January 10, 2023 • 12 mins
Summer Series
Topics included in this episode -
- Media entrepreneur Mia Freedman has two boys and she discusses how she defines masculinity as well as her parenting journey.
Find us on Facebook at Dr Justin Coulson's Happy Families
Email us your questions and comments at podcasts@happyfamilies.com.au
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
It's the Happy Families Podcast. It's the podcast for the
time poor parent who just wants answers.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
Now.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
Every now and again, on the Happy Families Podcast, we
get to talk to fascinating people with fabulous ideas. A
little while ago, we did a Bringing Up Boys summit.
One of my guests on the summit was the high
profile Mea Friedman, and Mea joined me for around about
a forty five to fifty minute conversation talking about all
things boys, raising boys. She's raised one to adulthood and
(00:31):
the second one is well and truly on his way
to adulthood. Now. I asked, Mia, what is masculinity like?
How would you, as somebody who works in an area
where these conversations are being had all the time, how
would mea Friedman define masculinity and what is a masculine
boy or man to you?
Speaker 2 (00:53):
I think the gender roles of prisons, whether they're prisons
for women, they're also prisons for men. And I think
we've done an enormously successful job of widening what it
means to be a girl or a woman over the
last few generations. But I heard Glorious Dinah once say
that you know their prisons for men as well. Even
if the man's prison has like wall to wall carpet
(01:14):
and someone to bring your coffee, it's still a prison
in terms of its constraining to think that our lives,
pretty as women are pretty unrecognizable from the lives of
our grandmothers and great grandmothers. Right like, neither of my
great grandmothers worked outside the home, neither of them could drive,
they could vote, but my great grandmothers probably couldn't. And
(01:36):
yet our partners' lives, if they're male, men's lives are
pretty similar to their fathers, their grandfathers, their great grandfathers,
their great great grandfathers, in that they're probably the you know,
main bread rinners in most in most households, they probably
don't do have a whole lot to do with the children,
although I do think that's changing. They certainly wouldn't have
(01:57):
taken parental leave or you know, likely that any of
that would happen. So I think that while our definition
of what it means to be a woman or what
it means to be a good mother has changed a lot,
I don't think it's changed nearly enough for men, And
I think that we have to make that change for
our sons in showing them that boys can cry, boys
(02:20):
can wear dresses, boys can do all manner of things.
And I'll quote my friend Holly wayIn Wright, who I
work with here at Mammea, and she said that she
realized she'd gone a bit far when her son said
to her. She's got a daughter and a son. Her
son said to her, when I grow up, I want
to be a girl. And she's like, Holly's like, oh
that's interesting, Billy, how come? And he said, well, because
(02:42):
girls can do anything. And that's when she thought, oh, okay,
I might have overcorrected, Like I've been so focused on
telling my daughter she can be anything and do anything
that I haven't given that same message to my son.
Speaker 1 (02:55):
Do you think that that's a message that our boys
are getting that girls can do anything, or that boys
are somehow deficient. I mean, when you look at the research,
boys underperform at school relative to girls. Boys matriculate to
and through university at lower levels to girls. Boys are
much more likely to be overrepresented on detention or writing
lines or getting in trouble at school.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
They're more likely.
Speaker 1 (03:16):
Overrepresented with drug and alcohol abuse, with violent acts in prisons.
What's the mood. Do you think I mean, I talk
to parents all the time who are saying, I'm worried
about my boys, But do you think that boys are
actually saying, Yeah, girls can do anything and boys just
aren't as good. Do you think that there's a even
though boys have always had all these freedoms, that there's
some sort of mismatch here between freedom and actually being
(03:38):
able to do what that freedom should allow.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
I think that because we are living through a big
correction in a lot of ways in terms of civil rights,
in terms of gender equality, the Meat Too movement, conversations
about consent and sexual assault, I think that boys who
are watching listening to all of these conversations happening around
(04:02):
them could be getting the idea that they're really bad,
that they are the cause of all the problems in
the world, that they are the cause of all the
problems for women, and that women don't like boys or
men very much. And I'm not even talking about strident feminism,
(04:23):
because feminism is not, and certainly never has been to
me in my household, about girls are better than boys.
It's more just there's always been an inequality, and we've
tried to redress that by building girls up. But I
think because we've told girls they can do anything, I
don't think we've said the same thing to boys. And
(04:44):
even if that means you can stay at home and
raise kids, you don't have to, you know, work in
an office and wear a suit, you know you can.
