Too many parents put their sons on a pedestal – and set them up to fail

When I was 11, I had a little cry in the bathroom when I found out my mum was having another girl. It’s a really awful thing to admit because that little girl grew up to be one of my sisters, who I love. But at the time, my siblings and I desperately wanted a boy in the family. I obviously didn’t hate girls. I was one of four, now one of five. But by 11, I already understood the assignment. Being a boy in my community was different. A son was something to celebrate. Girls, however, we came with responsibility. We were a burden. Boys came with value. My parents kept trying until they finally got their boy. He was the last one, and of course we love him, too. Recently, when my parents were annoying me about something, probably something I’d already explained to them 15 times in broken Benglish, I looked them squarely in the eye and said: “You do realise that when you’re both doubly incontinent, it won’t be your future daughter-in-law wiping your arses? It’ll be us five daughters.” Funnily enough, they understood that. I was joking. But not really. And I watched something dawn on their faces that looked a lot like: “Hmmm she’s probably right.” In many South Asian communities, daughters traditionally marry into their husband’s family, while sons remain connected to, and historically often live with, their parents. That’s culture, not an Islamic requirement, despite the two often being conflated. Versions of this tradition exist across Hindu, Sikh and Muslim communities. The logic, therefore, wasn’t difficult to understand. A daughter would eventually belong to somebody else’s family. A son stayed yours. He would bring home a wife who would become part of your family. Her income would contribute towards your household costs, she would look after her husband and, more importantly, look after his parents. This may have changed considerably now but it was certainly the status quo when I was growing up. A friend of mine started Pink Ladoo, a campaign challenging the South Asian tradition of celebrating the birth of a boy by handing out ladoos, an Indian sweet, while the arrival of a girl often wasn’t celebrated in the same way, if at all. Her intervention was beautifully simple: when a girl is born, hand out pink ladoos and celebrate her too. We’ve all seen a modern version of this at gender reveal parties: the unhinged dad who looks absolutely devastated when the smoke turns pink and starts smashing the neutral-coloured pinatas. For a long time, I thought that this was a brown family problem. It isn’t. Certainly, when I was growing up, boys and girls were raised very differently. Girls noticed what needed doing. We helped. We remembered all the little details. We checked whether Mum was okay. What jabs Dad needed before his annual trip to Bangladesh. We cooked, cleaned, did laundry and absorbed all that invisible labour from an incredibly young age, but it became evident talking to my non-brown friends that putting sons on a pedestal was a universal theme. I visited a young male cousin’s house as a kid. His plate of food was brought to him at the table while I was expected to go into the kitchen and serve myself. I remember thinking: “I’m the bloody guest here.” And it isn’t always some consciously misogynistic father imposing these rules, although it can be. Mothers do it too. Loving, progressive women can dote on their sons in ways they would never dream of doting on their daughters. I once had a very heated debate about this on an episode of Brown Girls Do It Too. A male guest argued that mothers enable their sons. And I agreed with him. They can. But my response was: “You’re a grown man. If your mum brings a plate of food to your bedroom but expects your sister to get her own, don’t just sit there eating it. Take the f**king plate to your sister.” At some point, men have to take responsibility for dismantling the privilege they benefit from too. But why would you question a system that appears to make your life easier? For years, I thought about all of this primarily in terms of the damage it did to girls: making us feel inadequate, second class to men and like we were never quite good enough. But in a strange way, a whole generation of us were gaslit. We were told we were less capable and less valuable, while simultaneously being put through the wringer from such a young age that we became incredibly capable. We learned to juggle everything, notice what needed doing, take responsibility and look after ourselves and everybody else. It’s only as I’ve got older that I’ve started to wonder: what did that same system do to the boys? We thought we were favouring our sons. What if, in some ways, the people that are supposed to love them the most, the parents, inadvertently set them up to fail? Because the messaging to girls has transformed during my lifetime. Be independent. Get educated. Have a career. Earn your own money. Buy your own home. Believe that your life can be whatever you want it to be. Women have listened. But what was the equivalent conversation with boys? Have we done enough to teach boys that equality requires something radical from them too? And by radical, I mean the bare minimum. To notice what needs doing. To care for other people. To take responsibility – without being asked. To develop the emotional and practical skills that girls have been expected to learn almost by default. We spend a lot of time asking what’s happening to men, as we should. We talk about school, loneliness, mental health, masculinity and the appeal of the Andrew Tate brigade who fill a vacuum. But perhaps we should also look much closer to home. How are we raising them? Because the little boy whose mum does everything for him eventually becomes a man. My parents thought having a son would give them security. Turns out, their daughters became their security. Maybe equality isn’t only about giving our daughters everything we’ve traditionally given our sons. Maybe it’s also about expecting from our sons everything we’ve always expected from our daughters.