ExchangeEveryDay Past Issues

The solution rests entirely in the way we raise the world’s youngest children. A 2003 United Nations Division for the Advancement of Women (UNDAW) report on the roles of men and boys in achieving gender equality defined the fact that girls and boys in most societies experience care giving and early care and education (ECE) as principally female obligations as a “key aspect of gender inequalities” (UNDAW, 2004, p.15). When chidlren don’t see men involved in domestic, care giving, or nurturing roles, they draw stereotypic assumptions about their respective gender roles.

When young children are use to seeing images of nurturing males on classroom walls and in their picture books, to hearing stories on the diverse roles of men, and to being cared for and nurtured by fathers, fathering figures, and male early childhood educators, they come to expect caregiving, nurturing, and teaching as typical male behaviors. When the field sets in earnest to eliminate the biases, scrutiny, and commonly held assumptions about men embedded in its workplace culture, then nurturing fathers, fathering figures, and men who teach will sense their school communities as places where their contributions are valued and the number of involved men will multiply. ECE can revolutionize the value that the next generation places on male nurturing behavior, provided we recognize the opportunity and come to expect male involvement as a measure of quality and a natural course toward gender equality for all the worlds’ children.

The results concluded by University of Wisconsin's National Survey of Families and Households are useful for accepting the fact of imbalance of duties in the modern age where we talk much for women equality. Such studies must be encouraged with due care of honesty in data collection & analysis.Such studies need publicity with precautions of avoiding conflicts among parents.