There are so many different ways to be a boy
in the world, and I think that's really important, particularly
if you're the parent of both, because you know, I'm
(05:04):
very conscious of giving my daughter all these empowering messages,
but my younger son is listening to all of those
messages and the conversations that we have about consent and
about danger and about predators and about sexual harassment, and
he hears when we talk about her getting harassed in
the street and how awful that is, and if you
(05:25):
can extrapolate that to mean all men about and I'm
part of a group that is inherently bad when that's
just not true.
Speaker 1 (05:33):
Yeah, I'm so glad you mentioned that. I actually had
a question here. I was going to ask you, how
do we make sure that boys aren't demonized? Yeah, which
is kind of the extension of what you're just saying.
How do we move from not just making sure that
they know that it's not true. But I mean there
are hashtags. There are some vile hashtags out there. I
know Twitter is not representative of the real world. And
you mentioned even when I mentioned feminism at the beginning
(05:55):
of our conversation, I noticed that there was a little
bit of an eyebrow raise. You're like, well, where are
we going to go with this big because there's a
really milion.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
No, no, just that you called it the F word, as
if it was somehow like, oh, feminism. It's just like,
I feel like that idea is really tired, that it's
we've got to somehow apologize or feminism is this big
scary thing. It's like, my kids are feminists, all of them.
They know their dads Like, it's just it's not a
big deal, nor should it be a big deal. But yeah,
(06:22):
I think it's as important to raise feminist sons as
it is to raise feminist daughters.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
Yeah, and then to finish that, you get to that
militant feminism and where you've got the hashtag kill all men.
Ah and and and that's that's kind of where I
was going with the In some in some quarters, feminism
has moved more and more extreme so that it can
quote unquote stay relevant or stay in there in the news.
And what you're suggesting instead is, let's just make sure
(06:47):
that we treat everybody, everybody like We don't have to
have this militant man hating aspect.
Speaker 2 (06:56):
That's not what feminism is. And I think that the
people who carry on like that really eve misrepresent it.
And that's why I, you know, roll my eyes. I'm
as exasperated with those people as I am with people
who don't believe that women should have equal rights. I
think that they're both polar extremes of a very wide spectrum.
And really, we don't want anyone to be getting those
(07:19):
kinds of negative messages about male tears. And I find
that just absolutely repugnant, you know, mocking men in any
way I find, you know, incredibly unhelpful and actually just
detrimental to the cause.
Speaker 1 (07:37):
It's interesting, again, listen to the way you're talking about this.
I think about what boys want, and I know that
as I talk to them, they want to Most of
them want to have really good relationships with the people
around them. They want to be as they want to.
And yet there is that narrative that seems to be
bubbling up with things like me too, and with that
more militant arm that boys need to be demonized, there's
(07:57):
a problem with them. Let me ask you this mea
what do you see? I mean, this whole summit has
been about all the different things that boys are struggling with,
but in terms of you being the mum of two
boys and also the person who is really watching what's
happening in terms of movements and who's making noise here,
there and everywhere and why, what do you see is
(08:18):
the biggest issues that boys are facing right now? And therefore,
parents of boys, what a great question.
Speaker 2 (08:24):
I think. As I said, we've shifted a long way
in a short amount of time. Even between when my
son who's twenty four as a teenager and my young
my oldest son and my youngest son. You know, that's
a gap of eleven years, and I've seen a massive
difference in you know, consent was not a word that
was even used when my son was thirteen, fourteen, fifteen sixteen.
(08:49):
I used to say things to my son and his
friends before, you know, as I drive and drop them
to their night out or drive them to sports training,
I'd be like at the party, you want to be
the one that holds the drunk girl's hair back, not
the one who's trying to pull her pants down. And
you be that guy, Be that guy who makes sure
the girls get home. And I think that that that
(09:10):
idea has been taken so much further by amazing women
like Sheanel Contos and Grace Team as well. I think
that we've almost in some areas demonized the idea of
boys being a little bit awkward, a little bit I
don't know, exuberant sometimes and we've tried to either tell
(09:36):
them that they've got to be tough guys, or if
they show any sign of you know, rebellion or whatever,
completely freaking out and coming down on them like a
ton of bricks. And I think that the hardest thing
now that I've experienced being the mother of teenage girls
and tenage boys and boys and girls like girls will
(09:56):
talk about their feelings all the time, but boys won't.
