For a long time, a male heir was thought to be desirable, but the trend has shifted: most parents now prefer females, and many argue with male sons.
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| Why everyone wants girls more than boys? |
A Wednesday afternoon at Wilmersdorf's playground. Two women stand back and watch their four-year-old children play tag. One of them is obviously pregnant. "The ultrasound is tomorrow," she adds, glancing at her tummy and hoping it's not a poke. The other mother nods in agreement.
What may come as a surprise to some is that the sole desire for daughters is extremely widespread in a certain, generally metropolitan, milieu.
For example, I only know two ladies in my Berlin social circle who were praying for a boy following a positive pregnancy test. Yet there were at least twenty people who yearned for a daughter or girls. They are all educated and introspective ladies. Many people do not grasp their desire for a female.
It was merely diffuse for some, and they soon adjusted to the fact that it would not be the anticipated gender. Others had to nibble for a longer period of time. Consider Filippa. She was born in Berlin and is 38 years old. Filippa has two children, ages seven and five. It's all about the lads. Of course, she adores both of them. Yet it took her a long time to accept having sons.
She and her partner were certain that their first pregnancy would be a girl, she adds. When it was revealed to be a boy, the two followed suit barely 16 months later. Another young man.
Filippa couldn't disguise her dismay at the scan. "I was really heartbroken when the doctor informed us. I needed to weep "she claims. At the same time, she feels embarrassed by her emotions. She does, after all, have two healthy children.
As a result, Filippa does not want to feature in this piece under her own name. She's not sure why she wanted a girl so desperately. "I'm not a fan of pink outfits, and I'm more of a sports fan. I just had a notion that girls would fit me better."
She is not alone in feeling this way. Under the topic of gender desire, there are many articles in German-language online blogs and parent forums by pregnant women who ardently want a girl or convey their anguish at the knowledge that the kid will be a male.
There is some dubious advice on how to boost the chances of a sperm with an X chromosome winning the race as early as conception. There have been cases of women seeking psychotherapy in order to avoid rejecting the male fetus in their pregnancy.
Today's parents' predilection for daughters can even be scientifically confirmed. The most recent study on the subject was only released in mid-February. The University of Warsaw's Magdalena Grabowska and Ewa Cukrowska-Torzewska analyzed the reproductive behavior of residents in eleven Central and Eastern European nations.
They were able to demonstrate that if the first kid was a male, parents born after 1960 were more likely to have a second child. In other words, many parents believe that a daughter is sufficient, but a boy is not. The researchers were able to establish this impact in connection to planning a third child in Germany: moms born after 1960 are more likely to become pregnant for the third time in this nation if they already had two males. Family planning is more commonly done when there are two daughters.
The analysis also reveals an intriguing fact: in Germany, the tendency toward the favored gender reversed throughout the course of the twentieth century. If the first two children were females, parents born before 1960 had a third child substantially more frequently in this nation. Male offspring were more popular at the time.
In fact, boys were once thought to be a blessing in Germany and other European countries. For a long time, only a male heir could carry on the land, company, or family name in feudal society. For generations, boys were considered a sure sign of riches.
This is still the case in many countries today, which is why boys are favored in India, China, and the South Caucasus, for example, and female embryos are even intentionally terminated. Cultural factors, such as the dowry practice or the habit of girls moving live with their in-laws, frequently play a part here.
From the end of the nineteenth century, the number of farms and handcraft companies in Germany has progressively fallen. At the same time, affluence grew and women's rights were established. More and more females were able to complete higher education, study, and contribute to their families' income. Simultaneously, the urge for boys diminished. Even the scientists were taken aback by the amount.
Karsten Hank, a sociologist from Cologne, has been researching the chosen gender of German and Scandinavian parents for many years, conducting surveys in 2000, 2006, and 2019. He and his colleagues, like the Warsaw researchers, analyzed data from birth registrations.
"We anticipated that boy preference would decline since the 1950s. What we didn't expect was for the trend to change." Yet, Hank was able to demonstrate that parents are increasingly focusing their family planning on having at least one daughter.
Gender dissatisfaction is thus not a new occurrence in the English-speaking world. Anja Constanze Gaca, a Berlin midwife, is also aware of it via her daily job. She frequently encounters parents who are dissatisfied with their child's sex. "Sometimes their dreams and expectations have little to do with the real kid that is developing in their belly," Gaca says on her blog "Of Good Parents". It's more about what the parents have gone through.
