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> parents of teenage daughters argue more about parenting than do the parents of sons This to me strikes me as the thing that might be the culprit. I can't cou

> parents of teenage daughters argue more about parenting than do the parents of sons This to me strikes me as the thing that might be the culprit. I can't count the amount of times I've heard men how much they would worry if they'd be getting a daughter. It seems as if many people think a girl has to be parented differently - probably more intensely - compared to a boy who can apparently be left to his own devices more often. I'm speculating here of course.

ed25519FUUU 6y ago
Do you have children? They most definitely need to be parented differently. With boys there’s a lot of effort into mitigating physical damage to themselves or physical and/or emotional damage they may cause to others. With daughters, there’s less effort with physical harm and much more effort into helping their emotional well-being. I would argue that social media and media in general has disproportionately affected the minds of our daughters compared to our sons.
- TeaDrunk 6y ago
  > I would argue that social media and media in general has disproportionately affected the minds of our daughters compared to our sons. I would speculate it affects it in different ways. Social media puts young boys at risk of entering highly misogynistic spaces, the damage of which will be borne out on the bodies, careers, and wellbeing of women they meet later.
- croissants 6y ago
  The Economist (relatively) recently featured a long article about the modern lives of adolescent girls: https://archive.is/OGxxk https://archive.is/OGxxk.
- User23 6y ago
  I think people without sons may seriously underestimate the ingenuity, energy, and frequency with which boy toddlers attempt to kill, maim, or otherwise seriously injure themselves.
  - de_Selby 6y ago
    I have a son who is a toddler right now, very well put - "ingenuity" made me laugh.
  - da_big_ghey 6y ago
    Even moreso with multiple sons close in age. Thinking about the trouble my brothers and I caused on our own versus in groups versus all together, there seems to be a superlinear growth in the amount of trouble a group of boys can cause.
  - testfoobar 6y ago
    Ha! I tried to explain this to parents who have only daughters. They would offer advice like "you need to give them more projects to do or you need to listen more to them." They would look on with a judging attitude as my sons would tear around playgrounds looking for sticks and rocks to arm their fort. Or they would play on the "outside" of playground structures. Imagine a 15 foot tall covered slide. They would climb on the outside of the slide - risking a serious fall. I've already seen the tables turn. Parents with teenage daughters describe things that make me shudder. At least I now have the wisdom to not judge the parents. It seems to me that the worst bullying behaviour that I hear in my social circle is perpetuated by teenage girls towards other teenage girls.
    - cycomanic 6y ago
      I think there is a strong selection bias there as well, there's significant research showing how girls and boys are treated differently when getting into "dangerous" situations. It's been my experience as a father of 2 girls that they also love to climb on the outside of playground structures. However what I see with a lot of the parents of other girls (compared to boys) is that they caution the girls a lot more and then they say my girls are so self-confident and "brave". That is not to say that there is no difference between girls and boys, but you there are also huge variations between individuals as well, the way my two daughters are in their "wildness" is so different you would not guess they are siblings.
      - 6y ago
- wongarsu 6y ago
  > With daughters, there’s less effort with physical harm and much more effort into helping their emotional well-being. Suicide rates for 10-14 year olds are twice as high for boys than for girls, and for 15-24 year olds four times as high. I'm sure you are describing how parenting is done in general, but not spending as much time on the emotional well-being of boys doesn't seem to be a good strategy. 1: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/suicide/rates_1999_2017.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/suicide/rates_1999_2017...
  - ed25519FUUU 6y ago
    I definitely didn’t mean to discount the emotional damage done to boys by social media and media. Also the damage done to them by caging them up in schools while demanding absolute obedience and attention in “lord of the flies” situations.
    - fastball 6y ago
      You did though. You said girls need emotional support and boys you need to worry about them damaging themselves (physically) or others (emotionally). I honestly can't come up with a reading of your comment that doesn't involve discounting the emotional needs of young boys.
  - ac29 6y ago
    Suicide attempts, however, are far higher in females: https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/suicide.shtml https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/suicide.shtml This is in part because males choose more effective suicide methods - they are approximately twice as likely to use firearms.
    - bitshiftfaced 6y ago
      But couldn't that be because some do it as a cry for help?
      - throwaway3699 6y ago
- robin21 6y ago
  I’d love to read something that explores why social media affects females more than males, and also a first person perspective of the social pressures of young females and how much wiggle room they actually have to remain socially accepted and active whilst avoiding pressures. I think a lot comes down to body image of females in society. Something as simple as the fact that females are expected to wear makeup and men do not I think can explain a lot. The vast number of activities that surround makeup create an unhealthy obsession with vanity. It’s the raw amount of time spent looking at one’s self and comparing against others. This then propagates throughout life and results in an unwinnable battle against ageing that only leads to unhappiness. A typical female social media stream contains a huge amount of beauty-related content of which a male’s does not. There are just certain interests you have to have to blend into social groups that are dramatically different for men and women. Although recently men are starting to become more vain and I hear a lot of marketing crap like “men should take more care looking after their skin/appearance” - the metrosexual thing - which I think is going down a bad path. We need less social pressures for young people...but of course there is a huge monetary incentive to get men hooked on skin care etc.
  - medium_burrito 6y ago
