The Swedish Way to Parent and Play

by Kristina Henkel

  —örjan, parent of a two-year-old

  If we listen to our own words and those of our children, it’s easy to come away with the impression that there are many more boys and men in the world than girls and women. We often say he/him about figures, toys, and animals without realizing it, by default. Young children quickly adopt these conventions as their speech develops. Some people still use he/him generically: If anyone asks, tell him we’re in the store. He/him is the standard, the supposedly neutral language. Consider the classic sequence of images showing primate evolution, from ape to human. The human is always a man. What would happen if we provided breasts and a vulva for the figures at the various stages of development? This idea that man is the norm and that woman is something that deviates from this norm is repeated in our language. It affects our children and their perception of how much space they’re allowed to take up.

  Suggestions

  Switch from him and her to it or them for animals, figures, characters.

  Try replacing guy with a less gendered word like figure, thing, thingamajig.

  • I like the figure you chose.

  Switch between her, him, man, woman.

  • Is the monster woman going for a ride?

  • Wolves can be hungry. She could eat you right up.

  • Let’s make a snow-woman!

  Tie Your Shoelaces!

  “The girls have incredibly sophisticated conversations when they’re off on their own. They’re really conversing. It’s hard to believe that they’re only three years old.”

  —ingrid, teacher

  “I’m so tired of having to keep repeating myself. He never listens anyway. I almost always end up standing there yelling.”

  —antoine, parent of a five-year-old

  “Boys can often be heard a lot and use a lot of sounds in their games. But if you take a closer look, you’ll notice that there isn’t much dialogue going on.”

  —kenneth, teacher

  There’s no mistaking the joy when babies start babbling and understand that they can communicate with other humans in a more advanced way. All of a sudden, children can use words to express how they feel and can change their surroundings and experiences. But somewhere along the way something happens to their language development. Starting at a very early age, we adults spend more time communicating with girls than with boys, and when they’re a little bit older, we often interact with boys with fewer syllables and short commands: Tie your shoelaces! Come here! Put your jacket on! Wait! We address girls with longer sentences and more reasoning and imagery: Tie your shoelaces so that you don’t trip on them and hurt yourself! Come here and put your jacket on so that you won’t be cold out since it’s freezing! Wait until I’m ready so that we can walk down the stairs together. This may very well be due to our expectation that boys can’t stay still for any significant length of time. Or, perhaps we think that girls are better able to understand words and language. Whatever the reason, after a period of time, boys end up with a smaller vocabulary. This can be seen in how they write when they start school. In general, boys write fewer sentences and have a smaller vocabulary compared to girls. This smaller vocabulary affects their performance in school, since many subjects depend on reading comprehension and listening comprehension. A rich language and vocabulary can help us appreciate new ways of thinking and new topics, and make it easier to understand and express our own thoughts and feelings and share them with others.

  “Although gender differences follow essentially stereotypical patterns on achievement tests, for whatever reasons, females generally have the advantage on school marks regardless of the material.”

  —Daniel and Susan Voyer, “Gender Differences in Scholastic Achievement,” American Psychological Association, 2012

  Because short commands don’t require proximity, boys get less eye contact and interaction with grown-ups than girls do. Often, we won’t expect any kind of response to those short commands, either. There’s no dialogue. And it may be harder for us to get through when we call out like this, since the children might be lost in their own thoughts and not at all receptive. It’s easier to ignore a reprimand that’s simply shouted out than one that’s delivered face to face, as part of a dialogue. When children hear these kinds of brief, impersonal bursts, it’s easy for them not to pay attention. This in turn irritates adults who will then raise their voices. This way of communicating with (mainly) boys prevents them from practicing active listening, but we need active listening in order to understand others and cooperate with them. Children who have a chance to practice both speaking and listening have an easier time handling frustration and solving conflicts with other children.

  Suggestions

  Try to establish eye contact with all children and take your time when speaking with them. Avoid shouting out commands that land somewhere in empty space, leading to irritation.

  Talk with all children, especially boys, and don’t be scared of using long sentences and new words and expressions that the children don’t know. Those kinds of challenges help them with their language development.

  Set a good example and show that you can listen to what your child is saying. Children who aren’t used to talking often need extra time to express themselves.

  Who Gets to Speak and Where?

  “But the girls never say anything in class. They don’t want to. It’s just us boys talking.”

  —andreas, age 14

  “They say Ludde is so charming because he talks all the time, but that he needs to learn to wait his turn and not just start talking right away.”

