#Boymom Culture, What Hath You Wrought?
The internet did not invent the Toxic #Boymom but it sure turned up the volume
My dad’s mother gave birth to four sons in a row. When she got pregnant a fifth time, she told friends and family that she was “finally gonna have my girl.”
She had twin boys.
My grandmother never referred to herself as a “boy mom,” as far as I was able to tell, even though, as a mother of six male children, she would have been one of the most credentialed.
Unlike the gender reveal party (invented circa 2010, Chicago, IL, by a woman whose kid grew up to be nonbinary and has since called for an end to the practice), the #boymom as a named and hashtagged identity is another product of parenting in the social media age that started innocently enough and has bloomed into a Cordyceps-infected cringe monster.
The simplest and most benign application of the term is a way for women who have male children to identify and commiserate with each other about the unique foibles of raising boys, given the fact that the mothers have no memories of being little boys themselves and are thus flying blind into boyhood. That I can sympathize with. I have no idea what it’s like to be a boy, either.
Developmentally, baby boys tend to be more challenging than girls in some ways, albeit only slightly– they’re less cognitively advanced when they’re infants and toddlers, they take longer to potty train, they are off and running with gross motor skills more quickly and their brains tend to reward risk-taking, which means, according to a friend with two sons, “If you have boys, you’re going to end up in the emergency room a lot because of all the dumb ways they hurt themselves.”
But again, just because population-wide assessments may indicate a general trend doesn’t mean that every single little boy is more prone to poop jokes and broken limbs than every single little girl, and that little boys are all naturally more rough and tumble than all little girls. An anecdata counterexample: I sometimes take Juniper to an indoor play “gym” for babies, and the only kids who have ever hit or shoved her have been other girl babies. There are sweet, gentle, thoughtful boys and nightmare bruiser girls. Toddlers don’t know how boys or girls are supposed to act. Toddlers are just their terrible, hilarious selves. Treating toddlers as though their gender is their destiny can be a self-fulfilling prophesy.