And I'm just at the begin of that awful tunnel
that they go into with my youngest, which is breaking
my heart every day, where he doesn't talk to me anymore,
and he doesn't want to look at me and my
body discuss him and he barely will look me in
the eye or acknowledge my existence. And it makes me
(10:17):
incredibly emotional to think about the little boy who wanted
nothing more than to give me a cuddle or come
into bed with me, or have me cuddle him in bed,
and all of that, and all of that's gone and
seemingly gone quickly, like seemingly gone overnight, and the heartbreak
of that is so real for me. But what it's
left him without is the ability to talk in the
(10:41):
way that he used to be able to talk to me,
because I don't believe that boys necessarily talk to their
friends like that. So I'm aware all of a sudden
that there is this vacuum in his life that I
can't feel anymore. And it's like there's this wall that's
gone down, and he's kind of, I won't say lost
to me, but I'm cut off from him for years now,
(11:05):
and that's personally distressing, but also as his mother, you know,
I worry about what does get in there, from pawn,
from the internet, from gaming, from you know, everything else,
from YouTube, from everything else he's exposed to. Because it's
this is the age where my role as a parent.
I remember Paul Dylan once said to us in a
(11:25):
parent conversation Paul Dylan, who's a brilliant drug and alcohol speaker.
He said, you know, at around this age in high school,
you go from being your child's manager to being a consultant.
And even though it can feel like you know when
your kids are little, you can you've got more than one.
Particularly can be like, oh my god, well they ever
stop having to manage this child? And then it's like
(11:46):
I'm suddenly about being made redundant and I've been scaled
back to a consultant, and you're like, oh, it can
come as your shock.
Speaker 1 (11:56):
Always liked my conversations with me a Friedman. You can
find more that discussion, as well as a whole lot
of other experts talking about bringing up boys. By googling
Happy Families, Bringing Up Boys Summit. All the information will
come up to you in the Happy Families web shop
if you're bringing up boys and you'd like to know
how you can do it better, how you can protect them,
how you can help them to have a healthy form
of masculinity. Hey, thank you so much for joining me
(12:19):
in the podcast. Today. Tomorrow Kylo joins me again in
the studio as we continue the Happy Families summer podcast
series
It's the Happy Families Podcast. It's the podcast for the
time poor parent who just wants answers.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
Now.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
Every now and again, on the Happy Families Podcast, we
get to talk to fascinating people with fabulous ideas. A
little while ago, we did a Bringing Up Boys summit.
One of my guests on the summit was the high
profile Mea Friedman, and Mea joined me for around about
a forty five to fifty minute conversation talking about all
things boys, raising boys. She's raised one to adulthood and
(00:31):
the second one is well and truly on his way
to adulthood. Now. I asked, Mia, what is masculinity like?
How would you, as somebody who works in an area
where these conversations are being had all the time, how
would mea Friedman define masculinity and what is a masculine
boy or man to you?
Speaker 2 (00:53):
I think the gender roles of prisons, whether they're prisons
for women, they're also prisons for men. And I think
we've done an enormously successful job of widening what it
means to be a girl or a woman over the
last few generations. But I heard Glorious Dinah once say
that you know their prisons for men as well. Even
if the man's prison has like wall to wall carpet
(01:14):
and someone to bring your coffee, it's still a prison
in terms of its constraining to think that our lives,
pretty as women are pretty unrecognizable from the lives of
our grandmothers and great grandmothers. Right like, neither of my
great grandmothers worked outside the home, neither of them could drive,
they could vote, but my great grandmothers probably couldn't. And
(01:36):
yet our partners' lives, if they're male, men's lives are
pretty similar to their fathers, their grandfathers, their great grandfathers,
their great great grandfathers, in that they're probably the you know,
main bread rinners in most in most households, they probably
don't do have a whole lot to do with the children,
although I do think that's changing. They certainly wouldn't have
(01:57):
taken parental leave or you know, likely that any of
that would happen. So I think that while our definition
of what it means to be a woman or what
it means to be a good mother has changed a lot,
I don't think it's changed nearly enough for men, And
I think that we have to make that change for
our sons in showing them that boys can cry, boys
(02:20):
can wear dresses, boys can do all manner of things.