    I'll paraphrase something I read a while back. Men have physical competition, women have emotional/social competition. Men play sports, fight, kill each other and video games imitate life. Social media is the women's version of video games, refined to weapons-grade purity.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - gonzo41 6y ago
      Yeah, Instagram really should be considered a WMD for self esteem.
  - DoreenMichele 6y ago
    I’d love to read something that explores why social media affects females more than males, and also a first person perspective of the social pressures of young females and how much wiggle room they actually have to remain socially accepted and active whilst avoiding pressures. I'm a woman. I didn't bend to social pressure until I actually had children. Once you have a child, the amount of crap society hangs on women and all the social pressure comes at you as a form of blackmail where the subtext is "And you and your child can both go die in a fire if you, little girlie, don't go along to get along." Society generally treats mothers and their children as a package deal. Mothers tend to get custody. A woman can end up pregnant from a one-night stand and have her life irrevocably changed and the father may never know a child existed. Men bitch about having to pay alimony and child support and how unfair that is if they are no longer getting to sleep with the woman and have her pick up after him and getting to enjoy the company of the children and it gets glossed over that both having kids and the threat of potentially having kids undermines female income on a regular basis. If nothing else, women tend to support their husband's career at the expense of their own career development, either without thinking about it (because it is just a social norm rooted in history) or because if you are woman and not an idiot, it is always at the back of your mind that an unintended pregnancy with unexpected health impacts (or resulting in a special-needs child) can derail your career in a way that it typically doesn't do to a male career. This is an actual biological difference between cis women and cis men: cis women can potentially get pregnant and cis men cannot. It has profound impacts on many social things in ways that most people either don't readily see or don't want to admit because it's scary, I guess.
navait 6y ago
I’m married to an Indian woman and while I don’t have a strong gender preference, she wants a boy a lot more than a girl.
- nonamechicken 6y ago
  deleted
  - vmception 6y ago
    For anyone passing by, if you say quips like 'go find someone else' don’t be surprised when your partner does
    - nonamechicken 6y ago
      deleted
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
  - raunakdag 6y ago
    Are you guys first-gen immigrants? I’m 17 and nearly every single one of my Indian friends is part of a 2-child family (n>~50).
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - seanmcdirmid 6y ago
    My wife quips the same (wanted a girl, had a boy, wife is Chinese, I’m American), though I think it’s more about how much work is involved in having one kid let alone two.
- ArkanExplorer 6y ago
  Son preference is an unfortunate cultural element of Asian migration. "Indian-born mothers living in Canada with two children had 138 boys for every 100 girls" https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2016/04/11/canadas-missing-indian-canadian-girls-linked-to-son-preference-abortion-study.html https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2016/04/11/canadas-missing-... These preferences are lasting into the second-generations, with no indication that even at the third and later generations these preferences are lost: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-study-suggests-prenatal-sex-selection-for-boys-remains-a-trend-among/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-study-suggest... Immigration to North America from India should restrict the number of males allowed, to balance the trend of sex-selective abortion in those communities, and to increase the 'value' of females - since they will have an easier chance of migrating.
wongarsu 6y ago
I think a large part of the thinking (at least subconciously) is that if a son gets in a stupid relationship and gets someone pregnant, it's not nearly as big of an impact on his life as it is to the daughter who got in a stupid relationship and got pregnant.
freedomben 6y ago
I have two sons, three daughters, and I was one of those who said I was terrified of having a daughter and how much I would worry. It has nothing to do with thinking girls have to be parented differently and everything to do with knowing that most teenage boys and men are pieces of shit when it comes to actually loving and caring about her (just like I was in some cases with flings and tempromances that were more about excitement than deep, long-term love and affection). I worried (and still worry) about having to watch my daughter make terrible choices in men, while being utterly powerless to do anything to protect her.
- playcache 6y ago
  They said their standards for a mate based a lot on their father and he he treats the mother. So just be a good role model.
- nullsense 6y ago
  If you have a boy then you only have to worry about one boy. If you have a girl then you have to worry about all the boys.
- tomjakubowski 6y ago
  > most teenage boys and men are pieces of shit when it comes to actually loving and caring about her (just like I was in some cases with flings and tempromances that were more about excitement than deep, long-term love and affection). Do you worry about your teenage sons acting this way?
  - oblio 6y ago
    Presumably, but considering the fact that we're programmed to care more about our family than the rest of the world, it's unlikely he'll be as worried about the situation he's described than the opposite.
    - lotsofpulp 6y ago
      There’s also probably some underlying worry caused by the fact that women can generally be physically overpowered by men.
PrefixKitten 6y ago
weird. I'd only be content with a daughter. A son would worry me
HowTheStoryEnds 6y ago
I believe that's because of (the scare of) pregnancy and the certainty that the baby ends up in the mother's hands wether or not there's a willing let alone capable father.
watwut 6y ago
My friend who have constant problems with his teen girl and no with boy is exactly that case. He constantly takes issues with her make up - but had her in dancing group from childhood where makeup is basically required. Constant issues with interpreting her cloth sexually - while she did not understood that yet. Taking issues with a lot of things that are clearly unfair. She does more sport then boy and have good grades, but somehow she is lazy because she did not went biking over weekend.

