It is still men that hold most of the seats of power and women are more likely to report rape and violence perpetrated by men.[115] To address these well-known concerns, schools have erased sex in their minds. They have pretended the problem away to focus on gender. There is a trend to push boys into the changing room with girls. Unfortunately, this trend to promote androgyny (sex ambiguity) as a solution to the violence and poverty women face called the “gender gap”, is a dangerous trend to de-sex women, while ignoring rape, causing mass cultural confusion. Encouraging girls to be more like boys, as a solution to their lower status (generally and globally) does not address the reality of the status of women, it ignores the status of women, by ignoring women.

 

Scottish lesbian radical feminist Magdalen Berns (1983-2019) said that women’s rights are more important than anything else. She said that if a “woman cannot talk about the fact that she has a body, a female body, she won’t be able to defend any of her rights, making it completely possible to undo decades, even hundreds of years of feminism…It’s this important!”[116] To encourage androgyny discounts the innate talents of girls for a social convention.