Recommended
More Related Content
More from hyacinthshackley2629
More from hyacinthshackley2629 (20)
Recently uploaded
Recently uploaded (20)
1313Gender-Free Baby Is it O.K. for Parents to Keep Their C.docx
- 1. 1/3/13Gender-Free Baby: Is it O.K. for Parents to Keep Their Child’s Sex a Secret? | TIME.com 1/3healthland.time.com/2011/05/25/…/print/ PARENTING Gender-Free Baby: Is it O.K. for Parents to Keep Their Child’s Sex a Secret? By Bonnie Rochman May 25, 2011 2 Comments If pregnancy were a musical composition, finding out whether y ou’re hav ing a boy or a girl would be the coda. Indeed, “Do y ou know what y ou’re hav ing?” is probably the question lobbed most frequently at pregnant women, right up there with, “When are y ou due?” So news that a Canadian couple is raising their third child “genderless” in what amounts to a grand social experiment has set parental tongues a- wagging. Gender is so central to parents’ concept of their unborn children
- 2. that most moms- and dads-to-be can’t ev en wait until deliv ery day to learn what they ’re hav ing. A 2007 Gallup poll found that 66% of 18- to-34 -y ear-olds said they would choose to learn their baby ’s sex before seeing their newborn’s birthday suit for the first time. Y et Kathy Witterick and her husband, Dav id Stocker, hav e kept their baby Storm’s gender a secret. T he only people who know are one family friend and Storm’s older brothers, Jazz, 5, and Kio, 2. (Not surprisingly , the two midwiv es who deliv ered Storm on New Y ear’s Day are in the know as well.) A lengthy feature last week in the T oronto Star profiled the family and their quest to raise their baby unfettered by the rules of pinks and blues. T he couple began by sending out an email after Storm’s birth: “We’v e decided not to share Storm’s sex for now — a tribute to freedom and choice in place of limitation, a stand up to what the world could become in Storm’s lifetime (a more progressiv e place? …).” (More on T ime.com: Rutgers Okay s ‘Gender-Neutral’ Dorm
- 3. Rooms to Help Gay s Feel Safer) Although they ’re confident that they ’re giv ing their child the gift of freedom from social norms, others are not as certain. Some hav e worried about Storm being bullied or teased, and friends fretted the couple was using their baby to fulfill their own ideological longings. Many Star readers were outraged as well: “Never has an article left me so upset. These parents are turning their children into a bizarre lab experiment,” wrote Heather Reil in an email. “The world around us has been set by thousands of years of social evolution. To try to undo this evolution through your child is very selfish and very inconsiderate to the child,” said Wayne Leung. Y et Stocker and Witterick take issue with what they see as parents promoting gender stereoty pes. “What we noticed is that parents make so many choices for their children. It’s obnoxious,” say s Stocker. TIME Health & Family Magazine Video LIFE Person of the Year Apps
- 5. http://www.time.com/time/mobile-apps/ 1/3/13Gender-Free Baby: Is it O.K. for Parents to Keep Their Child’s Sex a Secret? | TIME.com 2/3healthland.time.com/2011/05/25/…/print/ While it’s certainly an intriguing undertaking, the amount of effort that must go into keeping Storm’s gender identity under wraps — the constant questions from strangers, the endless explanations — makes me want to curl up and take a nap. His parents hav e got to be hy perv igilant since no one but them can change Storm’s diaper. T hat means no help from grandparents, no relief courtesy of baby sitters. It also feels wrong to ask Storm’s older brothers to keep such a sophisticated secret. T here’s no way they can truly understand why their parents are doing what they ’re doing. Little kids are notorious blabbermouths; if they ’v e truly been able to keep their baby brother/sister’s gender on the down- low, their parents must spend an inordinate amount of time reinforcing the importance of doing so. And for what? Is it really such a bad thing to be a boy or a girl? It’s not which camp we fall into that matters, but how we choose to embody that gender. Much depends, of course, on how parents socialize their children. All the boy s in my son’s preschool class pretended to be Batman