And I'll quote my friend Holly wayIn Wright, who I
work with here at Mammea, and she said that she
realized she'd gone a bit far when her son said
to her. She's got a daughter and a son. Her
son said to her, when I grow up, I want
to be a girl. And she's like, Holly's like, oh
that's interesting, Billy, how come? And he said, well, because
(02:42):
girls can do anything. And that's when she thought, oh, okay,
I might have overcorrected, Like I've been so focused on
telling my daughter she can be anything and do anything
that I haven't given that same message to my son.
Speaker 1 (02:55):
Do you think that that's a message that our boys
are getting that girls can do anything, or that boys
are somehow deficient. I mean, when you look at the research,
boys underperform at school relative to girls. Boys matriculate to
and through university at lower levels to girls. Boys are
much more likely to be overrepresented on detention or writing
lines or getting in trouble at school.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
They're more likely.
Speaker 1 (03:16):
Overrepresented with drug and alcohol abuse, with violent acts in prisons.
What's the mood. Do you think I mean, I talk
to parents all the time who are saying, I'm worried
about my boys, But do you think that boys are
actually saying, Yeah, girls can do anything and boys just
aren't as good. Do you think that there's a even
though boys have always had all these freedoms, that there's
some sort of mismatch here between freedom and actually being
(03:38):
able to do what that freedom should allow.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
I think that because we are living through a big
correction in a lot of ways in terms of civil rights,
in terms of gender equality, the Meat Too movement, conversations
about consent and sexual assault, I think that boys who
are watching listening to all of these conversations happening around
(04:02):
them could be getting the idea that they're really bad,
that they are the cause of all the problems in
the world, that they are the cause of all the
problems for women, and that women don't like boys or
men very much. And I'm not even talking about strident feminism,
(04:23):
because feminism is not, and certainly never has been to
me in my household, about girls are better than boys.
It's more just there's always been an inequality, and we've
tried to redress that by building girls up. But I
think because we've told girls they can do anything, I
don't think we've said the same thing to boys. And
(04:44):
even if that means you can stay at home and
raise kids, you don't have to, you know, work in
an office and wear a suit, you know you can.
There are so many different ways to be a boy
in the world, and I think that's really important, particularly
if you're the parent of both, because you know, I'm
(05:04):
very conscious of giving my daughter all these empowering messages,
but my younger son is listening to all of those
messages and the conversations that we have about consent and
about danger and about predators and about sexual harassment, and
he hears when we talk about her getting harassed in
the street and how awful that is, and if you
(05:25):
can extrapolate that to mean all men about and I'm
part of a group that is inherently bad when that's
just not true.
Speaker 1 (05:33):
Yeah, I'm so glad you mentioned that. I actually had
a question here. I was going to ask you, how
do we make sure that boys aren't demonized? Yeah, which
is kind of the extension of what you're just saying.
How do we move from not just making sure that
they know that it's not true. But I mean there
are hashtags. There are some vile hashtags out there. I
know Twitter is not representative of the real world. And
you mentioned even when I mentioned feminism at the beginning
(05:55):
of our conversation, I noticed that there was a little
bit of an eyebrow raise. You're like, well, where are
we going to go with this big because there's a
really milion.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
No, no, just that you called it the F word, as
if it was somehow like, oh, feminism. It's just like,
I feel like that idea is really tired, that it's
we've got to somehow apologize or feminism is this big
scary thing. It's like, my kids are feminists, all of them.
They know their dads Like, it's just it's not a
big deal, nor should it be a big deal. But yeah,
(06:22):
I think it's as important to raise feminist sons as
it is to raise feminist daughters.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
Yeah, and then to finish that, you get to that
militant feminism and where you've got the hashtag kill all men.
Ah and and and that's that's kind of where I
was going with the In some in some quarters, feminism
has moved more and more extreme so that it can
quote unquote stay relevant or stay in there in the news.
And what you're suggesting instead is, let's just make sure
(06:47):
that we treat everybody, everybody like We don't have to
have this militant man hating aspect.
Speaker 2 (06:56):
That's not what feminism is. And I think that the
people who carry on like that really eve misrepresent it.
And that's why I, you know, roll my eyes. I'm
as exasperated with those people as I am with people
who don't believe that women should have equal rights. I
think that they're both polar extremes of a very wide spectrum.
