*If your kids aren't fucked up, your grandkids will be.
xpecting our first baby, my husband and I told my father-in-law that, whatever the sex of our unborn child, we would call it "Baby" - and raise it gender neutral. He saw through our pseudo-liberal joke immediately, but in lots of ways we weren't actually kidding. We are millennial parents (albeit at the elderly end of that cohort) and we were interested in ideas of bringing up our daughter without the life-limiting shackles of being assigned a pink dolly at birth, and so on.
To those parents who have already successfully raised perfectly capable humans without stressing about this, the whole concept of gender neutrality can be a bit of a marmalade dropper, or at the very least an eye-roller. At its more extreme end, it evokes stark images of children not being told what sex they are, banned from playing with the toys they crave, and dressed only in grey or khaki babywear.
But the issue is certainly trending at the moment. Celebrities such as Paloma Faith have said they will be raising their children gender neutral (Faith said she wouldn't reveal the sex of her first born, though it turned out that she meant "to the media", not to the child, as panicked headlines suggested). John Lewis stirred the pot further when it announced it would drop the labels "boys" and "girls" on its childrenswear.
So it's fashionable, but backed up by research, too. One study in the Journal of Adolescent Health found that children subject to strict gender expectations are at an increased risk for mental and physical health problems during and after adolescence. A separate study published in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology found that kids enrolled in the Sweden's gender-neutral kindergarten system had access to more opportunities, which the researchers predicted would equate to more success as adults.
There was also a BBC documentary last year, No More Boys and Girls: Can Our Kids Go Gender Free?, which followed a class of seven-year-olds. It observed that girls called themselves pretty, but had lower self-esteem than the boys, while boys had a limited vocabulary when describing their emotions. Wanting the best for our child (like all parents), my husband and I made a conscious effort to tell our daughter, from birth, how brave and strong and intelligent she was, instead of how "pretty" (it's quite hard to ascribe intelligence to an immobile spud that just feeds and sleeps, but we did our best); and we bought her the cult book Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls - about female astronauts, engineers and civil rights campaigners - along with toy cars and Lego and dinosaur baby-grows. Not a dolly in sight.
Our bemused parents played along, gamely. Not that either of them had raised us in a world of pink and princesses (me) or macho boy stuff (my husband). I was very into my dad's old toy cars, along with dolls, whereas my husband loved to draw and play sport. But somewhere between my childhood in the early Eighties and today, female childhood seemed to become saturated in a pink hue. And my generation of parents have felt the need to respond with campaigns like Pink Stinks and Let Toys be Toys. But have we taken it too far?
Helen Wills, the blogger actuallymummy.co.uk, who has a 13-year-old daughter, Maddie, and 11-year-old son, Evan, says that she sees "quite a lot of angst from parents of younger girls". Her advice? "Chill the heck out," she laughs. "The important thing is to be aware what they enjoy, expose them to everything and don't jump to the conclusion that if your little girl loves pink her mind's been warped by a patriarchal society."
Ok, I'm sick to my stomach, you can take it from here
To those parents who have already successfully raised perfectly capable humans without stressing about this, the whole concept of gender neutrality can be a bit of a marmalade dropper, or at the very least an eye-roller. At its more extreme end, it evokes stark images of children not being told what sex they are, banned from playing with the toys they crave, and dressed only in grey or khaki babywear.
But the issue is certainly trending at the moment. Celebrities such as Paloma Faith have said they will be raising their children gender neutral (Faith said she wouldn't reveal the sex of her first born, though it turned out that she meant "to the media", not to the child, as panicked headlines suggested). John Lewis stirred the pot further when it announced it would drop the labels "boys" and "girls" on its childrenswear.
So it's fashionable, but backed up by research, too. One study in the Journal of Adolescent Health found that children subject to strict gender expectations are at an increased risk for mental and physical health problems during and after adolescence. A separate study published in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology found that kids enrolled in the Sweden's gender-neutral kindergarten system had access to more opportunities, which the researchers predicted would equate to more success as adults.
There was also a BBC documentary last year, No More Boys and Girls: Can Our Kids Go Gender Free?, which followed a class of seven-year-olds. It observed that girls called themselves pretty, but had lower self-esteem than the boys, while boys had a limited vocabulary when describing their emotions. Wanting the best for our child (like all parents), my husband and I made a conscious effort to tell our daughter, from birth, how brave and strong and intelligent she was, instead of how "pretty" (it's quite hard to ascribe intelligence to an immobile spud that just feeds and sleeps, but we did our best); and we bought her the cult book Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls - about female astronauts, engineers and civil rights campaigners - along with toy cars and Lego and dinosaur baby-grows. Not a dolly in sight.
Our bemused parents played along, gamely. Not that either of them had raised us in a world of pink and princesses (me) or macho boy stuff (my husband). I was very into my dad's old toy cars, along with dolls, whereas my husband loved to draw and play sport. But somewhere between my childhood in the early Eighties and today, female childhood seemed to become saturated in a pink hue. And my generation of parents have felt the need to respond with campaigns like Pink Stinks and Let Toys be Toys. But have we taken it too far?
Helen Wills, the blogger actuallymummy.co.uk, who has a 13-year-old daughter, Maddie, and 11-year-old son, Evan, says that she sees "quite a lot of angst from parents of younger girls". Her advice? "Chill the heck out," she laughs. "The important thing is to be aware what they enjoy, expose them to everything and don't jump to the conclusion that if your little girl loves pink her mind's been warped by a patriarchal society."
Ok, I'm sick to my stomach, you can take it from here
