WOKE PARENTING
Raising Gender-Neutral Kids
Our daughter recently said “some boys wear dresses and makeup but Appa chooses to wear shirts.” This is basically what we want them to know. Gender is there, but it’s a choice. That’s all.
It’s not that our kids don’t express gender, they look like a stereotypical boy and girl. Our daughter likes pink and purple, our son likes vehicles and snakes. It’s just that when our kids come to a gender boundary (nail polish, for example), we just let them cross it. This is the point where you would correct the child and say ‘boys don’t do that’. We just don’t do that.
It’s actually much easier this way. Rather than a complex and changing set of gender rules, our kids can just wear what they want. Most of our clothes are gifts, so they end up being quite gendered, but again, if they want to cross a boundary we let them.
The conservative idea is that gender roles are fixed, and teaching kids otherwise confuses them. In my experience, this is ass-backwards. There are actually a thousand rules for fixed gender and zero if it’s free. Consider the rules for clothes.
Fixed gender: Boys wear pants, girls wear dresses. Well, girls can wear pants or dresses, but girls pants have to have useless pockets. Boys pants…
