General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: "We Owe to Our Sons What We've Given Our Daughters" [View all]pnwmom
(109,021 posts)The way you describe raising your girls sounds very reasonable and most parents I know attempt a similar style; however, parents with multiple children often discover that the same methods that work for some children don't always work for others.
I, for example, congratulated myself for knowing how to feed my oldest because I offered her a balanced choice of healthy foods and she happily ate them. I found out when I had my next child that it isn't always so easy. The same thing happened with potty-training. I thought I was an expert potty-trainer, with easy successes following a simple reward system (using stickers on a piece of paper) at about age 2 - 2.5. My third child taught me that I knew nothing. I had just been lucky the first two times.
I suspect that you simply didn't have enough children, and certainly not enough boys, to discover the limits of your own methods.