Open-mindedness: Post 3

Our third post on open-mindedness, written by Hanna and also published in her blog: A Little Blog About Words

Unfortunately it’s quite difficult to avoid sounding like a lecturing know-it-all when you are writing about big issues such as tolerance and acceptance. These are such important and thought-provoking topics which everyone has their own opinions on and if you are not careful it is easy to sound as if you think that you have it all figured out and everyone else needs to learn from you. I have really tried to avoid this, but I still suspect that a few of you who have read mine and Sebastian’s posts might have thought that we seem to be very full of ourselves. That is not at all our intention and I think that we are both very aware of how far away we still are from our ideal of reaching a completely open-minded state. Personally, I find that my wish to be open is being challenged on a regular basis and particularly some things are difficult to embrace. In this third post I therefore thought that I would write a little bit about one area where I find myself being too close-minded sometimes.

If you don’t know any other way, you are likely to believe that the way you are living is the “correct way”. Therefore, for most people the attitudes we hold are deeply rooted in our childhood and the environment we grew up in. For me, growing up was largely about discovering that there were other ways to live in and that there were many cultures where the norms were completely different from those I was used to. In fact, even your next-door neighbours may be living differently from you.
In my case, one thing that has shaped me a lot is that I grew up in a family where both parents worked and the household chores were split equally. Both my parents value equality and happen to have been fairly successful at what they do, so they decided together that they wanted to divide the workload at home equally between them. Because of this, I found it difficult for a long time to be open-minded to more traditional homes where the wife is more involved in child-care and cooking, while the dad is responsible for earning money. This is probably a quite unusual example of close-mindedness; usually people talk about the opposite situation when someone thinks that women “should know their place” etc. but I think that it is important that I really make it clear that in my mind “open-mindedness” is all about respecting other people’s choices and realising that there are several right ways of doing things. Therefore, any type of failure to accept others’ lifestyles counts as close-mindedness.

Beginning to discuss equality and family arrangements with friends and family, as well as reading and hearing what people had to say about it in the media opened my eyes to the fact that sometimes you can be equal without having to take care of the exact same things. In some families the parents make the mutual decision that the mum will stay at home because she prefers that and she doesn’t get as much money from working anyway.

When I moved to England I also found out how difficult it is to stay at home with children and still keep your job here. When you give birth, your boss basically expects you to be back at work as soon as you have healed enough. If you are a man you have next to no chance at all to stay at home with your newborn and remain employed. If you like many parents, feel opposed to the idea of hiring a nanny, a common solution is therefore that the mother becomes a stay at home mum to be able to care for her infant and then she often remains a house-wife because it is difficult to get out onto the job market when you have been away for years. This scenario was completely foreign to me when I first heard of it, because in Sweden both parents have the right to stay at home with the child for several months each and still be employed. Learning that this is not something to take for granted even in Europe, made me adjust my view and become a lot more understanding and accepting towards families that have more traditional gender roles.

I definitely believe that the key to personal development is to meet others and find out what they have to say. I remember being so surprised, maybe even a little shocked, when we discussed equality in my English literature class once in school and I realised how differently many of my friends viewed gender roles. Personally I would prefer it if there were no such thing as gender roles, because I think that men and women are both perfectly capable of doing the same things as long as they want to. I believe that it is all about choice and motivation!  But, with my growing understanding and awareness of different perspectives I have been able to see that what people want is not always the same and while some women want a career, others don’t. I still find it difficult to accept people who have the attitude that men are less capable of taking care of children, but I try not to get too worked up about it. If both I and the other person can put our close-mindedness aside it will be a lot easier for us to get along and if I have to be the person to set the example then I will try my best to do that.
I guess what I wanted to say by giving you this personal example is that everyone struggles with changing our opinions and/or accepting that others might have other opinions and I am absolutely not any different. What we can do is to try to be aware of these weak point we have, and maybe sometimes just stay away from topics which you know that you won’t be able to agree on!

/Hanna