My grandson is just three and absorbing new words like a sponge. My son-in law was explaining two new words to him — “husband” and “wife”.
“Daddy, you can’t be mummy’s husband.” On quizzing him, the truth slowly emerged. On asking him why he couldn’t be my daughter’s husband he explained that as he did all the cooking, he was obviously a wife, not a husband.
He is an excellent cook, and as my daughter and he both work, they divvy up the household chores between them. As someone who loves being in the kitchen, he does most of the cooking.
What had happened is that being read stories like the Gingerbread Man where the woman does all the cooking and baking, my grandson had made the natural assumption that husbands’ roles were to be brave and take the world on (“You can’t catch me, I’m the Gingerbread Man”), while wives’ roles were to be nurturing and provide food for the family.
Because nursery rhymes and classic children’s stories have been around forever, we read them to our children and grandchildren and don’t think twice about the mindsets involved. The morals of the stories we generally concur with, and we hardly notice the wider implications of how the world has moved on since most of them were written.
Mindsets are a definition for a commonly accepted way of viewing the world. We all have them, but some people are slow to readjust as the world alters around them. Smacking children or telling sexist jokes are no longer the done thing in today’s world, but thirty or forty years ago few would have taken issue with such behaviour.
Which leads us to the antidote to fixed, or frozen, thinking: an agile mindset. One that continually frees itself from herd thinking. One that is constantly tuning in to what is relevant and worthwhile in society as it evolves. Yes, it is comfortable and reassuring to follow the blogs or the newspapers that reflect our thinking. But we earn little by doing so (apart from the warm glow of confirming we are not alone in our analysis of the ills of the world).
Whether it’s husbands being typecast in a very young child’s mind as people who eat meals, rather than cook them or many of the other unconsciously accepted mindsets we fall into — now more than ever we need to question them.
My book on Agile thinking is published in amongst all this mayhem in a fortnight and I hope it’s an interesting read for those looking for something to ponder https://thedobook.co/products/do-agile-futureproof-your-mindset-stay-grounded