ed25519FUUU 6y ago

Do you have children? They most definitely need to be parented differently. With boys there’s a lot of effort into mitigating physical damage to themselves or physical and/or emotional damage they may cause to others. With daughters, there’s less effort with physical harm and much more effort into helping their emotional well-being. I would argue that social media and media in general has disproportionately affected the minds of our daughters compared to our sons.

TeaDrunk 6y ago
> I would argue that social media and media in general has disproportionately affected the minds of our daughters compared to our sons. I would speculate it affects it in different ways. Social media puts young boys at risk of entering highly misogynistic spaces, the damage of which will be borne out on the bodies, careers, and wellbeing of women they meet later.
croissants 6y ago
The Economist (relatively) recently featured a long article about the modern lives of adolescent girls: https://archive.is/OGxxk https://archive.is/OGxxk.
User23 6y ago
I think people without sons may seriously underestimate the ingenuity, energy, and frequency with which boy toddlers attempt to kill, maim, or otherwise seriously injure themselves.
- de_Selby 6y ago
  I have a son who is a toddler right now, very well put - "ingenuity" made me laugh.
- da_big_ghey 6y ago
  Even moreso with multiple sons close in age. Thinking about the trouble my brothers and I caused on our own versus in groups versus all together, there seems to be a superlinear growth in the amount of trouble a group of boys can cause.
- testfoobar 6y ago
  Ha! I tried to explain this to parents who have only daughters. They would offer advice like "you need to give them more projects to do or you need to listen more to them." They would look on with a judging attitude as my sons would tear around playgrounds looking for sticks and rocks to arm their fort. Or they would play on the "outside" of playground structures. Imagine a 15 foot tall covered slide. They would climb on the outside of the slide - risking a serious fall. I've already seen the tables turn. Parents with teenage daughters describe things that make me shudder. At least I now have the wisdom to not judge the parents. It seems to me that the worst bullying behaviour that I hear in my social circle is perpetuated by teenage girls towards other teenage girls.
  - cycomanic 6y ago
    I think there is a strong selection bias there as well, there's significant research showing how girls and boys are treated differently when getting into "dangerous" situations. It's been my experience as a father of 2 girls that they also love to climb on the outside of playground structures. However what I see with a lot of the parents of other girls (compared to boys) is that they caution the girls a lot more and then they say my girls are so self-confident and "brave". That is not to say that there is no difference between girls and boys, but you there are also huge variations between individuals as well, the way my two daughters are in their "wildness" is so different you would not guess they are siblings.
    - 6y ago
wongarsu 6y ago
> With daughters, there’s less effort with physical harm and much more effort into helping their emotional well-being. Suicide rates for 10-14 year olds are twice as high for boys than for girls, and for 15-24 year olds four times as high. I'm sure you are describing how parenting is done in general, but not spending as much time on the emotional well-being of boys doesn't seem to be a good strategy. 1: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/suicide/rates_1999_2017.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/suicide/rates_1999_2017...
- ed25519FUUU 6y ago
  I definitely didn’t mean to discount the emotional damage done to boys by social media and media. Also the damage done to them by caging them up in schools while demanding absolute obedience and attention in “lord of the flies” situations.
  - fastball 6y ago
    You did though. You said girls need emotional support and boys you need to worry about them damaging themselves (physically) or others (emotionally). I honestly can't come up with a reading of your comment that doesn't involve discounting the emotional needs of young boys.
