Friday, November 25, 2016
Gender Neutral Children
Sasha's story is the following. Sasha was raised gender neutral and the infants parents do not want to raise their child in the fear of a set gender. The child has a yellow room- plays with Barbies and Lego's and is able to dress in any way. The infants gender was not only not stated but went as far as being hidden from anyone that was not immediately close to the child. The parents even waited to find out the gender of the child after the child was born for 30 minutes. However, Storm's story for the child's parents was different. A child psychiatrist said that the parents were disturbed and misguided for raising their child this way.
In my opinion I feel that gender neutral parenting is something that is difficult to achieve and must be carefully planned out by both parents in a careful way. I also find it strange that they refer to their child as "the infant". This is a human being, someone's child. Those words do not dictate the gender of someone, however, they do show more affection than "the infant". In the article the psychiatrists sat that "we do have male brains and female brains" if this is true I think it is great that parents are allowing their children to find out for themselves which brain the have despite their physical parts. However, it is important that parents do not cross the very very fine line and take gender neutral parenting to the point that could be detrimental to the child. Unfortunately we do not know enough yet to tell what gender neutral parenting does to a child and what effects them later on in life. Because of that it is sadly a wait and see situation. I think that children no matter what their gender is or is not, they should be able to think, play, and create with whatever they wish to. They even should be able to wear what they want in order to express themselves in a safe way. However, hiding their gender from them I think will be detrimental to them later in life. Allow child to express who they are for what they are- not who they could be.
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I agree Sam, there is a very fine line that parents can cross in gender neutral parenting. I think it is important to show some direction in raising a child, without pushing too many stereotypes onto him or her. Eventually, the child will have to recognize that he was born biologically as a boy. Now regardless of whether he identifies with his gender at birth is a whole other story. I do not think that the parents should hide the boy's gender from him- we do not know how this will affect the boy as he goes into puberty for example.
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