From Left to Write Book Club: Raising My Rainbow
I received a copy of “Raising My Rainbow” free of charge for my participation in this book club. The book link below is an affiliate link.
It’s time for another From Left to Write book club post (though I’m getting this one up a bit late – oops!) and I’m excited this time to be writing alongside some blends! For those who missed my last post, From Left to Write encourages blogging not a review of each book, but a post on anything the book inspired. Yes, anything! I’m here today to write about gender stereotypes and kids, an obvious choice given the description of Lori Duron’s Raising My Rainbow:
“Parenting is not an easy job, but what happens when your son loves to wear dresses and plays with toys marketed for girls? Lori Duron encounters this and much more with her youngest son, CJ. In Raising My Rainbow: Adventures in Raising a Fabulous, Gender Creative Son, Duron shares her discovery about CJ’s gender non-conformity and how her family accepts him for who he is.”
Lori (before this book, she had and still has her blog of the same name) and her husband, Matt, do a great job of not pushing CJ to continue in typical “boy sports” he tries and quickly loses interest in. She mentions that if he asks her to take dance or art classes, she will enroll him and not try to change his mind. That’s great, but it also got me thinking about the amount of “gender-conforming” activities young boys (versus young girls) have available to them.