{"id":9618,"date":"2011-06-01T13:25:25","date_gmt":"2011-06-01T17:25:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=9618"},"modified":"2011-06-01T13:25:25","modified_gmt":"2011-06-01T17:25:25","slug":"qotd-gender-free-parenting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2011\/06\/01\/qotd-gender-free-parenting\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: “Gender-free parenting”"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Earlier this month, the Toronto Star<\/em> published a story called \u201cFootloose and gender-free,\u201d 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\u2019t even tell people outside the family whether Storm, their four-month-old child, is a boy or girl. \u201cIf you really want to get to know someone, you don\u2019t ask what\u2019s between their legs,\u201d says David Stocker, the child\u2019s father.<\/p>\n

I wish this well-meaning fellow could have attended my 7-year-old daughter\u2019s 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\u2019d seen on Youtube.<\/p>\n

Not that the boys weren\u2019t \u201ccreative.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Jonathan Kay, “Take it from me \u2014 \u2018gender-free\u2019 parenting doesn\u2019t work”, National Post<\/em><\/a>, 2011-06-01<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Earlier this month, the Toronto Star published a story called \u201cFootloose and gender-free,\u201d 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\u2019t even tell people outside the family whether Storm, their four-month-old child, is a boy or girl. \u201cIf […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[57,41],"tags":[374,254,139],"class_list":["post-9618","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-humour","category-quotations","tag-children","tag-gender","tag-psychology"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-2v8","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9618","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9618"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9618\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9619,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9618\/revisions\/9619"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9618"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9618"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9618"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}