Barack and Michelle Obama are the parents of two girls. This is not news to you; Sasha and Malia Obama are going to be the youngest kids in the White House since Amy Carter, and while Barack and Michelle deserve credit for keeping them reasonably seqestered from media scrutiny (because kids should be off-limits), they seem like decent kids from what anecdotes have come out.
That Sasha and Malia are girls, though, is relatively normal for the White House. For some reason — most likely random chance, given the small universe of people we’re talking about — presidents who’ve had kids in the White House have tended to have girls. Dubya had Jenna and Barbara (for a little while, anyway), Bill Clinton had Chelsea, Jimmy Carter had Amy. Gerry Ford had three older sons, but his daughter, Susan, was the only child left when he was in the white house. Dick Nixon had Trisha and Julie; you have to go back to John F. Kennedy, who had John-John and Caroline, to find a presidential son who was of the right age to grow up in the White House.
Of course, that doesn’t mean presidents haven’t had sons. Dubya’s dad obviously did, and so did Reagan and Ford. Kennedy did, and so did Eisenhower. It’s just that with the exception of Kennedy, the sons haven’t been quite at the right age to be White House kids.
Melissa McEwan puts forth a reasonable theory to explain this — men with daughters tend to be more feminist and better able to relate to women, and therefore better able to win the votes of women — but the truth is probably more prosaic. People who run for president tend to be at least in their 50s. At 47, Barack Obama will be the fifth-youngest president in American history. It’s simple math that the older you are, the older your children are likely to be. Ronald Reagan had sons, but given Reagan’s age when he took office, it’s unsurprising that those sons were grown-ups. Given that most of the men to serve as president in the past fifty years were older than 55 when they took office, it’s hardly a shock that a good chunk of them didn’t have kids in the White House. Of the six who will have as of January, one will have had a boy and a girl, two a girl who was an only child, two will have had two sisters, and one will have had one girl — but one with three older brothers. In other words, we’re hardly talking about anything other than an apparent statistical fluke.
Or maybe it’s just that boys suck, as Belinda Luscombe argues in the pages of Time:
So why no modern manlings in the east wing? I have a theory, born of careful historical analysis and solipsism: It’s impossible to be elected to the White House if you have young sons, because that would mean you have to campaign with them.
Campaigning and raising sons are mutually exclusive. Campaigning requires lots of travel, enormous amounts of time in the public eye and months and months of sitting down quietly listening to the same guy talking while wearing your good clothes. It’s like 11 straight months of being in church when you’re the preacher’s kid — with long car rides in between. It’s torture on adults, let alone children. But it’s worse for boys. Try this experiment: next month ask your son to be on his best behavior in front of other people, from now until November 2009. See how far you get.
To be fair, you won’t get very far asking a son to be good for nine months. Of course, you won’t get very far asking your daughter to be good for nine months, and anyone who thinks you will has obviously never met a little girl. Kids are kids — they do dumb things, act out from time to time, and generally misbehave. And that’s good, because they’re kids, and that’s how they learn what misbehaviors will get them in trouble and what misbehaviors won’t.
“Boys are generally more competitive, risk-taking and defiant, which makes them less manageable,” says Meg Meeker M.D., author of Boys Should be Boys and Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters. And the 24/7 scrutiny of the modern campaign makes every small risky and defiant act a public affair. So if you get a little bored of what dad’s saying, because he’s dad and you’ve heard it eleventy million times before, you end up here.
Yes, Andrew Giuliani was a rapscallion in that video, which I remember as being an endearing thing; certainly more endearing than the fact that a decade or so later, Andrew all-but-disowned his own father over Rudy’s serial infidelity and mistreatment of his mother. Certainly, of all the things that I think of as being embarassments to Rudy, his son being a kid when his son was a kid is at the bottom of the list.
The Obama campaign was noted for its discipline, its rigor and its self control: three things most young boys are not noted for. Of course, Obama didn’t take Malia, 10, and Sasha, 7, everywhere he campaigned. But long fatherly absences may make the boys even more likely to be unhelpful. “If dad’s away on the campaign trail a lot, [boys’] tendencies towards defiance and impulsivity are exacerbated,” says Meeks.
Young girls, on the other hand, can be an asset to a candidate’s image. “There’s definitely something in the father daughter-relationship that makes being in the public eye much easier,” says Meeks. “Girls want to please their mothers and particularly their fathers. Their dads can take their daughters places and do things with them and the girls won’t act out.”
Oh, really? I see, so when my daughter refuses to listen to me and get her coat on, despite my telling her to do it seventy-five times, that’s her trying to please me? Don’t get me wrong, I have the best kid ever, but she’s more than capable of being defiant when she wants to be. So are the Obama kids. You may recall that when Barack Obama bought his informercial, he said Sasha’s first question was whether it would pre-empt Disney. Certainly, she wasn’t looking out for her dad’s welfare there; she was being an ordinary kid.