- 6. and Superman, but he nev er once assumed the persona of an Action Hero. Nor did he cleav e to cars and trucks; it just wasn’t his thing. But that doesn’t mean he swung to the opposite side of the pendulum. Sure, he’s pranced around with his sisters in tutus and I’v e painted his toenails, at his request, when I’v e painted theirs. But he’s forged his own path and dev eloped his own interests: soccer, rock-collecting, reading any thing that’s got print on it and cooking and eating really good food. My daughters, on the other hand, are quintessential girlie-girls. A y ear ago, I recorded my then-5-y ear-old daughter’s “fav orite things” in her own words: ballet, sparkly things, jewelry , twirly dresses, cupcakes with sprinkles. Her fav orite game with her y ounger sister is “Mommy , Baby ,” which is pretty self-explanatory . When they ’re done role-play ing, they alternately swaddle, stroll and put v arious baby dolls or stuffed pandas to sleep. I hated dolls as a kid. Go figure. And y et: my daughter who lists twirly dresses as a preference doesn’t let that stop her from climbing any tree in her path. Does that make her a tomboy ? My y oungest updated me y esterday on the ev olution of a caterpillar into a chry salis; perhaps that indicates
- 7. future scientific leanings. (More on T ime.com: Study : Why Some T ransgendered People Hav e Higher Lev els of Autistic T raits) T he way Storm’s parents handle the de-genderizing (is that a word?) of the y oungest member of their family is confusing at best and creepy at worst. During a family v acation to Cuba, they flipped a coin to decide how to refer to Storm: on this particular trip, (s)he was a boy . “In fact, in not telling the gender of my precious baby , I am say ing to the world, ‘Please can y ou just let Storm discov er for him/herself what s (he) wants to be?!.” Witterick wrote in an email to the Star. Chery l Kilodav is, author of the recently released My Princess Boy, about her y oung son with a penchant for pink and all it represents, applauds Storm’s parents for challenging society ’s way of categorizing people. But she thinks using the term “genderless” or “gender-free” to describe what’s going on is inaccurate. “It concerns me because honestly that’s not the truth,” say s Kilodav is. “If we don’t acknowledge there is a gender, we lose the power of acknowledging differences. T o me, there is a beauty in boy s and girls, in different skin tones, in different religions.”
- 8. Respecting nontraditional paradigms is something Kilodav is has learned to embrace as a result of her experiences parenting her two sons — Dkobe, 9, a “ty pical” boy , and Dy son, 5, who was any thing but. He grav itated toward princesses and sparkles; Kilodav is tried to repress that by giv ing him toy trucks. Notwithstanding, 3-y ear-old Dy son announced, “I’m a pretty princess.” Kilodav is firmly corrected him: “Boy s are not princesses. Girls are.” “He looked me in the ey e and said, I am a princess boy ,” say s Kilodav is. “I was taken aback by that.” Dy son made clear his own identity . But his story is hardly analogous to that of baby Storm. I don’t know Storm’s parents, but after reading about them, it feels like they are not-so-subtly imposing their own agenda on their kids. Of course, what parent doesn’t? Y et this feels particularly heav y - handed. Diane Ehrensaft, a California psy chologist and author of Gender Born, Gender Made, which adv ises parents with outside-the-box kids, told the Star that parents should support “gender-creativ e children.” But it’s not clear that 4 -month-old Storm or his/her brothers fall into that category . Are they truly rebelling against their gender, a la Chaz Bono, or are they simply succumbing to the power of suggestion?
