We received a CD from a friend’s birthday party recently. It had some goodies and somethings I would have been happier never having played in this house (I now have a 2 yo walking around singing, “I’m a barbie girl, in a barbie world.”) One of the definite goodies was Girls Just Wanna Have Fun by Cyndi Lauper; I always liked that song.
So I had the CD on in the car and was suddenly confronted with, “Why not boys just wanna have fun?” The funny thing is, a friend had told me she’d had a similar conversation with her son over the same song. I started with the idea of knights. When you have 6 and 4 yo boys, knights are a good place to start many a conversation. When you play knights what do you do? “Slay dragons” and “Fight”, lovely, my little pacifist children; can we just go with adventures instead? So what do you do if you play princess? [they used to both play the knights and the princess, and when being the princess, they carried a sword however, we're going from traditionalism here] “Sit around waiting to be rescued.”
Now we were getting somewhere. Does it sound fun to sit around waiting to be rescued? What if girls want to go on adventures too? So I reversed the song to the lines:
Some boys take a beautiful girl,
And hide her away from the rest of the world.
I wanna be the one to walk in the sun.
We talked about how it was assumed in the song that boys were getting to have fun and girls wanted to have fun too, not that girls want to have fun and boys don’t. Big distinction.
I was trying to think of easy examples for a 4 and 6 year old, while B, who’s 2, was just happy to be singing about girls wanting to have fun. As odd as it sounds, I brought up voting since D keeps asking about it. The fact that men could vote from the time we became a country but that women had only had the right to vote for less than 100 years. Another easy one to understand is money and property; I told them that women weren’t allowed to own property or have their own bank accounts.
“That’s not fair!” and we went back to listening to music. Sometimes a few minutes of conversation is all it takes to lay the foundations for an idea.
