Last night, around dinnertime the doorbell rang. When I opened it to find a clipboard-clad solicitor obviously looking for donations or a signature, earnestly I wasn’t thrilled. But she had me at hello when she said, “I’m here to work for equal pay and equal rights to health care.” After we talked for a few minutes, my little boy curiously also appeared at the door and asked what we were discussing. We explained and he stayed quiet. But later in the evening he said to me unprompted, “it sure made sense” that women and men were paid the same amount of money for the same job.
Then this morning I stumbled upon this cartoon on instagram. Hidden truths re-imagined in the pant suit! Something about this felt exceedingly timely with 2015 being a time where a woman is a front-running candidate for President of The United States, girls now report more than anything else they’d like to grow up to a doctor, and a time where we’re still working hard to chip away at supporting women and men equally in the workplace as they raise families. As we raise our little girls to feel unencumbered and as we raise our little boys to feel the just the same, I couldn’t help but feel the thrill from this “superhero” re-design. I say we share it with our children…also consider these 3 articles today:
3 Things To Read While Raising Girls And Boys To Value Each Other Equally:
- Thoughts from Gloria: Gloria Steinem Explains Why Feminism Reached A Turning Point in 2015. A group of my friends and colleagues have been discussing this article via email over the past few days. These two quotes and lessons really resonated with us where she instructs: “I learned the simple lessons of organizing: If you want people to listen to you, you have to listen to them. If you want to know how people live, you have to go where they live. These are fundamental ground-up lessons, but I didn’t understand that they would be useful in my own country. It took me a while after I came home. It took the Civil Rights Movement, and the war movement, and then the women’s movement to understand that these were universal guidelines.” And then there is this one: “Tell the truth about what has happened to you even to small groups of people and chances are that you will discover that a version of that has happened to other people, too.” We really are never alone in our experiences. When we speak up, the crowd can help us know we belong.
- Why We Have To Keep Focusing On Failure: Tenacity still will be a very important part of success for our little girls and boys and they advance into a rapidly changing world. I re-read this 2011 NYT Magazine article, “What If The Secret To Success Is Failure?” about the value of “grit” and character and how tenacity and outlook make up a huge part of how we succeed with our ideas. As we all work to improve our community, our home, and our lives as this 2016 resolution season arrives in earnest on Friday, we have to remember that our failures can help shape our profound success. I think we have to detail these truths openly with our children.
- Have Big Dreams: Things may be shifting for US children. I loved these graphics and charts and the story here about moms, dads, and their children and where our children are headed in this quick Forbes article, “What Kids in 2015 Want To Be When They Grow Up.” It’s, in part, a serious discussion about norms for careers in science, technology, and engineering and how they may be shifting. But this quote was pretty nice, too… “Among three-to-four-year-olds, the No. 1 profession is super hero.”
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