I have been raising my daughters to be feminists since they were in utero. I knew the world’s training would begin the second they were born, and I wanted them to be ready. Ready meant having an internal narrative about what it means to be a woman that they could weigh against the world’s narrative. I did not have an alternative narrative as a child, so when the world told me that a real girl is small, quiet, pretty, accommodating, and pleasant, I believed that this was the Truth. I breathed in those lies, and they made me very sick. Children are either taught by the adults in their lives to see cages and resist them, or they are trained by our culture to surrender to them. Girls born into a patriarchal society become either shrewd or sick. It’s one or the other.

I wanted my girls to know this: You are a human being, and your birthright is to remain fully human. So you get to be everything: loud quiet bold smart careful impulsive creative joyful big angry curious ravenous ambitious. You are allowed to take up space on this earth with your feelings, your ideas, your body. You do not need to shrink. You do not need to hide any part of yourself, ever.

It’s a lifelong battle for a woman to stay whole and free in a world hell-bent on caging her. I wanted to give my girls whatever they’d need to fight for their full humanity. Truth is the only weapon that can beat the pervasive lies the world will tell them.

So I’d place headphones over my watermelon belly at night and play audiobooks about brave, complicated women. After they were born, I’d rock my daughters to sleep with stories about women who had broken out of their cultures’ cages to live free and offer their gifts to the world. As they grew, we’d go for walks and guess the careers of the women passing by: “I bet she’s an engineer, a CEO, an Olympic athlete!” When another mother jokingly mentioned my daughter’s bossiness, I’d say, “Isn’t it great? She’s a leader.” When my girls lost a game and became furious, I’d say, “It’s okay to be angry.” When they started school and began to consider dimming and shrinking themselves, I’d say, “Keep raising your hand, honey. You can be your bold, brilliant self out there in the world. You can be sure of yourself and still be a girl.”

It worked. As they grew, they’d come home from school and ask why the winner on the four-square court was always called “King.” They’d ask their teachers why all the language in the constitution was He. They insisted that we transfer from their Christian elementary school because the teacher refused to entertain the idea of referring to God as She. When Tish’s soccer jersey was issued to her with “Lady Bruins” on it, she led a revolt, demanding that either the “Lady” be removed from the girls’ jerseys or “Gentleman” be added to the boys’ jerseys. Amma wore suits to school, and when classmates called her a boy, she shrugged. When I complained about missing my appointment to dye my gray roots, Tish asked, “Why are you trying to change who you are?”

Five years ago, I was cleaning up the kitchen while CNN droned on. I walked over to flip the channel, but then I noticed a particular and disturbing pattern in the reporting.

The first story was about several white male government officials who had been caught lying and cheating to keep their power. The second story included footage of a police officer brutally beating an unarmed black teenager. Then these stories:

I stared openmouthed at the TV and thought:

Oh my God.

This is what it looks like for boys to try to comply with our culture’s directions.

They are not allowed to be whole, either.

Boys are in cages, too.

Boys who believe that real men are all-powerful will cheat and lie and steal to claim and keep power.

Boys who believe that girls exist to validate them will take a woman’s rejection as a personal affront to their masculinity.

Boys who believe that open, vulnerable connection between men is shameful will violently hate gay boys.

Boys who believe that men don’t cry will become men who rage.

Boys who learn that pain is weakness will die before they ask for help.

Being an American boy is a setup. We train boys to believe that the way to become a man is to objectify and conquer women, value wealth and power above all, and suppress any emotions other than competitiveness and rage. Then we are stunned when our boys become exactly what we have trained them to be. Our boys cannot follow our directions, but they are cheating and dying and killing as they try to. Everything that makes a boy human is a “real man’s” dirty secret.

Our men are caged, too. The parts of themselves they must hide to fit into those cages are the slices of their humanity that our culture has labeled “feminine”—traits like mercy, tenderness, softness, quietness, kindness, humility, uncertainty, empathy, connection. We tell them, “Don’t be these things, because these are feminine things to be. Be anything but feminine.”

The problem is that the parts of themselves that our boys have been banished from are not feminine traits; they are human traits. There is no such thing as a feminine quality, because there is no such thing as masculinity or femininity. “Femininity” is just a set of human characteristics a culture pours into a bucket and slaps with the label “feminine.”

Gender is not wild, it’s prescribed. When we say, “Girls are nurturing and boys are ambitious. Girls are soft and boys are tough. Girls are emotional and boys are stoic,” we are not telling truths, we are sharing beliefs—beliefs that have become mandates. If these statements seem true, it’s because everyone has been so well programmed. Human qualities are not gendered. What is gendered is permission to express certain traits. Why? Why would our culture prescribe such strict gender roles? And why would it be so important for our culture to label all tenderness and mercy as feminine?

