Pants-Free Parenting: Don’t diminish daughters for their emotions

People like to warn me about my daughter and her feelings.

'Girls are so hormonal,” they will say, as she sits there making up songs on her Princess guitar. 'Watch out!”

The one I have heard the most is some version of: 'Girls are easy now, but awful when they become moody teens.”

These warnings baffle me. I remember being a 'moody teen.” I didn't yell a lot, I just read subversive literature, wrote Communist slogans on my jeans with Sharpies, and skipped work to play tennis with my friends.

I didn't get teenage pregnant or do drugs, so all in all, my teenage girlness didn't seem so bad. I also remember that during that time, my brother who is 16 months younger than me, was also a moody teen. He spent almost five years locked in the basement listening to angry German death metal, emerging only to play video games, go to school, or eat sugar cereal. But no one ever has similar warnings about my son for me

For centuries, emotions have been inextricably linked to women. And the responses to expressions of these feminine emotions have varied from locking them away in the Victorian era, to over medicating them. The message is clear: Feelings are feminine weakness.

As a teen and into my 20s, I did my best to hide these feelings. I rarely cried. I didn't want anyone to think I was weak. This often meant that my parents, teachers, college advisor and roommates, called me cold. I'd rather be cold and hard than weak, I rationalized. But it was frustrating to realize that no matter what I couldn't win. Either I was an irrational girl or I was unfeeling.

I was supposed to feel, but not show it. I was supposed to be calm, but not too in control. Sometime, in my late twenties, I just gave up. Now, sometimes I cry at the park when I'm talking about pie recipes. Sometimes I roll my eyes at death scenes in movies. 'Feelings are for feeling,” I tell people, you have to accept them as they come.

This is why I am not afraid for my 4-year-old to turn into a teen - for her to cry and rage against me, against her world and any other thing that comes her way. Or maybe she won't, maybe she'll play video games and listen to death metal. It's hard to tell. But like feelings, children are who they are, you just have to accept them as they come.

I'm not sure why we have to diminish girls for their emotions. I don't know why we have to raise our hands and thank God that boys aren't like that. Because they are. Feelings, emotions, hormones, these aren't gender specific. I have never had more emotions about a household appliance than my husband has had over our dishwasher, may it rest in peace.

But I hope that I never dismiss any of my children because of their feelings - because their internal struggles spill out all over our home as tears and screams and heavy sighs.

Our emotions don't diminish us, in fact, they make us stronger. Irrationality, moodiness, hormones, I expect my daughter to embody all of those things, just as I do sometimes. Just as her father does and just as her brother will.

Our emotions, while inconvenient, are there and just like baseball games and dance recitals, I want to bear witness to them as expressions of my child's humanity, not her weakness. So, if you say, 'Just wait until she's a moody teen.” I'll respond, 'I can't wait to see more expressions of the woman she is going to be.”

' Lyz Lenz is a writer, mother of two and hater of pants. Email her at eclenz@gmail.com or find her writing at LyzLenz.com.