- ac29 6y ago
  Suicide attempts, however, are far higher in females: https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/suicide.shtml https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/suicide.shtml This is in part because males choose more effective suicide methods - they are approximately twice as likely to use firearms.
  - bitshiftfaced 6y ago
    But couldn't that be because some do it as a cry for help?
    - throwaway3699 6y ago
robin21 6y ago
I’d love to read something that explores why social media affects females more than males, and also a first person perspective of the social pressures of young females and how much wiggle room they actually have to remain socially accepted and active whilst avoiding pressures. I think a lot comes down to body image of females in society. Something as simple as the fact that females are expected to wear makeup and men do not I think can explain a lot. The vast number of activities that surround makeup create an unhealthy obsession with vanity. It’s the raw amount of time spent looking at one’s self and comparing against others. This then propagates throughout life and results in an unwinnable battle against ageing that only leads to unhappiness. A typical female social media stream contains a huge amount of beauty-related content of which a male’s does not. There are just certain interests you have to have to blend into social groups that are dramatically different for men and women. Although recently men are starting to become more vain and I hear a lot of marketing crap like “men should take more care looking after their skin/appearance” - the metrosexual thing - which I think is going down a bad path. We need less social pressures for young people...but of course there is a huge monetary incentive to get men hooked on skin care etc.
- medium_burrito 6y ago
  I'll paraphrase something I read a while back. Men have physical competition, women have emotional/social competition. Men play sports, fight, kill each other and video games imitate life. Social media is the women's version of video games, refined to weapons-grade purity.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - gonzo41 6y ago
    Yeah, Instagram really should be considered a WMD for self esteem.
- DoreenMichele 6y ago
  I’d love to read something that explores why social media affects females more than males, and also a first person perspective of the social pressures of young females and how much wiggle room they actually have to remain socially accepted and active whilst avoiding pressures. I'm a woman. I didn't bend to social pressure until I actually had children. Once you have a child, the amount of crap society hangs on women and all the social pressure comes at you as a form of blackmail where the subtext is "And you and your child can both go die in a fire if you, little girlie, don't go along to get along." Society generally treats mothers and their children as a package deal. Mothers tend to get custody. A woman can end up pregnant from a one-night stand and have her life irrevocably changed and the father may never know a child existed. Men bitch about having to pay alimony and child support and how unfair that is if they are no longer getting to sleep with the woman and have her pick up after him and getting to enjoy the company of the children and it gets glossed over that both having kids and the threat of potentially having kids undermines female income on a regular basis. If nothing else, women tend to support their husband's career at the expense of their own career development, either without thinking about it (because it is just a social norm rooted in history) or because if you are woman and not an idiot, it is always at the back of your mind that an unintended pregnancy with unexpected health impacts (or resulting in a special-needs child) can derail your career in a way that it typically doesn't do to a male career. This is an actual biological difference between cis women and cis men: cis women can potentially get pregnant and cis men cannot. It has profound impacts on many social things in ways that most people either don't readily see or don't want to admit because it's scary, I guess.

