Stop Teaching Children to Compete Against Each Other Based on Gender
Boys vs. girls is a game until it’s not
Boys vs. girls is a game until it’s not
Vacation Bible School was one of the few summer activities I looked forward to when I was young. It lasted every evening for one week and occurred at the church where my dad worked. I attended First Baptist Church of Carrollton, Texas, from age two to sixteen, and the biggest, most exciting event during VBS was the penny competition.
The children were divided into two groups, boys vs. girls, and asked to raise money for the church by bringing pennies every night. Then, at the end of every service, adults loaded the pennies into a large bucket — a blue bucket for boys and a pink bucket for girls, then weighed to see who had collected the most pennies.
At the end of the week, the buckets were placed on hooks and attached to a large scale. One bucket would weigh more, and that gender would be declared the winner. The prize was small and cheap: stickers or terrible cookies. Of course, the award didn’t matter because the girls loved the entire game since there were always more girls than boys in attendance.
Therefore, the girls won every year.
The only thing more dramatic than hundreds of screaming children in a church trying to compete over which sexual reproductive system could gather more pennies is how incredibly happy the adults seemed to be while orchestrating this circus.
“Come on, boys! We’re men! Are you going to let the girls win? ” the adult men would scream into the microphone.
“NO!” the boys would scream.
“Girls? Are we going to take that from those boys?”
“NO!” the girls would scream as they attempted to break glass with their voices.
Every adult in attendance would smile and laugh at the “fun” we were having. However, as the years passed, it stopped being fun and became a drag. Due to waning maturity levels and rising hormones, discussing the penny competition was usually banned from Sunday school for several weeks due to the arguments and shouting matches that arose shortly afterward.
As the birds and the bees drew closer, we wondered if it was such a great idea to compete against the other gender constantly. Some kids started having boyfriends and girlfriends on the other side of the competition. I remember a particular instance when a girl asked the Sunday School teacher if they could refrain from competing against her boyfriend, to which the teacher replied, “Oh no. It’s just a fun game.” We’ll come back to this phrase later.
The boys vs. girls competition didn’t stop at the sanctuary doors because we had adults at school, too.
Tug-of-war, spelling bee, foot races, basketball, and every other competition in school was typically divided into a battle of the sexes, and the teachers made sure of it. I can’t even count the number of times a teacher immediately turned anything close to a contest into boys vs. girls. The level of frustration was always palpable.
One specific memory comes to mind: Field Day.
Field Day was a special event where the kids walked down the street to another elementary and competed in outdoor activities. But we weren’t only competing against the school; we were competing against the opposite sex, too. The gender that scored the best would earn a prize. Again, the award didn’t matter. What mattered to us was that our gender won.
After all of the competitions, games, heated debates, and arguments, imagine my surprise when suddenly, around seventh grade, we were told girls were equals. Not only were we equal, but I was supposed to have known this fact all along. Despite the cooties, contests, and competitions, we now had to respect girls with everything we did, and to argue otherwise was sexist. Worst of all, we kept having this weird feeling that we needed to get as close to each other as physically possible.
So, there I was. Over a decade of training told me how much better I was than girls, and every adult I knew made sure I competed against everyone who didn’t match my reproductive organs. Yet, I had this deep desire to spend every waking moment with any girl who would pay attention to me. It didn’t go well.
Fast forward 30 years, and I find an entire generation was raised similarly. Battle of the sexes, gender conformity, and a war against trans people now rage across the nation. And yet, in my discussions with my peers, some of them remained shocked that the world has come to this state.
It’s death by 1,000 cuts. Instead of being raised as equals and allowing that relationship to become deeper and more nuanced as teenagers, we were taught that everything was a competition between boys and girls even after we began to protest that perhaps it wasn’t a great idea.
Remember earlier when my Sunday School teacher said it was just a game? If I could go back in time, I would have replied that repetitively communicating that you’re vastly superior because of what’s between your legs for over ten years isn’t a game — it’s systematic indoctrination. It’s training a generation of children that men are the better, wiser, and more powerful sex through fun and games.
I’m reminded of a scene in the comedy movie Dazed and Confused. In the film, all eighth graders must undergo an initiation before entering high school. So, on the last day of eighth grade, the new high school seniors can practically torture the new ninth graders. The boys are spanked with large wooden paddles by the senior boys, and the girls are publicly humiliated by the new senior girls.
The scene I remember occurs when the freshmen girls are in the parking lot, forced to wear baby clothes with pacifiers in their mouths. One senior screams, “Air raid!” and watches them drop to the concrete.
One of the teenage boys watching states how surprised he is that the school and the entire community seemed to support the misery.
We educate children all the time through games for spelling, math, and history, yet none of the adults seemed to have understood that the same type of education on gender equality was just as effective.
The power struggles continued as adults, but with higher stakes.
I have three children, ages 15, 12, and 10. I wish I could state that I was surprised the practice of boys vs. girls continued, but I’m not. When my kids were little, we taught them objects had no gender. Toys could not be a “boy’s toy” or a “girl’s toy,” they were simply toys. My wife and I also taught them the same lesson about clothing, movies, and a variety of other inanimate objects.
However, my children returned home from VBS at my mom’s church with the same story. Groups were divided into boys and girls and then set against each other. In elementary school, again, a similar story. My son asked me once, “Dad, why does everything have to be boys vs girls?”
“I don’t know, son,” I said. “I don’t know.”