Because disallowing the expression of these qualities is the way the status quo keeps its power. In a culture as imbalanced as ours—in which a few hoard billions while others starve, in which wars are fought for oil, in which children are shot and killed while gun manufacturers and politicians collect the blood money—mercy, humanity, and vulnerability cannot be tolerated. Mercy and empathy are great threats to an unjust society.

So how does power squash the expression of these traits? In a misogynistic culture, all that is needed is to label them feminine. Then we can forever discount them in women and forever shame them out of men. Ta-da: no more messy, world-changing tenderness to deal with. We can continue on without our shared humanity challenging the status quo in any way.

I stood and stared at the TV. I thought back on how I had prepared my girls from day one to fight for their humanity. I thought:

Fuck.

I have a son, too.

I do not recall rocking my son to sleep with stories about tender men. I do not remember pointing to men passing by: “I bet he’s a poet, a teacher, a devoted father.” When an adult mentioned my son’s sensitivity, I don’t remember saying, “Isn’t it great? His tenderness is his strength.” When he started school, I do not recall saying, “You can be quiet, sad, merciful, small, vulnerable, loving, and kind out there in the world. You can be unsure of yourself and still be a boy.” I do not remember saying to him, “Girls are not for conquering. They do not exist to play supporting roles in the stories of men. They exist all on their own.”

I want my son to keep his humanity. I want him to stay whole. I do not want him to become sick; I want him to be shrewd. I do not want him to surrender to cages he must slowly die inside or kill his way out of. I do not want him to become another unconscious brick that power uses to build fortresses around itself. I want him to know the true story, which is that he is free to be fully human, forever.

My son is an accomplished student-athlete. He takes tough classes, stays up all hours of the night studying, then wakes up early to go to practice. Until a few months ago, I used that as an excuse to let him slack off at home. I straightened his room for him while he was at school, I did his laundry, and I cleaned up the nightly mess he left out in the family room.

One evening, he asked to skip the dishes to go finish his homework. I let him go while Abby, the girls, and I finished up. That night in bed, Abby said, “Babe, I know it’s out of love, but you cater to Chase, and he takes advantage of it.”

I said, “That’s ridiculous!” and then I lay in bed and stared at the ceiling for an hour.

The next day I turned on the TV and saw a commercial about a couple who had just become parents. The young mother left the baby with his father to return to work for the first time. The camera followed the father around the house as their Alexa chirped constant reminders that the mother had programmed the night before: “Don’t forget music class at nine! Don’t forget lunch at noon, the bottle’s in the fridge! You’re doing a great job!” Viewers were meant to swoon at the sweetness.

All I could think was: Did this father just arrive on Earth? Is he new here? Why does he need minute-by-minute coaching in order to care for his baby? What did preparation for this day look like for this baby’s mother? In addition to getting ready to go back to work, this mama spent the previous night thinking through every minute of her husband’s next day. She anticipated each of his and his baby’s needs, and then she trained Alexa to hold the father’s hand all day so he did not have to think at all. But this father appeared to be a grown man who loved his son. There was no earthly reason why he would not be every bit as capable of caring for his son as his wife was. They were both new parents. How had one of them become so helpless?

Oh, I thought. OH.

The next day I left Chase a list of chores to do. He didn’t finish them. When I confronted him, he said, “I’m so sorry, Mom, I’ve got this big physics test tomorrow.”

I said, “No, I’m sorry, Chase. I’ve been sending you the wrong message. I have accidentally taught you that achieving out there is more important than serving your family in here. I’ve taught you that home is where you spend your leftover energy, out there is where you give your best. I need to course-correct by giving you this bottom line: I don’t give a rat’s ass how much respect you earn for yourself out in the world if you are not showing respect to the people inside your home. If you don’t get that right, nothing you do out there will matter much.”

Our boys are born with great potential for nurturing, caring, loving, and serving. Let’s stop training it out of them.

Years ago, my ex-husband went out to dinner with an old friend who had just had a baby. They stayed out for hours, and when Craig got home, I said, “Tell me everything! What’s the baby’s name?”

Craig said, “Hm. I don’t know.”

I said, “What? Okay. How’s it going at home? Are they exhausted? Is the baby sleeping? How’s Kim doing with it all?”

“I didn’t ask.”

“Okay. How’s his mother? Is the cancer getting worse?”

“He didn’t mention it.”

“Wait. What did you talk about for two hours?”

