One Son One Daughter: When I Realized I Was Parenting Them Differently (Small Changes I’m Trying Now)
I was folding clean laundry last Saturday when my 11-year-old son Luka dragged a broken soccer shin guard over to the kitchen table. The elastic strap had snapped clean through. “Can you fix this?” he asked. My 9-year-old daughter Mia was right behind him, holding up her dance recital costume where a sequin had come loose around the neckline. “Mom, can you help me with this?”
I answered without even thinking. To Luka: “You fixed your own backpack strap last month, remember? Grab the needle and thread from the junk drawer and give it a go first. I’ll check it when you’re done.” To Mia: I held out my hand. “C’mere, I’ll do that. Don’t poke your finger with the needle.”
That’s when I froze mid-reach. Wait a second, I thought. Why did I just do that?
I’d spent years telling myself I’d never fall into this trap. I didn’t buy only pink for Mia and only blue for Luka, I signed both up for sports and art classes, I made them both take turns taking out the trash and setting the table. I thought I’d avoided the gendered parenting stereotypes I’d read about growing up. But that split second of response wasn’t something I planned. It was automatic, something I’d picked up somewhere without even noticing.
Over the next week, I caught myself doing it over and over, in hundreds of tiny ways I’d never seen before. When we went hiking and both complained their legs were sore, I automatically offered to carry Mia’s backpack before I even asked Luka if he needed a break. When Luka struggled with a pre-algebra problem, I sat back and asked him to walk me through what he’d already tried. When Mia got stuck on a reading comprehension question, I just read the passage out loud to her before she even asked for help. When Luka got into a tiff with his friend on the playground, I told him to work it out between the two of them. When Mia had a disagreement with her best friend, I called the other mom to arrange a make-up playdate before I even asked Mia what she wanted to do.
None of these were big, dramatic differences. They were tiny, split-second choices. But they added up. I brought it up to my sister, who also has a son and a daughter, and she laughed and said she does the same thing. She realized it when her son asked to take ballet and she almost said no, before remembering she’d signed her daughter up for tackle football without a second thought.
I decided to ask my kids straight out, to be honest. That night at dinner, I asked them if they felt like I treated them differently. Luka shrugged and stirred his pasta. “You make me do more hard stuff alone, I guess. Like when I fell off my bike two years ago you told me to get up, and when Mia fell you picked her up right away. But it’s fine, I’m the older brother.” Mia frowned and pushed her broccoli around her plate. “You always think I can’t do stuff. I wanted to join the robotics club last month but I didn’t sign up ‘cause I thought I’d mess up the building and you’d have to do it for me, and that would be embarrassing.”
That stung. It wasn’t what I meant to do at all. I’d always thought I was just building Luka’s independence and taking care of Mia’s needs, but I was actually teaching Luka that he couldn’t come to me for soft, vulnerable help, and Mia that she couldn’t handle hard things on her own.
I didn’t make a big new parenting plan or overhaul our whole routine. I just started one tiny, low-effort habit: whenever one of the kids asks for help, I pause for two full seconds before I answer. During that pause, I just ask myself one question: Would I say the same thing if the other kid was asking? That’s it. No complicated checklists, no big family meetings to announce a new system. Just a two-second pause.
I also swapped out my default automatic phrases for new, neutral ones. For any kid, when they come to me with a problem—whether it’s a broken strap or a hurt feeling—my default is now: “Do you want to try to work it out on your own first, do you want me to help you figure it out together, or do you just need me to listen right now?” That puts the choice in their hands, not my outdated assumptions.
For Mia, when she asks for help with something small, instead of jumping in to fix it, I say “What’s the first thing you’d try? I’ll be right at the sink if you get stuck.” Last week, she fell off her scooter on the way to the bus stop and scraped her elbow pretty bad. I paused instead of running over, and she got up on her own, brushed off her jeans, and walked over to me just asking for a band-aid. She didn’t need me to pick her up and coddle her. She just needed the band-aid.
For Luka, when he comes to me upset about something, I don’t default to telling him to toughen it out. Last month, he didn’t make the advanced soccer team he tried out for, and he came home quiet. I sat down next to him on the couch, didn’t throw out empty encouragement like “there’s always next year.” I just said “That sucks. Do you want to talk about it, or do you want to eat ice cream and watch that silly cat show you like?” He ended up crying for 15 minutes, which I don’t think he would have done a year ago, because he knew I wouldn’t tell him to shake it off.
I still slip up. Last week, I almost told Luka he didn’t need to help me bake chocolate chip cookies because “Mia’s the one who likes baking” before I caught myself. We baked them together, he put in twice the amount of salt, and we all laughed and ordered pizza instead. Some days I forget to pause, some days I fall back into old habits. I don’t think I’ll ever get it perfect. It’s just one of those things: you don’t know what you’re doing until you notice it, and then you just keep trying, a little bit every day.
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