Help them grow out of the box

Sarika Kanwar

A girl’s favourite colour is pink, they say, and a boy’s is blue. What if a girl likes blue and a boy loves pink? Would that be ‘normal’? Will we accept it? Or we consciously brainwash children into the pink and blue boxes, where they’ll keep living their whole life?

The minute a child is born, we create boundaries. We draw a circle around them, a circle of gender. Nature has already given each one of us a gender, based on our physiology. Do we need to cement it with things like behaviour, colour and hair? The very first time that we tell our son to ‘be a man’, or daughter to ‘sit like a girl’, we unknowingly fence their personalities. We create a wall around them, of how to be a man or a woman.  And we feel happy that our children will grow confined to these walls. Limiting them makes us feel secure, secure that they are ‘normal’. Is it normal to grow in confinement? Is it healthy for the mind? Anything that remains stagnant can never be healthy. There has to be a free flow of ideas, likes, dislikes and opinions. We need to water the mind with fresh ideas, we need to be open to new spaces. Only then, can a child’s mind grow strong and healthy.

If a boy cries, we admonish him, ‘don’t be a girl’. Crying, as per our ‘box’, is a sign of weakness associated with girls. And if a girl is aggressive, we tell her ‘be gentle and soft’. A girl needs to be protected and the boy needs to protect her. I wonder from what is she supposed to be protected? From the world? But she was born into the same world as boys. Why do we put her in the ‘weak’ box and the boy in the ‘strong’ one, right at birth. Boys aren’t supposed to play with dolls. They’re laughed upon. Parents replace dolls with cars, so that their son is considered normal. And vice versa for girls. Even if a girl wants to play cars with boys, she’s asked to play with ‘other girls’. That’s how we have groomed them. 

We can talk about umpteen props from these boxes. Let’s break the walls from around our children and let them grow into healthy minds. Let the girls not feel the need to be ‘protected’ from this world. Instead, make them feel safe. Let the boys not feel the need to ‘protect’ the girls. Instead, make them feel respectful of ‘fellow’ beings. Let the girls dream of becoming astronauts and boys of becoming dancers. Girls can be car racers and boys can cook and clean at home. 

Isn’t it time that the box is thrown out of our minds? We always encourage our children to think out of the box, why don’t we just lift the box and free our children of this imprisonment? Let them feel the beauty of this world. Let them express without fear of being judged or laughed at. Let them grow up into not men or women, but into strong, well-nourished minds.

Let’s not bring up sons and daughters, let’s raise humans. Give power to the mind, not the body. A boy looks as pretty in pink as a girl looks beautiful in blue.