And really, we don't want anyone to be getting those
(07:19):
kinds of negative messages about male tears. And I find
that just absolutely repugnant, you know, mocking men in any
way I find, you know, incredibly unhelpful and actually just
detrimental to the cause.
Speaker 1 (07:37):
It's interesting, again, listen to the way you're talking about this.
I think about what boys want, and I know that
as I talk to them, they want to Most of
them want to have really good relationships with the people
around them. They want to be as they want to.
And yet there is that narrative that seems to be
bubbling up with things like me too, and with that
more militant arm that boys need to be demonized, there's
(07:57):
a problem with them. Let me ask you this mea
what do you see? I mean, this whole summit has
been about all the different things that boys are struggling with,
but in terms of you being the mum of two
boys and also the person who is really watching what's
happening in terms of movements and who's making noise here,
there and everywhere and why, what do you see is
(08:18):
the biggest issues that boys are facing right now? And therefore,
parents of boys, what a great question.
Speaker 2 (08:24):
I think. As I said, we've shifted a long way
in a short amount of time. Even between when my
son who's twenty four as a teenager and my young
my oldest son and my youngest son. You know, that's
a gap of eleven years, and I've seen a massive
difference in you know, consent was not a word that
was even used when my son was thirteen, fourteen, fifteen sixteen.
(08:49):
I used to say things to my son and his
friends before, you know, as I drive and drop them
to their night out or drive them to sports training,
I'd be like at the party, you want to be
the one that holds the drunk girl's hair back, not
the one who's trying to pull her pants down. And
you be that guy, Be that guy who makes sure
the girls get home. And I think that that that
(09:10):
idea has been taken so much further by amazing women
like Sheanel Contos and Grace Team as well. I think
that we've almost in some areas demonized the idea of
boys being a little bit awkward, a little bit I
don't know, exuberant sometimes and we've tried to either tell
(09:36):
them that they've got to be tough guys, or if
they show any sign of you know, rebellion or whatever,
completely freaking out and coming down on them like a
ton of bricks. And I think that the hardest thing
now that I've experienced being the mother of teenage girls
and tenage boys and boys and girls like girls will
(09:56):
talk about their feelings all the time, but boys won't.
And I'm just at the begin of that awful tunnel
that they go into with my youngest, which is breaking
my heart every day, where he doesn't talk to me anymore,
and he doesn't want to look at me and my
body discuss him and he barely will look me in
the eye or acknowledge my existence. And it makes me
(10:17):
incredibly emotional to think about the little boy who wanted
nothing more than to give me a cuddle or come
into bed with me, or have me cuddle him in bed,
and all of that, and all of that's gone and
seemingly gone quickly, like seemingly gone overnight, and the heartbreak
of that is so real for me. But what it's
left him without is the ability to talk in the
(10:41):
way that he used to be able to talk to me,
because I don't believe that boys necessarily talk to their
friends like that. So I'm aware all of a sudden
that there is this vacuum in his life that I
can't feel anymore. And it's like there's this wall that's
gone down, and he's kind of, I won't say lost
to me, but I'm cut off from him for years now,
(11:05):
and that's personally distressing, but also as his mother, you know,
I worry about what does get in there, from pawn,
from the internet, from gaming, from you know, everything else,
from YouTube, from everything else he's exposed to. Because it's
this is the age where my role as a parent.
I remember Paul Dylan once said to us in a
(11:25):
parent conversation Paul Dylan, who's a brilliant drug and alcohol speaker.
He said, you know, at around this age in high school,
you go from being your child's manager to being a consultant.
And even though it can feel like you know when
your kids are little, you can you've got more than one.
Particularly can be like, oh my god, well they ever
stop having to manage this child? And then it's like
(11:46):
I'm suddenly about being made redundant and I've been scaled
back to a consultant, and you're like, oh, it can
come as your shock.
Speaker 1 (11:56):
Always liked my conversations with me a Friedman. You can
find more that discussion, as well as a whole lot
of other experts talking about bringing up boys. By googling
Happy Families, Bringing Up Boys Summit. All the information will
come up to you in the Happy Families web shop
if you're bringing up boys and you'd like to know
how you can do it better, how you can protect them,
how you can help them to have a healthy form
of masculinity. Hey, thank you so much for joining me
(12:19):
in the podcast. Today. Tomorrow Kylo joins me again in
the studio as we continue the Happy Families summer podcast
series
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