Integrating Gender and Culture in Parenting

Show parents how to help their children break free of the artificial limitations placed upon them by society’s gender and cultural expectations!

This book presents both theoretical and practical ideas for integrating gender and culture into parenting. Unlike other books on the subject, this one examines interventions and activities, and suggests discussion topics that provide children with the skills to become critical consumers and thinkers. You’ll learn to help children discover and celebrate who they are, while infusing the message that they should notice and challenge exaggerated stereotypes of gender and ethnicity.

From the editor: “If therapists can coach parents in helping to inoculate their children, beginning at early ages, against the negative effects of gender socialization, perhaps the work of developing equal relationships in their friendships and intimate relationships will be less taxing as they grow and mature. Additionally, as children are taught to challenge rigid gender and ethnicity messages, perhaps they will feel a greater sense of flexibility as they dream about who they want to become and how they want to live their lives.”

This essential book will teach you to help children defeat the harmful media messages they’re bombarded by. Integrating Gender and Culture in Parenting:

• presents 20 simple ideas and 5 group activities to teach children about social justice in our everyday lives
• explores parental socialization practices and the values transmitted to school-aged and young adult offspring, focusing on the way parents’ teaching styles integrate race and gender
• investigates the parenting practices of middle-class, dual-earner couples who feel that they are successfully balancing family and work-with a look at the specific strategies these couples use to achieve an appropriate balance
• shows what family therapists should know about sexuality education, and highlights the specific roles that feminist family therapists can play with parents, children, and adolescents to help children be more sexually responsible and less likely to put themselves in sexually risky situations
• examines the gender messages found in 63 articles from the top three selling parenting magazines in the United States

In addition, you’ll find two revealing and insightful chapters in which interviewer Lori Lund discusses the cultural scripting that American boys and girls are subjected to, with:

• Jackson Katz-one of America’s leading anti-sexist male activists and the creator/director of the United States Marine Corps Gender Violence Prevention Program, and
• Mary Pipher-respected sociologist, educator, and bestselling author of Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls and Hunger Pains