By Melissa Lin ’12, Online Editor
A few days ago, I read an article (here and here) about a couple in Toronto, Canada raising their newborn child Storm without a gender. What that means is that they weren't telling anyone, save for the newborn's siblings, whether that child was a boy or a girl. After this story was released, people within the family's community and in the online community expressed anger and outrage at the parenting style, with some people saying that cases like this demonstrate why parenting should need a license.
This was my first time learning about such a parenting style, and I like it. Well, I love the idea, but I feel like the method may not be the best as there are many potential issues that could arise from a child not knowing what actually is specific to their sex. We discussed in Seminar this year the differences between gender and sex; my personal definition of sex is whether your chromosomes are XY (or XXY in the case of Klinefelter's syndrome) or XX (or XO in the case of Turner's syndrome), while gender encompasses gender roles, femininity, masculinity and sexual orientation.
The parents explained that they didn't want their children growing up restricted by gender roles and the societal expectations that came with "what's between their legs." Many of the comments argued that the parents were setting their child up for a childhood of teasing and a lifetime of identity crises. This reminded me of the case where a young boy dressed as Daphne from Scooby-Doo, and the mother received similar criticisms that the teasing the boy received would be her fault.
I completely disagree with the criticisms in this case and against the Scooby-Doo child, as they show how children are restricted from a very young age by their genders. The very fact that others are blaming the parents for the teasing that will be brought on the children shows that there is something wrong with the way other children are being raised. One, children should be taught not to bully. Period. Two, even very young children have been profoundly impacted by gender roles so as to know when someone of a certain sex does not belong or fit into their specific gender and to conclude that they should police what the boundaries of that gender are. A counterargument could be something along the lines of: if a parent was raising their child to hit and somehow harm those around him or her, then both the child and parent do deserve the anger and scorn of classmates and teachers. But that argument doesn't apply in this case since breaking the rules of gender does not harm the students or teachers in any way.
Another critic argued that the parents were somehow forcing their own political and ideological views on the child, and that this was unacceptable. Isn't that type of parenting style basically the only reason religion is still popular today? Why is there almost never the same outrage when Christian parents teaches their children that if they don't follow a book that condones slavery/servitude and the treatment of women as inferior, they will burn in eternity in hell? It's probably because it's already an accepted practice in society. Therefore, this argument that raising a child to choose her/his own gender is indoctrination and thus, terrible parenting, is quite hypocritical.
However, I do want to argue against the very idea itself that raising a child without specific gender roles is brainwashing. I think it's quite the opposite, as it is leaving a space for the child to determine by herself/himself what or who she/he wants to be. The parents are not imparting their beliefs about what being a girl should entail and what being a boy should entail. This can be called indoctrination no more than atheism can be called a religion.
With all this having been said, there are certain aspects of their parenting that I somewhat disagree with. The article mentions how the mother, who practices "unschooling," allows her kids plenty of freedom to choose what they want to do for the day, whether it is playing in the mud or skating. I liked her idea of encouraging curiosity about the world by making kids realize that learning is not just what happens between 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. on weekdays, but I feel like most kids will never realize how much importance the basic, factual knowledge has, while parents do. Just like the parent shouldn't allow children to eat whatever they want (I know that when I was a child, I would have been happy with macaroni and cheese for every meal, every day), the parent should also have some strictness regarding how much "learning" and "play" time are in a day. This is a belief that may or may not apply to the couple in the article, as there isn't really enough information on how the kids are learning.
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