Boy moms and girl dads, let’s be done with gendered parenting labels | Canada Voices

There are plenty of things that parents do that are absolutely none of my business. Calling themselves “boy moms” and “girl dads,” unfortunately, has become everyone’s business.

For your consideration: Anne Hathaway is a self-described boy mom. Earlier this year, the actor used the term while explaining how raising two sons has influenced the way she dresses, so that she can go from a work meeting to a pickup basketball game at a moment’s notice.

Channing Tatum, too, has enthusiastically embraced his girl-dad status, having talked about overcoming his initial fear that he wouldn’t be able to connect with his daughter because he didn’t know how to braid hair or paint nails.

What makes the Hathaway and Channing examples grating is how they reduce parenting to the most basic gestures and tired gender clichés: braiding hair, playing sports, simply showing up for their kids. It feels outdated.

Then there is the more unsettling end of the spectrum. Brace yourself. In May, actor and writer Jenny Mollen went viral after posting photos cuddling her 12-year-old in bed captioned: “Your eldest son will be the most toxic guy you ever date.”

In a recent essay where she calls herself a boy mom, she doubled down. In it, she also described her sons’ future partners using derogatory language, claiming they will “weaponize my flaws in therapy.” Yikes. To be clear, treating future girlfriends as rivals is perhaps the most extreme manifestation of boy-mom culture that can veer into possessiveness.

These examples are obviously not the same, but they get at why the increasingly ubiquitous language of boy moms and girl dads give me a tremendous ick. We have taken the completely ordinary fact of having a child of a particular gender and turned it into an identity, one that often relies on stale assumptions about what boys and girls are like, and what they require from their parents. Raising a son means signing up for chaos and an unusually intense mother-son bond; raising a daughter means a dad gets extra credit for talking about feelings or showing up to her dance recital. It feels performative.

Despite how chronically online this phenomenon feels, none of it is new. The BoyMom hashtag was already being used millions of times on Instagram by 2018, while “girl dad” exploded into the mainstream in 2020 after Kobe Bryant’s death, when ESPN anchor Elle Duncan recalled the basketball player proudly describing himself that way.

Lauren Furey, a communications professor at California State Polytechnic University, and Andrea Hall, assistant professor of public relations at Middle Tennessee State University, studied how both identities play out on social media and found that the two labels carry very different expectations. “Girl dad has allowed men to show a softer side of themselves,” Furey says in an interview. “Granted, it’d be nice to see a softer side with a father and a son, too.”

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Boy-mom culture, on the other hand, reinforces a more traditional idea of gender. The pair’s research involved analysis of 50 Instagram posts each day over several weeks in March, 2021. In those posts, Furey says there was still a sense that mothers were expected to “join the boy world” – dressing up like superheroes, playing the games their sons wanted to play – rather than expanding what that world might look like if it were, say, softer.

What feels new about this discussion is the cultural climate. We’re living through an online revival of hyper-specific gender identities: tradwives, masculine “provider” husbands, divine femininity, alpha males. Old-fashioned gender roles are packaged up in shiny, algorithm-friendly aesthetics, but all of these ideas are still guided by the impulse that gender tells us something essential about who we are and how we should behave.

Which leads us to what I find to be the most uncomfortable truth: girl dads and boy moms are not judged equally. Furey and Hall’s research found that women are already culturally associated with parenting children of either gender, while fathers are still more strongly associated with sons. So, when a man visibly embraces his daughter’s world and plays with dolls, it is perceived as extraordinary. “They’re going above and beyond,” Hall says with a laugh. It’s new packaging of familiar messaging.

The girl dad is typically framed as evolved and refreshingly comfortable with femininity. A boy mom, meanwhile, can barely sneeze online without being psychoanalyzed: A sentimental post about her son becomes evidence of enmeshment, a joke about his future wife becomes internalized misogyny, and too much pride in the relationship gets read as the makings of a nightmare mother-in-law. But, says Furey, “so much of our identity as mothers is tied to our children.”

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As kids grow up, move away and form new relationships, a mother may feel she is losing not only the closeness she once had with them, but a piece of the role she was expected to build herself around. Ultimately, moms are trapped in a lose-lose situation: too attached and they’re raising man-children, too detached and they’re failing at their maternal role.

So, okay, maybe the problem isn’t that there can never be anything distinct about raising a son or daughter. It’s the assumption that those differences are predetermined: boys are wild and physical, while girls are delicate and emotional. And once “boy mom” or “girl dad” becomes part of a parent’s identity, those assumptions can become self-fulfilling. You expect your son to be rough-and-tumble, so you encourage the sports and shrug off the tears; you expect your daughter to be sensitive, so you marvel at her emotional intelligence and treat her toughness like a surprise.

Even when it’s affectionate, the label can narrow the range of who a child is allowed to be before they’ve had much chance to figure it out for themselves. Kids are so much more interesting and nuanced than that. Why not just be parents raising kids to be whoever they want to be?

Furey and Hall are hopeful that parenting language both online and offline will eventually catch up to the point where gender is stripped away. But I’m more skeptical as to whether these terms, or what they represent, will ever truly cease to exist. We’ve gotten better at recognizing the most blatant versions of gender stereotyping, yet we keep finding cuter and more socially acceptable ways to reintroduce the same ideas.

Social media only makes those identities easier to package and reward, turning a child’s gender into content and even personal branding. As we’ve been learning lately, gender roles have a frustrating habit of getting a makeover and bounding back louder and uglier than ever.