“I don’t know. Work. Soccer?”

I remember looking at Craig and thinking: I wouldn’t trade places with him for all the money in the world. I would not have made it through early parenting without honest friends to talk through how hard it all was. It must be so lonely to be a man. It must be so difficult to carry by yourself all the things we were meant to help each other carry.

I don’t want my son to be tamed into loneliness. So when I get stuck carpooling Chase and his friends all over God’s green Earth, I turn down the radio and say:

In the rearview mirror, I catch them rolling their eyes at each other. Then they start talking, and I marvel at how interesting their inner thoughts, feelings, and ideas are.

I remember once one of the boys said something particularly vulnerable and the other boys giggled uncomfortably. I said, “Hey. Just remember that when you laugh at something someone has said, it’s not about the person who spoke. It’s about you. He was brave enough to be honest; you be brave enough to handle it. Life is hard; friends need to be safe places for each other.”

Our boys are just as human as our girls are. They need permission, opportunities, and safe places to share their humanity. Let’s encourage real, vulnerable conversations among our sons and their friends. Let’s ask about their feelings, relationships, hopes, and dreams so they don’t become middle-aged men who feel permitted to discuss only sports, sex, news, and the weather. Let’s help our boys become adults who don’t have to carry life alone.

My friend Jason told me that for the entirety of his childhood, he had cried only in the bathroom because his tears would bother his father and mother. “Man up,” they’d say.

He told me that he and his wife, Natasha, were trying to raise their son differently. They want Tyler to be able to express all of his emotions safely, so Jason has been modeling vulnerability by expressing himself more openly in front of his son and his wife. After he told me that he said, “This might be in my head, but I feel like when I try to get vulnerable, Natasha gets uncomfortable. She says she wants me to be sensitive, but the two times I’ve cried in front of her or admitted that I was afraid, I’ve felt her pull back.”

Natasha is my dear friend, so I asked her about that. When I told her what Jason had said, she looked surprised: “I can’t believe he noticed that, but he’s right. When he cries, I feel weird. I am embarrassed to say that what I feel is kind of like disgust. Last month he admitted that he was afraid about money. I told him we would get through it together, but, on the inside, I felt myself thinking: Man up, dude. MAN UP? I’m a feminist, for God’s sake. It’s terrible. It doesn’t make any sense.”

It’s not terrible, and it makes perfect sense. Since women are equally poisoned by our culture’s standards of manhood, we panic when men venture out of their cages. Our panic shames them right back in. So we must decide whether we want our partners, our brothers, our sons to be strong and alone or free and held.

Perhaps part of a woman’s freeing herself is freeing her partner, her father, her brother, and her son. When our men and boys cry, let’s not say to them with our words or energy, “Don’t cry, honey.” Let’s get comfortable allowing our men to gently and consistently express the pain of being human, so that violent release isn’t their go-to option. Let’s embrace our strength so our men can take their turn being soft. Let us—men, women, and all those in between or beyond—reclaim our full humanity.

When Tish was nine, she and I went to our favorite bookstore together. As we walked inside, Tish stopped and stared at a magazine rack—a wall of cover models, each blonder, thinner, and more vacant than the last. All ghosts and dolls. Tish stared.

As usual, I was tempted to distract her, hurry her along, put it all behind us. But these messages cannot be put behind us, because they are everywhere. Either we leave our kids alone to make sense of them, or we wade in with them.

I put my arm around Tish, and we quietly looked at the covers together for a moment.

Tish looked around. A gray-haired employee was straightening books near us. A Latina woman was flipping through a paperback on the memoir table. A very pregnant woman with blue punky hair was wrangling with a cookie-eating toddler.

We drove home, and Tish disappeared into her room. Fifteen minutes later, she opened her door and yelled down the stairs, “MOM! HOW DO YOU SPELL PETITION?”

I googled it. Hard word.

A little while later, she came downstairs to the kitchen holding a handmade poster. She cleared her throat and began to read:

HELP SAVE HUMANITY

Dear world, this is a petition to show that I, Tish Melton, strongly feel that magazines should not show beauty is most important on the outside. It is not. I think magazines should show girls who are strong, kind, brave, thoughtful, unique, and show women of all different types of hair and bodies. ALL women should be treated EQUALLY.

I liked her idea so much. It wasn’t enough for women to have equality with men; they needed equality with each other.

I cannot rid my children’s air of all the lies they’ll be told about what it means to become a real woman or man. But I can teach them how to be critics of the culture instead of blind consumers of it. I can train my children to detect those lies and get angry instead of swallowing them and getting sick.