What the Obama campaign did with their children was to minimize their time in the spotlight; yes, Sasha and Malia would show up from time to time, but by and large, the campaign let them go to school and live reasonably normal lives. If the kids had been Sasha and Barack III, I suspect that the results would have been much the same — we would have seen the kids from time to time, they’d be cute, as kids are wont to be, we’d hear stories about the kids wanting a puppy when they got to the White House and occasionally playfully ribbing their dad — you know, exactly what we’ve heard thus far.
The simple truth is that boys aren’t beasts who are going to run amok at a minute provocation, any more than girls are perfect, pristine creatures who never raise their voices above mezzo-piano. Kids are kids — rambunctious, goofy kids. And they are more than capable of being beastly or pristine at any given time, just like adults. And that has nothing to do with gender.
I’ve always had the impression that the majority of stereotypical boy/girl behaviors are cultural constructs and not the result of biological differences between boys and girls. Our society is preoccupied, I think to an unhealthy extent, to the role that gender plays in the formation of a child’s identity. There is so much more to a child, the way he/she behaves, and the person he/she is than gender. The same could be said about adults, but it is especially true for children before puberty, when the physical differences between boys and girls are most subtle.
I do believe that there are biologically-based differences in the brains of boys and girls, which influence how they act. The case of David Reimer – the boy who was turned into a girl after a botched circumcision, and later changed back – confirms this, as do the experiences of transgender children, who can’t be persuaded to feel and act like they gender they are psychologically not. However, these differences are not nearly as clear-cut as society would like them to be. I don’t think we really know yet what makes a female and what makes a male, psychologically. We have clues as to what gender might mean, but no certainties.
And if the boys are more likely to run amok, it’s because their parents are more permissive!
It’s a self-fulfilling theory. If you think boys are more rambunctious, when you raise them you’re going to let them be more rambunctious, because they’re fulfilling your expectations of what is right for them, and likely aren’t going to want to punish them for their “nature”. If you believe girls are calmer, you’re going to punish them for being rambunctious because you’re going to think it’s against their nature, and thus they’re doing something wrong. And no matter how much you observe, it’s not going to matter, because the boys are energetic, girls are relaxed stereotypes are so prevalent that most parents without thinking are going to encourage their children to fulfill them.
How depressing that someone who is educated enough to know the word “solipsism” was never taught the idea of “socialization.”
All my workplaces exhibited name clusters – one office had a plethora of women named Sue, another had an overabundance of Daves. The place I work now has far too many Johns.
Humans seek out patterns and try to explain them as part of our nature and training. But sometimes there are no explainations beyond random chance . . . . clusters happen!
To add to marmalade’s point:
There are often peaks that last a few years in terms of a name for a certain gender. Sometimes it lasts decades or even longer, but few names are so popular to be at peak all the time over centuries.
Sarah might have been the rage in the 90 and pretty popular before, but maybe we’ll see a wave of Julia. And a certain gendered name might become neutral, or vice-versa (Kelly tends to become more used for female infants in recent years for example).
It’s like the sheep mentality. though the sheep mentality now is to find original unspellable names apparently.
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Edited to add:
I think socialization is both underestimated (people such as in the article) and overestimated (some people who swear we are blank slates at birth). The answer lies where we don’t know (too many unknown variables), but my safe bet is with the middle since neither innateness or socialization theories fit the bill on their own.
I used to think that ‘gender specific behaviour’ was way more nurture than nature. That lasted till I got kids of my own and was confronted with many many young children. Now I am inclined to think there is much more nature in there than I’d like to admit.
With three boys, currently 6 & 8 & 10 I can assure you that they can be cute as buttons too. They are eager to please, I’m usually quite happy to take them someplace where there are lots of people. They are also not ultimately fixed in their ‘gender roles’: stuff like cooking & playing with beads & reading are amongst their favourite occupations and all three are great lovers of cuddling. The oldest two have a number of girls they like and play with, female classmates they invite over – and some of those girls are real tomboys, so they aren’t always into classic gender behaviour either.
Yet there is not denying that boys are more physical, more present, more violent. Not every boy of course, the individual variety is big enough that there are plenty of boys fitting the female stereotype and vice versa. My own middle son is more of a typical girl than a typical boy in behaviour and likings. But people who assume that it is all a social construct of the result of overly permissive behaviour usually seem to have limited exposure to large groups of (very) young kids.
Or people with an hate agenda like NARTH who prefer to pathologize anyone who doesn’t fit their mold. They might have seen it themselves, or have “treated” it (George Rekers, Richard Green, Kenneth Zucker), their opinion is nonetheless that it is a defect and something to avoid, if not a “sin”. Their “treatment” often involves outright coercion with parental approval and participation (parents are usually the one coming to them for “gender non-conforming” behavior).
This idea used to be mainstream (before the 50s, it was the ONLY idea) and is now considered archaic, but it still has followers. For one Zucker operates his children and adolescent gender identity clinic in Toronto (and anyone under 12 is fair game for the coercive package). Green is head of the UK’s official gender identity clinic, and it’s easy to see how utterly retrograde their system is because of him.
Am I the only one thatsaw this article as racially problematic in its suggestion that Michelle should breed one for the team? The US has a history of policing the reproduction of WOC and this little “puff piece” does just that.