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Comment by c22 | Hacker News Reader

> As a dude, I'd probably find that useful, as weird as it may sound.

It only sounds weird because you prefaced it with "as a dude" implying what? That ladies have some sort of genetic knowledge of baby rearing techniques? That they receive special classes about it in highschool? I don't know, sounds weird though.

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To be fair, young girls are heavily socialized to play with dolls, to play "mommy and baby" games, to push around toy baby carriages... in essence the "average" girl has been trained for motherhood her whole life.

Thats a pretty big cliche.

The cliché is girls that are socialized that way. It's still overwhelmingly true that girls will have dolls more often than boys and that it will format their behavior.

Recognising that is not perpetuating or condoning it.

That also doesn't mean they have a clue on how to deal with an actual baby

Tell me the last time you saw a boy pushing a toy stroller. I see little girls pushing them every week -- starting before they are 2.

Just because things make you uncomfortable doesn't mean they are cliches.

Having worked in childcare / early childhood education, I've seen it a lot. Kids younger than about 5 or 6 don't care. The boys love to play dressup and the girls love the sandbox with the toy cars. As they get older some start to fall into stereotypical gender roles... and even then it's usually obvious that they're learning from / being indoctrinated by their parents. My use of the word indoctrinated is only to indicate that sometimes these gender roles are passively learned from the parents example, but in some cases there are parents that actively enforce / teach their kids to follow gender roles. For example, I've seen a father, on arriving to collect his son, react almost with horror to see the boy in a skirt playing in the mock kitchen.

Cliche is the wrong word. Gender roles in society are a topic that spans many disciplines and has a whole lot of detail to discuss. They are a huge thing, and you're right: the gender role assigned to girls does prescribe for them a lot of child rearing practice. That said, after seeing what some kids will do to a baby doll, I can confidently assert that such play is no substitute for actual instruction.

I completely agree with you, except on the younger than 5 or 6 don't care part. Maybe don't care as much, but studies suggest that gendered socialization starts occurring before 18 months. I think that this indoctrination is more common than people realize (and realizing that it's likely happened to you can be a hard pill to swallow). Especially in areas like mine, where most families are single income, it seems like the girls are always playing with dolls, strollers, ovens.

It makes me very sad.

But people will argue that it's innate until they're blue in the face, and use it as examples to 'prove' that our brains are sexed.

But it still doesn't help people to actually know what to do.

If the parents can't figure out what to do, they shouldn't have had a kid. It's not rocket science. I've seen some of the dumbest people with tons of kids, still alive and kicking.

To be fair, playing with dolls and pushing around baby carriages offers extremely limited practical "training" for caring for an actual live baby.

My partner is a girl! We had children together. She played with dolls, toy baby carriages AND mummy and baby games.

She had no idea how to bathe a baby safely, how to dress it, safely, how to hold it safely, how to play with it safely, how to clean its bum, how to put on a nappy, how to bottle feed it, how to breast feed it ....the list of things she didn't know was endless....

Neither did I.

We figured it out through a combination of trial and error ("oops, wet babies are slippery and easy to drop") parental advice and phamplets.

its not rocket science, its not easy and the "average" girl has NO insider information.

> and the "average" girl has NO insider information

Exactly. Before the baby was born, I took a (men only) course on fatherhood. It was both very funny as well as informational. Afterwards, I knew a lot more than my girlfriend. This helped me because I found out some women can get quite possessive (for lack of a better term). She'd still blurt out "I know best because I'm the mother", but I definitely wasn't ignorant anymore.

I'm baffled as to why you're getting downvotes. As a dudette, I have never felt more clueless since having my baby, and it is only through extensive research that I have any idea what to do with him.

If "maternal instinct" is a real thing, then I guess there's something defective about me.

At least where I'm at, its more that most girls with multiple younger siblings or cousins have probably dealt with them under parents, aunts, etc. supervision than boys. Mommy and daughter bonding time (sometimes Grandma and Aunts).

Learned behavior reinforced with toys of the same nature. Lots of girls these days don't have that extended family or siblings to learn with.

I'm turning 30 soon, and my female friends seem to get invitations to look at someones newborn. I sure don't any of that.

Look up the male / female percentages on daycare workers and you'll get the consequences of that behavior.

The parent didn't imply "maternal instinct". That's one explanation for the gap in knowledge. The other is socialization. It's no secret that girls play "house" more, play with dolls, are taught by traditionally maternal role models, are more likely to take babysitting classes, etc.

More women than men plan a large part of their life around being a parent.

I downvoted him for expressing the factually incorrect and IMO dangerous notion that knowledge has to be inborn or learned by means of formal organized schooling. And for ignoring the obvious fact that the reason why modern women are clueless around children and men clueless around women (especially in certain circles :p) is that they spend their youth locked up with other clueless children and discouraged from expressing their gender (because equality and whatnot) instead of hanging out with experienced adults and learning from them. My $.02.

I think you misunderstood what I was trying to express. I was providing not an exhaustive list of modes of learning, but a (non-exhaustive) list of hypothetical vectors that could lead to the vast majority of one gender being expected to be inherently expert at a subject.

A sort of naive question: don't they? (the genetic knowledge part)

Ok, maybe advanced stuff, stuff we've discovered after the introduction of modern medicine is not included, but doesn't the instinctive maternal bond also include some sort of generic component regarding behavior around children?

Humans are mammals, and have maternal instincts just like all the rest.

I'm not sure parental instincts include bathing techniques.

My instincts told me "no" when the midwife suggested adding olive oil to the bath water. I didn't listen. If you've ever fought a greased piglet you would understand what happened next.

Apart from an strong instinctual drive to love and care for children there's no "knowledge" about how to do that. Studies have shown that mother's brains light up differently in response to cries from her own child, and there's a strong anxiety when it's crying, pleasure when it's happy, etc. (Interestingly enough, I couldn't find any studies done on men, but I don't see any reason that fathers shouldn't react similarly)

But there's no "this is how you rock babies," "this is how you breastfeed," etc. I don't see how that would even work. Genes aren't magical. And I've seen some really clueless mothers...

I don't think so. I'm currently a stay-at-home dad of a 10 month old and we've found that my instincts regarding the baby are often better than my wife's. She often has no idea what to do and defers to my judgement.

Maybe, but even something you'd think is all instinct like breast feeding is a great deal of hit and miss. A lot of mothers find it hard to get the baby to feed, to the extent that most nativity units will have nurses helping mothers figure it out (whereas for some it just happens without the slightest problem), and it's not unusual for it to take days to learn to do it properly.

For those that haven't read it, "The Female Brain" is a fantastic book about human nature and discusses how male and female hormonal levels fluctuate throughout life and how that influences behavior.

A man's and woman's oxytocin levels are elevated after child birth but it's much higher in women. So the PP reference that a man is more clueless when it come to playing and touching their baby is not without scientific basis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maternal_bond

We're talking about maternal knowledge. Just because a mother might do anything for her child doesn't imply that she knows precisely what to do.

> That ladies have some sort of genetic knowledge of baby rearing techniques?

It's pretty well-known...

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