Earlier this month, the Toronto Star published a story called “Footloose and gender-free,” which sympathetically profiled a young couple trying to raise a child in a completely gender-neutral environment — so gender-neutral that the mother and father won’t even tell people outside the family whether Storm, their four-month-old child, is a boy or girl. “If you really want to get to know someone, you don’t ask what’s between their legs,” says David Stocker, the child’s father.
I wish this well-meaning fellow could have attended my 7-year-old daughter’s birthday party at a pottery and painting studio last week. There, he would have seen 10 little girls, all of them sitting quietly at a table, studiously creating beautiful little masterpieces. The boys, meanwhile, took about 30 seconds to slop some paint onto a ceramic dinosaur or car — and then spent the next hour chasing each other around the facility, occasionally hauling one another to the ground so they could act out professional wrestling moves they’d seen on Youtube.
Not that the boys weren’t “creative.” One of them had been given a cheap video camera from his parents, and spent 10 minutes taking footage of the (unoccupied) toilet in the studio bathroom. This pint-sized Truffaut had a cheering section: The boys assembled around him found the documentary project to be the most hilarious thing in the world, and some became literally incontinent with laughter (ironic, no?) as they took turns passing the camcorder from hand to hand watching and re-watching the footage. Occasionally, the girls would look over at the boys — much as well-dressed diners in a fancy restaurant might gaze out a window to watch hobos fighting over a liquor bottle in an alley — and then sighed and returned to their artistic labours.
As any (normal) parent can attest, such vignettes are entirely typical of parties featuring young boys and girls — who generally are so different in their behavior as almost to compose different species. Stocker is entirely wrong: There is no other single datum of information about a young child that will tell you more about his or her temperament, interests, energy level and maturity level than his or her sex.
Jonathan Kay, “Take it from me — ‘gender-free’ parenting doesn’t work”, National Post, 2011-06-01
June 1, 2011
QotD: “Gender-free parenting”
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Excellent exploration of the issue. I thought that one of the people commenting on the story nailed it though. Here, in part, is the comment “These two parents arent being honest with themselves or their children. Basic human psychology would dictate that any ‘overtly’ masculine behaviour by their boys would be perceived ( subconsciously) as a ‘failure’ of their attempt at a ‘gender neutral’ zone. And if the boys engage in any overtly feminine behaviour; this conversely would be ‘proof’ that their children are not ‘bound’ by the ligatures of their sex.
Now which behaviours do you think will be implicitly rewarded and encouraged?”
Comment by Dwayne — June 1, 2011 @ 14:34