I just got finished submitting my final paper for my gender and society class. My paper's topic was on gender inequalities and stereotypes taught by parents, sometimes through religion. Within this topic I ended up discussing how expectations regarding achievement to sons and daughters are often communicated differently by parents. As a result of that I had over a page on my notion and thoughts why its done in the African American community, specifically that girls are pushed more than boys. I'd thought that I'd also share my thoughts here. So here they are:

Myself being an African American woman I think that in the African American community girls are pushed to achieve more because so many African American households are ran by single mothers. Therefore these single mothers don’t want their daughter/s to have to deal with the same thing that they did. Daughters are pushed to focus on school, get good grades, and attend college to avoid having children at a young age, or if they do have children and the father isn’t present they’ll be in a position where they can be more financially stable, or able to take care of their child or children. Also in the African American community women are viewed as strong. Again, that links to so many women in the African American community being single mothers and also being the backbone of the family.

Within this theory or notion that I just mentioned, where does this leave African American men and boys? Does this mean that African American men and boys are weak? I think that this whole idea in the African American community of pushing more for our girls and women to gain educational achievement simply starts and contributes to the vicious cycle of African American men falling by the wayside. For example, if you have a single African American mother who has two children, one girl and one boy. The mother pushes for her daughter to exceed in school and attend college but, neglects to do the same thing to her son. In result of this the daughter attends college avoids having children at a young age and becoming a single mother and the son doesn’t attend college. The son feels as if he has no motivation and gets distracted and ends up getting into trouble or getting a young girl pregnant. Because the son is now a young father and really has no time to worry about succeeding in school he now lowers his chance of getting a good paying job. Over time the young girl that he impregnated will most likely become a single mother. The son may even eventually get back focused with school, move on , and attend college. The mother of his child will still be left alone emotionally raising a child by herself.

After inputting these thoughts into my final paper, I begin to think about how this really is an issue in our community because statistics show that there are more African American females in college and graduating from college than there are males. I think that my examples and my idea as to why this happens is true in many cases. I think that a lot of parents are pushing their female children to succeed and neglecting to do the same with their male children. This isn't just happening in the African American community in the Caucasian community the flip side is happening where Males are being encourage to achieve more than the women, although I don't believe Caucasian women are falling by the way side. I think that in every community, culture, etc we need to push all of our children, no matter what gender to succeed and be the best academically and period. Specifically in my own community I think that we do need to shift the focus to our young boys and begin to push them just as much as we do our young girls.