navait 6y ago

I’m married to an Indian woman and while I don’t have a strong gender preference, she wants a boy a lot more than a girl.

nonamechicken 6y ago
deleted
- vmception 6y ago
  For anyone passing by, if you say quips like 'go find someone else' don’t be surprised when your partner does
  - nonamechicken 6y ago
    deleted
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- raunakdag 6y ago
  Are you guys first-gen immigrants? I’m 17 and nearly every single one of my Indian friends is part of a 2-child family (n>~50).
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- seanmcdirmid 6y ago
  My wife quips the same (wanted a girl, had a boy, wife is Chinese, I’m American), though I think it’s more about how much work is involved in having one kid let alone two.
ArkanExplorer 6y ago
Son preference is an unfortunate cultural element of Asian migration. "Indian-born mothers living in Canada with two children had 138 boys for every 100 girls" https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2016/04/11/canadas-missing-indian-canadian-girls-linked-to-son-preference-abortion-study.html https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2016/04/11/canadas-missing-... These preferences are lasting into the second-generations, with no indication that even at the third and later generations these preferences are lost: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-study-suggests-prenatal-sex-selection-for-boys-remains-a-trend-among/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-study-suggest... Immigration to North America from India should restrict the number of males allowed, to balance the trend of sex-selective abortion in those communities, and to increase the 'value' of females - since they will have an easier chance of migrating.

wongarsu 6y ago

I think a large part of the thinking (at least subconciously) is that if a son gets in a stupid relationship and gets someone pregnant, it's not nearly as big of an impact on his life as it is to the daughter who got in a stupid relationship and got pregnant.

freedomben 6y ago

I have two sons, three daughters, and I was one of those who said I was terrified of having a daughter and how much I would worry. It has nothing to do with thinking girls have to be parented differently and everything to do with knowing that most teenage boys and men are pieces of shit when it comes to actually loving and caring about her (just like I was in some cases with flings and tempromances that were more about excitement than deep, long-term love and affection). I worried (and still worry) about having to watch my daughter make terrible choices in men, while being utterly powerless to do anything to protect her.

playcache 6y ago
They said their standards for a mate based a lot on their father and he he treats the mother. So just be a good role model.
nullsense 6y ago
If you have a boy then you only have to worry about one boy. If you have a girl then you have to worry about all the boys.
tomjakubowski 6y ago
> most teenage boys and men are pieces of shit when it comes to actually loving and caring about her (just like I was in some cases with flings and tempromances that were more about excitement than deep, long-term love and affection). Do you worry about your teenage sons acting this way?
- oblio 6y ago
  Presumably, but considering the fact that we're programmed to care more about our family than the rest of the world, it's unlikely he'll be as worried about the situation he's described than the opposite.
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    There’s also probably some underlying worry caused by the fact that women can generally be physically overpowered by men.

PrefixKitten 6y ago

weird. I'd only be content with a daughter. A son would worry me

HowTheStoryEnds 6y ago

I believe that's because of (the scare of) pregnancy and the certainty that the baby ends up in the mother's hands wether or not there's a willing let alone capable father.

watwut 6y ago

My friend who have constant problems with his teen girl and no with boy is exactly that case. He constantly takes issues with her make up - but had her in dancing group from childhood where makeup is basically required. Constant issues with interpreting her cloth sexually - while she did not understood that yet. Taking issues with a lot of things that are clearly unfair. She does more sport then boy and have good grades, but somehow she is lazy because she did not went biking over weekend.