Raising confident daughters with childrens books for girls: A Girl Named Pants!
One night, when my oldest daughter was around four-years-old, I sat at her bedside responding to dozens of questions which seemed designed more to keep me in her room than to get answers. One question, though, was really profound. She asked me why God was a "boy" and not a "girl." She attended a Christian pre-school and she said her teacher always referred to God as "He" or "Him" or our "Father," and never "She" or "Her" or our "Mother."
That was a tough one. Raised as a Christian myself, I always viewed God as a "Male." I had never really thought about it before. But, I thought about it a lot after that. It occurred to me that it must be difficult being a woman raised in a world where at least 3.5 Billion out of 6 Billion people believe that the supreme being is a Man. Not only have women been oppressed by the physicality of men since the beginning of humanity, but they have also been oppressed by powerful religions that say the supreme being is a Man and not a Women.
I decided that that wouldn't work in my mission to create confident, "I can do anything!" kind of girls. So, after concluding that God probably isn't a man or a woman, we would switch to using the female pronoun when referring to God in our home.
I told my daughters that God can do anything, and that if God wanted to be a Boy, He could do that, and if God wanted to be a Girl, She could do that too. And, since girls are so awesome, God was probably a Girl more often than a Boy. Now we refer to God as "She" and "Her" and our "Mother." And while I don't know what the long term impact will be, I feel better that my daughters don't have a home which perpetuates the belief that the centerpiece of the universe is a Man.
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