- 9. Jazz, we learn, wears his hair in long braids and chose pink shorts and pink socks for a recent outing to a park. His parents say ev ery one assumes he — and Kio — are girls, y et Jazz isn’t happy with that assumption: he insisted his mother clarify his gender in writing to group leaders at a nature center. (More on T ime.com: Masculinity , a Delicate Flower) Gender differences are innate, contends Ehrensaft. Giv e a girl a truck or a boy a doll, and they may not be too interested. Referring to the 1970s, when http://healthland.time.com/2011/05/18/study-why-some- transgendered-people-have-higher-levels-of-autistic-traits/ http://www.myprincessboy.com/index.asp http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,2070191,00.html http://healthland.time.com/2011/05/05/masculinity-a-delicate- flower/ some parents encouraged their kids to shake off the shackles of sex stereoty pes, Ehrensaft notes: “It only worked up to a certain extent. … It was a humbling experiment for us because we learned we don’t hav e the control that we thought we did.” Seconding that perspectiv e is Jesse Ellison, who described last y ear in Newsweek how her parents tried to ov erride her gender by dressing her in ov eralls as a toddler, withholding Barbies in fav or of blocks and snipping her hair into a bowl cut. “But my parents’ little project in gender neutrality
- 10. (namely , me) was, from the get-go, a total failure. As soon as I could speak, I demanded they replace my ov eralls with a long, pink, lacy dress. Far from gender-neutral, I was emphatically , defiantly a ‘girl.’” How long Storm’s parents will be able to keep up their charade is any one’s guess, but judging by Witterick’s comments, it could be quite a while. “Ev ery one keeps asking us, ‘When will this end?’” Witterick told the Star. “And we alway s turn the question back. Y eah, when will this end? When will we liv e in a world where people can make choices to be whoev er they are?” Bonnie Rochman @brochman Bonnie Rochm an writes about pregnancy, fertility, parenting — the ups and downs of being a kid and having one — for TIME. http://www.newsweek.com/2010/03/22/my-name-is-jesse.html http://healthland.time.com/author/brochman/ http://www.twitter.com/brochman http://healthland.time.com/author/brochman/ 1/3/13Couple Finally Reveals Child's Gender, Five Years After Birth | Parenting - Yahoo! Shine 1/2shine.yahoo.com/parenting/couple-finally-reveals-childs- gender-five-years-birth-180300388.html
- 11. Couple Finally Reveals Child's Gender, Five Years After Birth By Piper Weiss, Shine Staf f | Parenting – Fri, Jan 20, 2012 1:03 PM EST It's a boy! And he's five. Beck Laxton, 46, and partner Kieran Cooper, 44, have spent half the decade concealing the gender of their son, Sasha. "I wanted to avoid all that stereotyping," Laxton said in an interview with the Cambridge News. "Stereotypes seem fundamentally stupid. Why would you want to slot people into boxes?" Take a look at the most controversial parenting stories of the year. Laxton, a UK-based web editor, and her partner, Cooper, decided to keep Sasha's sex a secret when he was still in the womb. The birth announcement stated the gender-neutral name of their child, but skipped the big reveal. Up until recently, the couple only told a few close friends and family members that Sasha was a boy and managed
- 12. to keep the rest of the world in the dark. But now that he's starting school the secret's out. For years, Becks has been referring to her child, the youngest of three, as "the infant" on her personal blog. But guarding the public from her son's gender was only part of her quest to let her kid just be a kid. Sasha dresses in clothes he likes -- be it a hand-me-downs from his sister or his brother. The big no-no's are hyper-masculine outfits like skull-print shirts and cargo pants. In one photo, sent to friends and family, Sasha's dressed in a shiny pink girl's swimsuit. "Children like sparkly things," says Beck. "And if someone thought Sasha was a girl because he was wearing a pink swimming costume, then what effect would that have? " Sasha's also not short on dolls, though Barbie is also off limits. "She's banned because she's horrible," Laxton says in the Cambridge interview. On a macro level she hopes her son sets an example for other parents and makes them reconsider buying their own sons trucks or forcing their daughters into tights. She's seen how those consumer trappings affect how and who kids play with in the sandbox. See how one preschool is fighting gender bias in the classroom