  —lotta, parent of a six-year-old and an eight-year-old

  Even though girls, on average, are taught a larger vocabulary and offered more opportunities to practice communicating, boys, as a group, dominate the speaking that happens in preschools and schools. The idea that boys are impatient and can’t wait their turn is probably to blame once again. By offering eager children immediate attention, we achieve temporary peace and quiet. This will often be easier than helping them learn to wait. Impatient boys are often considered charming and driven. But while we attend to them, we’re inadvertently telling those who sit waiting that what they have to say is just not as important. Boys are more often allowed to interrupt, too. Girls are assumed to be good at listening and waiting their turn, a turn that may never come.

  Some people claim that women speak more at home than at work, and that they speak more than men altogether. Perhaps the lack of space for women to speak in public makes them talk all the more in private and makes young girls talk a ton outside the classroom but grow quiet once they’re inside. Because we respond so differently to boys’ and girls’ abilities to listen and speak, children learn that boys’ and girls’ words carry different weight in various contexts. Children who don’t live up to stereotyped expectations fare the worst. Shy, quiet boys and loud, impatient girls don’t fit in. The ability to be a good listener is reserved for girls, and the ability to make your voice heard in large groups or public spaces is reserved for boys. Shared participation is important and is fostered by teaching all children to make room for others through active listening and take up room by expressing ideas and opinions.

  Suggestions

  Everyone has something to say. Ask shy children open-ended questions. That way, you’re showing them that you are interested in their thoughts.

  • What are you drawing?

  • What are you doing now?

  • Where do you think the boat should go?

  In school, the teacher uses two-thirds of the speaking time in the classroom. Boys take up two-thirds of the remaining time, and girls one-third.

  —Eva Gannerud, Lärares liv och arbete i ett genusperspektiv (The Life And Work Of Teachers From A Gender Perspective), 2001

  With children who have a hard time expressing themselves, ask fairly specific rather than general questions. Instead of asking them what they had to eat, try:

  • Of the food on your plate, which was yummiest
?

  • What color were the vegetables?

  • Who else sat at your table?

  Instead of asking what your child did during the day, start by telling about your day. That way, you’ll have more of a dialogue.

  Talk to your child about what makes someone a good listener. Active listening involves maintaining eye contact, taking an interest, nodding, asking questions, and showing that you’re engaged in other ways.

  Listen actively to children who talk a lot, too. It’s easy for adults to stop paying attention, but that can make the child talk even more.

  Let all children practice not interrupting. At dinner, let everyone talk about something fun that happened during the day without anyone else interrupting.

  Use a talking stick to organize talking in a group. Whoever has the stick is the one who gets to talk right then, and everyone else listens. The talking stick makes it easier for everyone to wait their turn and listen actively to the speaker. It also helps show that everyone’s ideas and opinions are important.

  Where Do You Live?

  “Everyone, write your address on the paper.”

  “What should I do? I live with my mom and also with my dad.”

  “Well, write the other address over on the side.”

  There are forms to fill out for school. If you’re lucky, there’s room for two addresses, but often there’s only space for one. That’s because they’re based on the idea that a child lives in a single place, which doesn’t match reality today. In Sweden, about half a million children live in a situation that’s different from the nuclear family (mother, father, child, all in the same household). More and more children have more than one address, and it’s important that we show that that’s natural. One way of doing that is by not assuming that a child only has one address and instead demonstrating curiosity about what a particular child’s situation might look like.

  In much the same way that forms and address lists often only have room for one address, it’s common for children who live in more than one place to only have information mailed to a single address. Whether it’s information from preschool, the dentist, or the doctor’s office, it will often only be sent to one address. Even when communication works well between a child’s separate households, sharing this kind information between homes is an unnecessary burden that single-address children never have to worry about. Children who switch households will often face a constant stream of questions about why their parents don’t live together. This situation, the fact that children who are somehow outside the norm have to account for their lives in ways that others don’t, is common. But what happens to children who constantly have to explain how they live, while others never have to? Constantly having to explain how we live creates a sense of being an outsider.

  Suggestions

  Show that you are curious and ask questions that aren’t loaded:

  • How many places do you live at?

  • Who lives with you?

  Let children draw and describe their families as part of getting to know each other. That will make showing their families into a nice and positive thing, something validating.

  Practice asking questions about the kinds of things that get taken for granted, those that are seen as the norm. This can come across as a bit odd, since those kinds of questions are rarely asked. But it can show how often those outside the norm are expected to answer similar questions.

  • Why do you live together?

  • Why are you having children?

  • Why are you getting married?

  • Why do you live in a house?

  What’s Your Dad’s Name?

