- [First-place Winning Entry, 2026 Chidera Anushiem Undergraduate Essay Competition]
- THEME – Equality Begins at Home: How Family and Upbringing Shape Attitudes Towards Gender
10-year-old Ade had always wanted to be a cook. One evening, while ravishing his mum’s delicious Semo and Egusi, he blurted out his long-held dream. Almost immediately, his dad put down his spoon. “Tufiakwa! Over my dead body,” he remarked. His mum, leaning from the doorway, added, “Ade, cooking is for girls. You cannot do it as a boy.” And in that very moment, Ade’s perception of his roles as a boy-child begins to form.
This is the world we live in. A world where the earliest misconceptions about gender come from the home, and how the only way to address them is to start from the home where they emanate from. This essay explores how Ade’s family upbringing negatively affects his life and how Ade’s decision to change the narrative in his family is the only hope for equality in society.
To begin with, the family is commonly considered the basic unit of society. When it comes to socialization, the family is the primary driver. Each family differs widely along tribal, religious, and cultural lines. While the family is the who, the upbringing is the how that determines how a child is raised.1 In a highly patriarchal society, upbringing is largely the same. And this upbringing determines how children are gender-socialized.2
According to social learning theory, children learn about gender through observation of behavior and direct instruction from parents.3 In a patriarchal upbringing, both mechanisms coalesce to socialize children towards stereotyped gender roles, from household chore divisions to differential discipline patterns, to emotional expressions, and to career expectations.
Ade, the boy-child, is pulled towards what sociologists call hegemonic masculinity, characterized by stoicism, self-reliance, aggressiveness, and emotional detachment.4 By the time Ade is a man, he has learned what he is supposed to be. The upbringing that begins at home follows him into adulthood, into his emotions, health, career, and role as a father.
He grows to become emotionally deficient. When emotionally troubled, he hides it.5 And it accumulates into an array of mental health struggles such as anxiety, substance abuse, and depression.6 The boy-child, who was taught to never show his pain, soon knots the pain around his neck, killing himself. Men commit 80% of suicides in Nigeria.7
These consequences do not stop there. Ade ties his entire worth as a man to his ability to be the breadwinner for his family. In fulfilling this role, he suffers from high rates of stress-related health problems like hypertension. He declines roles he considers beneath his dignity as a man. He avoids his first love, cooking, and chooses a career he does not love, because that is what his father tells him is for males.
Ade’s elder sister, raised under the same roof, suffers a different fate. She grows up socialized into benevolent sexism, where she learns to expect and reinforce Ade’s version of manhood.8 When she becomes a mother, she raises her children the same way Ade was raised. Though a victim, she is also a reinforcer of a system that affects both genders.
Sadly, for a long time, we have only pursued one-sided, external solutions. Our laws, regulations, and programs have long sought to address inequality from the lens of the girl child only, ignoring the fact that, first, both genders are victims, and second, today’s inequality is a reflection of the family upbringing of yesterday’s children.9 Without changing how both boys and girls are raised at home, we will keep going around in circles in our pursuit of equality.
This is what Ade soon realizes. After years of suppressing his emotions and trying to fit within a stereotype, he collapses from work-related stress and exhaustion.10 On the hospital bed, he reflects and sobs. “How did I get here?” he asks himself. His mind drifts back to his childhood, to his father’s silence when he hurt himself, to when he was scolded for crying. He realized he had grown up in a cage, and now, unknowingly, he is building the same cage for his children.
In that moment, he decides to break the cycle. He will not let his children suffer the same experience. When he returns home, he confides in his wife, crying. She is perplexed. Her husband should not be crying. Like her husband, she was raised to believe that males should not cry. They argue. Ade shows her his scars, the ones inside from years of emotional turmoil, the ones outside from years of overwork, and asks, “Is this what we want for our son?”
Then, she understands, and together, they decide to build a home where gender does not determine roles and responsibilities.
At home, Ade embraces household responsibilities and makes joint decisions with his wife. Their children observe both parents sharing responsibilities equally and openly expressing vulnerabilities. By watching their parents model gender equality, both children develop egalitarian beliefs and attitudes.11
The changes begin to show in the children. The son is not burdened by false masculinity. The daughter does not grow up expecting such. Together, they do not reproduce the same attitudes that sent their father to the hospital. Of course, society will push back. They will call the son soft and the daughter tomboy, but neither will break because the foundation they receive from home is strong.
And it is this realization that gives hope. When Ade and his wife model equality at home, they pass the baton to their children, who in turn pass it to their children. And like that, the narrative changes. By this, we see that equality does not begin on the pages of the newspaper or in the laws made by the government, but in the home; in the answer Ade’s father gives to his son who wants to be a cook, and in Ade’s courage to change it for his children.
REFERENCES
1Chami , R. A., & Youssef, M. H. (2025). Impact of Patriarchy and Gender Stereotypes on Working Women. In Google Books (p. 121). https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=nNM9EQAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PA121&ots=lWRF73CINr&sig=rScXzoSQ9NCGFlusPb7kaarEPU4
2Mariana Gonçalves Farias, Mariana Costa Biermann, Maia, & de, G. (2023). Structural Patriarchy and Male Dominance Hierarchies. Springer EBooks, 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85493-5_2152-1
3Cano, T., & Hofmeister, H. (2022). The intergenerational transmission of gender: Paternal influences on children’s gender attitudes. Journal of Marriage and Family, 85(1). https://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.12863
4Mensah, E. O. (2021). To be a Man is Not a Day’s Job: The Discursive Construction of Hegemonic Masculinity by Rural Youth in Nigeria. Gender Issues. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12147-020-09271-2
5Schumacher, Helene. 2019. “Why More Men than Women Die by Suicide.” BBC. BBC Future. March 17, 2019. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190313-why-more-men-kill-themselves-than-women
6Dennis, J. M., & Zolnikov, T. R. (2023). Demystifying Male Emotional Development: Exploring the Implications of Forced Gender Roles on Black American Males. Journal of Black Psychology, 50(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/00957984231191868
7Ani, E. (2023, November 19). International Men’s Day: Males account for 80% of suicides in Nigeria – Foundation. Daily Post Nigeria. https://dailypost.ng/2023/11/19/international-mens-day-males-account-for-80-of-suicides-in-nigeria-foundation/
8Glick, P., & Raberg, L. (2018). Benevolent sexism and the status of women. Psycnet.apa.org. https://doi.org/10.1037/0000059-018
9Li, Y., Zhang, J., Li, J., Chen, Y., Zhang, J., & Zuo, M. (2024). The influence of parents on children’s consciousness of gender equality: a multi-group structural equation modeling approach. Frontiers in Psychology, 15. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1361281
10Equimundo. 2022. “INTERNATIONAL MEN & GENDER EQUALITY SURVEY (IMAGES) a GLOBAL REPORT in 15 HEADLINES 2.” https://www.equimundo.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/IMAGES-Headlines_2022.pdf
11Cano, T., & Hofmeister, H. (2022). The intergenerational transmission of gender: Paternal influences on children’s gender attitudes. Journal of Marriage and Family, 85(1). https://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.12863
Klistivivi is a medical student by training and student journalist by passion who uses the power of his words to shape a better Nigeria.