- 13. But the sandbox is just a precursor to the classroom. When Sasha turned five and headed to school, Laxton was forced to make her son's sex public. That meant Sasha would have to get used to being a boy in the eyes of his peers. Still, his mom is intervening. While the school requires different uniforms for boys and girls, Sasha wears a girl's blouse with his pants. "I don't think I'd do it if I thought it was going to make him unhappy, but at the moment he's not really bothered either way. We haven't had any difficult scenarios yet." Last year another couple, Kathy Witterick, 38, and David Stocker, 39, of Toronto made a similar decision when they had their baby, Storm. At the time, certain psychiatric experts voiced concern over their decision. "To have a sense of self and personal identity is a critical part of normal healthy development," Dr. Eugene Beresin, director of training in child and adolescent psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital, told ABC News. "This blocks that and sets the child up for bullying, scapegoating and marginalization." But as parents well know, bullying is hard for any child to avoid. It's more important to raise someone who's confident enough in himself to overcome
- 14. DISCOVER YAHOO!DISCOVER YAHOO! WITH YOUR FRIENDSWITH YOUR FRIENDS Login SHINE FROM YAHOO! http://shine.yahoo.com/blogs/author/piper-weiss-shine-staff- ycn-1137177/ http://shine.yahoo.com/blogs/parenting/ http://yhoo.it/wLaqrY http://yhoo.it/zfHydN http://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/Home/Hes-pretty-in-pink-to- make-you-think-20012012.htm http://yhoo.it/Awkgv5 http://beckblogbeckblog.blogspot.com/ http://yhoo.it/AxhVXu http://yhoo.it/AxriC5 http://yhoo.it/xNBhzc http://abcnews.go.com/Health/baby-storm-raised-genderless- gender-dangerous-experiment- child/story?id=13693760#.Txmj4yMZ9nM http://shine.yahoo.com/parenting/couple-finally-reveals-childs- gender-five-years-birth-180300388.html# http://shine.yahoo.com/parenting/couple-finally-reveals-childs- gender-five-years-birth-180300388.html#yuhead-search http://shine.yahoo.com/ 1/3/13 2/2shine.yahoo.com/parenting/couple-finally-reveals-childs- gender-five-years-birth-180300388.html
- 15. peer pressure. It's also important to have his parents have his back (remember the mom who defended her son's choice in a Halloween costume?) Maybe Sasha's early years will be character building, maybe he'll have a higher emotional quotient being raised with dual perspectives on gender. Or the reverse could be true: Sasha may have less of a formed identity because of his upbringing, and feel angry at his mom for dressing him in flowery shirts and telling the world about it. Then again, maybe he'll get over it. As for Laxton, she says she's open to her son pursing any career or sexual preference he chooses as he matures. "As long as he has good relationships and good friends," she says, "then nothing else matters, does it?" Related: Costume makes moms mad, boy happy Why I'm fine with my son playing with Barbies Boys with nail polish: no big deal Discount Children Clothes Childbirth Video Best Prenatal Vitamins
- 16. Healthy Recipes for Kids Baby Feeding Schedule Child Behavior Parenting Tips Pregnancy Week by Week Free Cloth Diapers Diet Plans for Kids RELATED SEARCHES ads by Yahoo! 2012 Yahoo! Contributor Network Copyright © 2013 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved. | Y ahoo! Lifesty les Network | / http://contextualads.yahoo.net/Discount_Children_Clothes.cfm? &kp=1&kbc=7f674b09da016d282caf3b52bb051104.d2s&kt=240 &ki=8467268&ktd=131096&kbc2=1&fdkt=240&fp=pAC2qC2i OCReUHpRDv%2F4bggkfyvnnm8sNXo2ufjt%2Fx9JueEWFDeH 6k5mYVUfOye5ExAhrGJ4NFm3pB4qrkJaLJkRpUBs9LZtSDh1e gvp%2FuxbRR5Xx0Y1ek55VQnxdo2%2F&cme=3iQYBPWYYX 8aSPTKw8q%2B5Sn8Xmu6nCyEpsJ24K%2FTUJ%2FLUXse%2 BybRp1pisCT2d5k3RMHGPpDGqAk%3D%7C%7CN7fu2vKt8% 2Fs%3D%7CSGmN1cGE11SpyFHRfhpkqdjEInCheRdWTzeIFZ9 zo91kMDvKF5maaiua1wyxzZ4Tq3e8W8aenwej%2FXO1QB5Os c3lYDy1Kk6kuk9cFijmQKjDN7rpcytI9Ss0cWfAy40u%7CJf0d %2BWoAdPvgrRvyTVevdJS1TDYomVKdgawKBLsti2WUwYL gJvVO%2Fwn5LS8xGehF%7C&cid=8CU6627WN&oRurl=http