  “When my child and I were filling out the family tree at preschool it said ‘Mother’ and ‘Father.’ Same thing with every form we had to fill out. I had to cross out the labels and write ‘Mom 1’ and ‘Mom 2.’”

  —rebecka, parent of a three-year-old

  “We were talking with the kids at lunch. They asked each other what their fathers’ names were. Liv said she didn’t have a dad. One of my coworkers said: ‘What? Did your dad die?’ Liv was very confused because she has two moms.”

  —samira, teacher

  Questions may be asked with the best of intentions, but they can turn out very wrong. That’s because we have a traditional image of what a family looks like, and that image hasn’t caught on to the fact that society has changed. This situation leads to the effective erasure and exclusion of many children and their families. We still talk of parents who live with their child but not with a partner as “single parents,” even though they may be co-parenting with several other people. This expression stems from an era when it would be much more common for a woman to be the only caregiver.

  Today, things are different. Even if a child lives full time with one parent, other parents may also have custody and shared responsibilities. Being a parent is something you keep on being, no matter where your children live.

  In Sweden, forced sterilization was legal until 2013. Before 2013, anyone who wanted to have a gender confirming procedure or change their legal gender had to agree to being sterilized. Now, people who want to change their bodies so that they better match their gender identities can decide for themselves if they want to have the chance of having biological children. This means, among other things, that more and more people who identify as men and look like men will be pregnant.

  Precisely because there is so much more variety in family configurations these days than, say, 20 years ago, we need to start asking questions in new ways, not load them up with assumptions. One way is by asking about relationships instead of relatives. A woman who picks up a child at preschool or at the playground doesn’t have to be the child’s mother. Maybe she’s the mom’s or the dad’s new partner? Or maybe she’s a friend. By asking open questions we display curiosity without ranking families as better or worse than others, and we demonstrate that we know that families take different forms. This lets all children and their families feel included.

  Suggestions

  Practice asking questions that are more open and less loaded. Adopt the mindset of not knowing but being curious and wanting to know.

  • What is your parent’s name?

  • How many parents do you have?

  • Is that your parent?

  • Who is that?

  Use the word parent instead of mom or dad to make it easier to be inclusive.

  Gender Equality Through Language

  Language is a subtle but strong influence. Depending on how we talk with our children and the words we choose, we can either reinforce roles and patterns that limit them or challenge that framework and give them a richer reality. It may seem like a small thing, changing certain words and adding others, but in the long run it can make a big difference. If we had gender equality in and through language, children would have access to all the magic of the alphabet and its words. Children would be addressed as individuals, and their various activities wouldn’t be diminished through a choice of words. Them, him, and her would all be equal. Children would have the opportunity to develop rich vocabularies and practice putting their ideas and feelings into words. All children would be able to practice making themselves heard without necessarily speaking over anyone else. In their interactions, listening actively and speaking would be equally important and natural. Gender equality through language would let us see the children behind the words and give them the freedom to express themselves, to participate, and to influence their own lives.

  And They Played Happily Ever After

  More Ways of Being Friends

  The Boys Are Over Here!

  “My son was friends with both girls and boys at day care. But right around when he turned three, girls and boys stopped playing together. And no one seemed to think it was weird.”

  —marcus, parent of a five-year-old

  “When my son listed the names of the other kids at school, he mentioned Noel, Karam, Mohammed, Kasper, Emil, Björn, and Petter. You’d think he w
ent to an all-boys school.”

  —rita, parent of a six-year-old

  You’re about to drop off your child at day care. It’s been a somewhat stressful morning, and finally your child’s shoes, coat, and hat are all where they’re supposed to be and you’re on your way. When you get to the day care center, Solveig, the teacher, says, Hi, Philip! I’m happy to see you. Let’s go see what the other boys are doing! She acknowledges Philip by saying his name and then introducing him to what is going on. Everything’s done out of thoughtfulness for the child and for you, so you can get to work on time. However, what also happens in this everyday situation is that gender categories for friendships and playing are being created. When we thoughtlessly say, Here are the boys or Here are the girls, we tell children that gender matters and that girls are supposed to play with girls, and boys with boys.

  Suggestions

  Make all children potential friends:

  • Here’s another buddy!

  • Come, let’s go play with the other kids!

  • Let’s go and play with all your friends!

  Talk about the activity instead of the gender of those doing it:

  • Here are the soccer players!

  • Here’s the art crowd!

  • Here are the splashers and swimmers!

  • Here are the building buddies!

  Refer to all the children by their names instead of as girls or boys. This shows them that they are all potential friends and interesting to play with.