Littles.

[mrissa]

I'm almost done with the lj prompts I got from you folks last month when I was staying up all night for the EEG. Wow, do you ask a lot of questions! Much appreciated.

So. Somebody said, "I'd like to hear what you think is good for little boys."

Regular beatings until morale improves?

Umm. Seriously, I think that it's good for little boys to have people who are willing to offer them a range of interests to explore, but are also willing to put outer boundaries down firmly to keep them safe. They should learn practical skills but also be allowed to dream. They should know that their thoughts are valuable but also learn to hear other people's ideas. They should learn how to express their feelings without using them as weapons against other people. They should have a chance to work at things that are important to them and a chance to play at random silliness. They should be taught how to have healthy bodies, especially with a sense of moderation and balance, but they should also be taught to treat their own and other people's infirmities with calm and practical compassion. They should have parents they can trust and rely upon but also other adults who will be there for them, too.

Also they should have dinosaur toys and dragon toys and lots and lots of books.

So, basically the same things as are good for little girls. I'm not sure what I would do to differentiate, because it would depend on the specific kid. I don't deal with A Little Boy, I deal with Robin, or Noah, or Sean. And gender sometimes matters very much, but until you know the kid and the situation, you can't always say in which ways it will.

For example, my cousin Joe is 12 and plays the flute. This is not very common for a boy his age. But unless I got to know my cousin better, I couldn't tell you which of the following possible scenarios was the case:
--he is a little "ladies' man" and takes full advantage of having sectionals with a bunch of girls
--he is shy but cute, so all the girls swoon over him as "sensitive" even though he doesn't say much to any of them
--the other kids tease him and call him names they consider derogatory for playing a "girl instrument"
--the other kids look askance at this trait, but no one cares enough to say anything
--the other kids look askance at this trait but estimate that he could beat the crap out of them if they said anything about it
--the subculture in which he goes to school is fairly gender-blind where music is concerned
--he is comfortable being "just one of the girls" and bantering with them in that fashion
--he hates playing the flute and only does it because his parents make him, and he makes this clear to anyone who comes anywhere near him
--etc.

The point is, unless I talk to the kid, I don't know. Gender might not play into his experience. It might. But the ways in which it might matter to him are not binary, and trying to deal with them as a generalization is not very useful.

Comments

[fiddledragon]

Which is really funny regarding the flute, because you don't hear about famous female floutists...rather you hear about Jean Pierre Rampal and James Galway.

We had one boy floutist when I was in middle school/high school...though he was eventually joined by another. Both of them were exquisite musicians, and they just loved the instrument. It would not surprise me to find out that either or both of them had gone on to a career in music.

[mkille.livejournal.com]

Given your helpful face-value thoughts on hot boys, I thought for little boys, you might suggest something like this (http://www.enzyte.com/).

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I think most boys have needed a greater-than-average interest in their instrument in order to make flute playing worthwhile, so I'm not surprised that your boy flautists were good musicians. If they hadn't been excited about the flute and making music with it, another instrument would have had fewer social repercussions.

I was not thrilled to hear about either of those famous flautists when I was still playing, because I heard about them ad infinitum, and also because my flautist role model was Ian Anderson.

[ellameena.livejournal.com]

Glen has been asking for flute lessons for more than a year. It never occurred to me until just now that it's a rather feminine instrument. Seriously. :-)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

In all my time playing in various honor youth orchestras and bands and so on, I did not run into boy flautists. Every other instrument we had was gender-mixed, but not the flutes.

And I don't think it's entirely the "when men cook, they're called chefs; when women cook, it's called dinner" phenomenon, but I don't think it's entirely unrelated, either.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

And if you listen to Jethro Tull -- and if you let him play the flute, do let him listen to Jethro Tull when he's a little older so he knows the flute is not all Varm Fuzzy Nice Nice* -- it doesn't have to stay rather feminine. But in my experience it's the instrument that is most firmly gender-associated except for the (large, not lap) harp.

*"Vot good is science if no-vone gets hurt?"

[orbitalmechanic.livejournal.com]

I do think of the flute as a girl instrument, but also and more intensely it's an Asian thing around here. Go figure.

"when men cook, they're called chefs; when women cook, it's called dinner"

You know what else is weirdly like that? Horseback riding. Overwhelmingly, by the numbers, riders are women. But a majority (?) of professional and competitive riders are men.

[gaaldine.livejournal.com]

I do so hate the gendering of America.

Destroy it (the gendering, that is)! Destroy it, I say!

Or at least let us take turns and such. I've been asking Scott to be the girl for the last two weeks . . .

Not that we aren't both mixedly feminine and masculine anyway . . . Still, it's *his* turn to be the girl. He's not being fair and doing his part and all.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I know: you ask and ask, and will they ever be the girl for even an hour? Never. Sigh.

There are some aspects of gender I enjoy quite a bit (mmmm, man-smell), so I'm afraid I'm not willing to go quite so far as "destroy it." But sorting out the decent bits from the idiocy is the proverbial needle/haystack problem.

[timprov.livejournal.com]

Competitive Scrabble is like that, though. Even in an age when the sexism is being driven out of much more traditionally male-dominated games like chess and poker, Scrabble seems to be immune.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yah, I would be surprised if there were none at a place like Interlochen.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Saxophone was the really popular instrument when I started playing (fifth grade, 1988), and a lot of kids got foisted onto clarinet on the theory that it was cheaper, and if you could play one woodwind, you could play them all. (Hah.)

In some ways I am the stereotypical girl flute player: long-haired, femmey, poodle-owning, by no means low-maintenance, and occasionally really snotty.

[columbina.livejournal.com]

Depends on the kind of riding. Dressage and other stuff I used to call "horse etiquette" events (the horse is primarily judged, not the rider, if there is even a rider - its posture and conformation, whether it puts its feet in the right places, how it behaves) are still, as far as I know, overwhelmingly female. English-style events are largely female except for jumping courses (i.e. steeplechase) which run about fifty-fifty. It's only in Western-gear events that are not judged primarily on horse but on rider (i.e. rodeo stuff) that the men dominate, at least in my observation.

I never thought of the flute as being an especially female-dominated instrument, but then, I was exposed to Jethro Tull fairly early on. Oddly, what I DID associate with being female was being concertmaster (that's what they call first violinist, right?) because for some reason I only ever saw female ones for yearsnyears. Also harp. I have never, to the best of my knowledge, seen a male orchestral harp player.

[columbina.livejournal.com]

I am officially barred from comment about being the girl so I will just express my general agreement with that sentiment.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Huh; I mean, it's longer than it is wide, after all, so it shouldn't be.