My twin boys turned one in April. They have since learned to walk, exclusively in opposite directions so every room now requires army-level defence. I have babyproofed the house twice, and they still find dangers that I am certain did not exist before they arrived. “Welcome,” a friend messaged me recently, “to the life of a boy mum.”
Somewhere between the hazards and the hullabaloo, a reel keeps finding me on Instagram. It says angry, independent women were given boys to raise, so they could bring up the kind of men they never got the chance to meet. It’s a gag, mostly. But it touches something real: my generation of mothers is raising sons with an agenda. We want them kinder and softer, yet courageous enough to stand up for themselves and others. But none of us are entirely sure how, because nobody has done it this way before.
So I sat down with two women who would know. One spends her days sifting through the country’s harshest news. The other spent her tennis career at the receiving end of some of the harshest comments about how she looked, what she wore and whom she married. Their paths first intersected almost a decade ago. In 2017, when Faye D’Souza suggested that men and women should enjoy equal freedom during a debate, one of the panellists, a cleric, told her, “Underwear pehenke [aap debate mein] aaiye. Mard aur aurat barabar ho jayege, na.” Unruffled, the award-winning journalist clapped back, “...All you men think that if you rattle Sania Mirza when she’s doing her job, if you rattle all women when they’re doing their jobs, they will run back into their kitchens, cover themselves up and leave the world again for you to conquer. I have news for you, we are not going anywhere.” D’Souza interviewed the tennis player not long after, about motherhood among other things, before going on to have a child of her own in 2022. Reconvening for a conversation with Vogue India, the journalist and Grand Slam champion discuss changing the way we raise boys, so they grow into men who challenge the way we treat women.
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Courtesy of Sania Mirza
Vogue India: Faye, your son is four; Sania, yours is eight. What were your first couple of years of bringing them up like?
Faye D’Souza: I feel like I was given a boy so that I’d learn to empathise with the other team as well, because I was batting so hard for ours. When Neil was less than a year old, I bought him a lot of gender-neutral toys and exposed him to everything, but in the world’s oldest cliché, he gravitated towards dinosaurs and trucks. I suppose it goes the other way too. On holiday, I went snorkelling and diving while my husband, who doesn’t enjoy any of it, stayed on the boat with my son. When we got back, Neil told everybody in his class that girls dive and boys stay on the boat because that’s the safe place for boys to be. He also says girls go to the gym to become strong because he sees me going to the gym. He’s processing all of this into a gender construct right now, and our job is to sieve out anything that would get filed the wrong way.
Sania Mirza: When Izhaan was born, people treated me the way they treat any mother who has just given birth, which is to say everybody had an opinion about what I should do, what I should feed him, how many times he should be woken up. I didn’t show Izhaan an iPad until he was 14 months old. I would have loved to wait until he was two, but I had to start travelling to play again. I couldn’t sleep on the flight and I had practice the next day—I didn’t have much of a choice. Some people I know didn’t show their kids a screen until they were three. Does that make me a bad mother? No. It just makes my life different.
Courtesy of Sania Mirza
Vogue India: As boy mums, we spend so much of our day worrying about teaching our sons what’s right. How do you control what they pick up outside the house?
Sania Mirza: They pick up habits. I wouldn’t even call them bad habits—they just replicate behaviours. Sometimes, Izhaan will use a word that isn’t allowed at home after returning from a playdate where an older kid was also present. I make it a point not to reprimand him. You must leave a channel of trust open so your child feels comfortable talking to you about things that happened in your absence. Faye and I come from a generation taught to be scared of their parents; that’s exactly how you start trusting people outside instead.
A few years ago, when many things were changing in my life, I had to have open conversations with my son and I didn’t know how, so I asked a child psychologist. One thing he said has stayed with me: a child feels more shame if he finds out things from others rather than from his own family. My son was four then. So I told him myself, in a way that a child would understand. I will not let him learn things about his home from those who don’t live in it.
Courtesy of Faye D’Souza
Faye D’Souza: Everything arrives from outside, even the small things. My son was in a play, and the teacher wrote in asking us to put blush on his cheeks. It confused him because he associates makeup with girls. I told him, “Makeup is a matter of choice. It makes no difference whether you’re a boy or a girl; some people like it and others don’t.” He understood instantly, but then said, “Okay, so if I don’t like it, do I still have to wear it for my school play?” There’s always a loophole.
Vogue India: We talk about how boys should be gentle, but the world, unfortunately, is not. How do we handle that?
Faye D’Souza: My son is extremely gentle, to the point where he never pushes on the playground. Other children push him, but he never responds. I’ve been teaching him to turn around and say, ‘I don’t like this, and if you do it again, I’m telling the teacher.’ My husband says, “You’re going to have to teach him to push back at some point.” I don’t know how to solve that one.
Courtesy of Sania Mirza
Sania Mirza: I went through exactly this when Izhaan was four and began playing football. The older kids shoved him, but he wouldn’t retaliate. His father and I talked it through, and we told him that he was never to be the first to push, never to be the first to start anything. But if there was no adult around and no other way out, he was going to have to fight back.
Vogue India: So what does ‘strong’ look like in the boys you’re raising?
Faye D’Souza: Strong is being able to call out the privilege and patriarchy among your own friends. When they speak badly about a classmate or make dirty jokes, saying “This is not okay” takes guts. And it comes from believing that female reporters and sportswomen are equal entities, not oddities. Nobody should have to call Sania an amazing ‘woman’ achiever. I want Neil to hold two halves at once, like Sania, who has learned to be tough when she needs to and be gentle elsewhere. Men must contain these multitudes too. For us ’90s girls, that man was Shah Rukh Khan.
Vogue India: You can both give your sons the life neither of you was born into. How do you find the balance between providing and coddling?
Sania Mirza: It’s so tricky. Do I sit in business class and put Izhaan in economy so he understands he has to earn it? Maybe when he’s 17. For now, it’s the small stuff. He doesn’t go to Hamleys anymore, but when he did, I would let him pick only two things. One day, he asked me how much money I have. I said I have enough. He said, “But how much is enough?” He’d had a conversation at school and come home to ask why he can’t pick up more than two toys if I have the money for it. It’s toys now; it’s going to be cars and watches later.
Courtesy of Faye D’Souza
Faye D’Souza: I was flying back from Singapore with Neil, and we walked past business class, then premium economy and finally into economy. I was carrying him and he pointed to business class and said, “Mama, I want to sit here.” I said, “You and me both, love, but right now we’re walking to the end of this plane.” At some point, I’ll have to tell him that he will have to work very hard if he wants to sit up front.
Vogue India: They’ll google you eventually. How do you want them to perceive you before that happens?
Sania Mirza: When Izhaan was four, he was playing mini cricket with my cousin and her husband in our hallway. My cousin picked up the bat, and her husband, just messing around, said, “No, no, she can’t play, she’s a girl.” Izhaan turned around and said, “Why are you saying that? My mom is a girl, and she was a world champion.”
We lead by example. When Faye says things on television, our boys watch. They google. Our sons should be proud of us; they should be able to say, “That’s who brought me up to be the man I am and I love her” without feeling that their masculinity has been threatened.
Faye D’Souza: Neil tells people that his mom is like a bear, but a kissy bear—like I’ll protect him from everything, but I’ll be kissing him the entire time. It’s a Machiavellian world with billionaires for heroes rather than scientists or poets. But if somebody asked Neil about me one day and he says, “My mom worked really hard every day”, that would be enough for me.
This article appears in Vogue India’s September-October 2026 issue. Subscribe here.
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