Gaca believes that everyone who grew up with brothers has a good concept of what it's like to have boys. On the other side, if a woman had a loving mother-daughter connection as a kid, she may want to recreate that with her own daughter.
Sarah Trentzsch, a social psychologist in Berlin, attributes the dissatisfaction about the "wrong" gender to unconscious expectations. "Many women, even when they're in a relationship, don't feel emotionally supported," she says. They expected social presence, love, and the chance to reflect on themselves from other women. "My hypothesis is that what adult relationships leave unsolved, a daughter instinctively seeks."
Yes, witnessing a miniature replica of oneself grow up is a lovely sight. Nonetheless, many guys nowadays would like to have a female. Consider Filippa's partner. According to the Warsaw research, many moms who have a third child after two sons did not make this decision alone.
Hence the phenomena appears to be more than simply a yearning to relive one's upbringing. According to sociologist Hank, while women have been more liberated and have caught up with males in terms of education and self-realization over the last 150 years, the converse has not occurred. Everyone thinks it's amazing when a female plays soccer while wearing a dinosaur shirt.
According to Hank, men have fallen behind in traditionally female fields such as care work. "Just as parents did not trust their daughter to take over the farm or the firm in the past, they still do not trust their son to take care of them in old age. Or to serve as their emotional anchor".
And they are correct: Daughters are three times more likely than sons to care for their moms, according to sociologist Rüdiger Peukert. The responsibility of males to financially support their parents will become less significant as society provides more financial stability to its members, he argues in his book "The Lives of the Genders": With daughters who have one of their own incomes, parents might look for someone in their old age to take care of them and financially support them.
Why would they desire a son in these circumstances? "It's a vicious cycle: Boys are more likely to be permitted to separate from their parents. "They don't have as great a desire for affection and intimacy, and as a result, they feel less responsible for their parents' needs," explains social psychologist Trentzsch.
Furthermore, for numerous decades, boys have been viewed as the "difficult sex" in Germany. Girls do better in school and are more likely to attend university, whereas boys are more likely to drop out or be diagnosed with behavioral problems such as ADHD.
The author states that there are no biological variations that explain how boys and girls behave differently. Gender as a social construction, on the other hand, is decisive. Our children's skills are heavily impacted by how we and their surroundings treat them, as well as the expectations we have of them.
Girls are still expected to be socially adept and adaptive. Both of which are beneficial to a successful educational career. Males, on the other hand, are praised for asserting themselves and competing with one another: According to Diefenbach, these talents are undervalued in today's female-dominated school system.
The sad irony is that females cannot keep their educational advantage as adults. Notwithstanding liberation and anti-discrimination legislation, males continue to enjoy more professional prospects and greater earnings. If you want your child to succeed and have an easy life, you should prefer a male. Nonetheless, many parents appear to prefer having a seemingly straightforward daughter with great social skills over an outspoken male.
We basically control how sociable our boys grow and how attached they are to us. "Parents may also teach their children to open their tongues," sociologist Hank explains. Several studies suggest that both moms and dads discuss feelings with their girls significantly more frequently than they do with their sons, especially when it comes to negative emotions like melancholy. And that by the age of six, children have assimilated and replicate this mode of communication.
In trials, newborns respond differently to adults based on whether they are wearing a blue or a pink onesie. And it starts much earlier: depending on whether they are expecting a boy or a girl, pregnant women talk in a different voice and use different phrases to describe the movements of the baby in their womb.
Wouldn't we have to worry about our sons being tougher, more difficult, and less emotionally attached to us if we let go of all those expectations and treated them equally? "While guys are permitted to explore their surroundings, girls are nevertheless discreetly sanctioned," Trentzsch argues.
It is more difficult for them to express their displeasure and disagreements since they have learnt to be sensitive to their parents' sentiments. "That's presumably why guys are seen to be more strenuous than girls," the social psychologist explains.
If we ceased doing that as parents, the girl trend may become obsolete. But, sociologist Hank believes it is not unduly dramatic. "Yes, it appears that more parents prefer females. But, this has no social ramifications in Germany because there is no bigger proportion of women in society," he explains.
Furthermore, his and the Warsaw studies found that parents who already have a boy and a girl are less likely to have a third child than parents who have two girls. "Most parents in Europe would want to have both sexes. That's a good indicator that both boys and girls are appreciated."
The author Anna Pannen is a German journalist .
Source: TAGESSPIEGEL