Advice for Remy, Day 37. Never let anyone treat you differently because you’re a boy (and never treat someone differently because they’re a girl). Our favourite bedtime stories for you at the moment are these wonderful books - ‘Stories for Boys who Dare to be Different’ and ‘Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls’. They’re filled with amazingly written and illustrated tales of real people and their inspirational lives, from Barack Obama to the Bronte sisters - and many more incredibly inspirational people I’d never even heard of. You’ll grow up knowing and being inspired by these people, which can only be a good thing to make you aware of all the amazing things some people have done. However, there’s just one little thing which annoys me about these otherwise incredible books, and it’s in the title. The word ‘for’. I can’t see any reason at all why a book filled with amazing stories of inspirational males is targeted specifically at boys, and why the same book filled with inspirational females is targeted at girls. Children shouldn’t grown up thinking they can only aspire to be like people of their same gender - they should aspire to be like great people, not males or females specifically. These people did amazing things in all manner of areas - but none of their achievements were because they were male or female. I don’t want you to grow up only viewing males as role models - you should be admiring Jane Austen as much as Charles Dickens, Jacinda Ardern as much as Barack Obama, Serena Williams as much as Roger Federer. Greatness and inspiration isn’t gender-defined, it’s something human-wide, and the world would be a better place of more people realised this. And we can start by changing that ‘for’ to an ‘of’.
