I imagine most people are hesitant about homeschooling because the first question that comes to mind is "why are you homeschooling your child?" There aren't many good answers to that question.
On the whole I don't trust the average person to be a great teacher, even without considering motive.
I imagine most people are hesitant about homeschooling because the first question that comes to mind is "why are you homeschooling your child?" There aren't many good answers to that question.
On the whole I don't trust the average person to be a great teacher, even without considering motive.
Because public schools are frequently terrible (in the US, at least) and private schools are frequently either hideously expensive, synonymous with religious or other traditions you find distasteful to expose your kids to, or both (when they exist in your area at all)?
Even someone who is a mediocre teacher is more likely to successfully educate their child, provided that they have the time to dedicate to it, than the over-worked and under-paid teachers staffing a low-income school district's public school.
This just puts me in mind of people who had kids born as hermaphrodites and decided to make the choice of which gender their child gets to keep. For those parents that made the wrong choice that way pain and madness lay for the kid. Experiments have shown that trying to turn boys into girls and girls into boys by raising them as the opposite causes pretty extreme emotional damage.
I would compare it to sending gay kids to bible camps to get the gay taught out of them. It just doesn't work like that, you are what you are, sometimes you don't really have the option of choice.
I guess I just don't get it. Unless their kid is one of the extreme minority that ends up wanting a sex change there is no real choice to be made here, if it's a boy he's gonna want to be a boy, and if it's a girl she's going to want to be a girl. This all seems like rather pointless controversy to me.
I'm assuming s/he isn't going to end up like his/her parents and become a controversy creating attention seeker. :P
I agree that the principle of such an 'experiment' itself (i.e. letting a child chose its own gender) shouldn't be particularly damaging. However, the conditions you would need to set to even have the slightest chance of allowing that to happen will absolutely be damaging. If they want the kid to make some sort of conscious, informed choice about its gender, then they are going to have to stop it interacting with other kids until a quite advanced age. Otherwise at some point during running around naked, going swimming, going to the toilet, playing "show me mine" with other kids during its nursery years, other kids are going to find out and therefore treat it differently. It should be blatently obvious that they will have to curtail the child's activity and contact with others to a significant degree in order to maintain the mystery. That is the damaging part.
Additionally, as someone pointed out earlier, I think it's a pretty stupid response to "oh noes gender stereotypes r bad" to say "you have no gender!". A better response would be to say "gender stereotypes are bad, you can be whatever you want".
Stocker came across a book from 1978, titled X: A Fabulous Child's Story by Lois Gould. X is raised as neither a boy or girl, and grows up to be a happy and well-adjusted child.
"It became so compelling it was almost like, How could we not?" Witterick said.
Go Google that story and read it, it's 10 minutes max. The "X" kid in question is portrayed as some kind of superchild, and the entire thing makes extraordinarily biased assumptions as to the benefits of not being told a gender, and completely plays down the potential pitfalls - other children, for example, quickly get over it and suddenly are converted to the idea, rather than being the quasi-demonic repositories of groupthink that are more familiar from South Park or, well, real life. Any parent who was gullible or unthinking enough to be genuinely persuaded by that story is being a fucking idiot at degree level.
Even someone who is a mediocre teacher is more likely to successfully educate their child, provided that they have the time to dedicate to it, than the over-worked and under-paid teachers staffing a low-income school district's public school.
Who lives in such a community who is more qualified to teach their child at home let alone able? Homeschooling is pretty comfortably the territory of the religious and the fairly well off.
I agree that the principle of such an 'experiment' itself (i.e. letting a child chose its own gender) shouldn't be particularly damaging. However, the conditions you would need to set to even have the slightest chance of allowing that to happen will absolutely be damaging. If they want the kid to make some sort of conscious, informed choice about its gender, then they are going to have to stop it interacting with other kids until a quite advanced age. Otherwise at some point during running around naked, going swimming, going to the toilet, playing "show me mine" with other kids during its nursery years, other kids are going to find out and therefore treat it differently. It should be blatently obvious that they will have to curtail the child's activity and contact with others to a significant degree in order to maintain the mystery. That is the damaging part.
Additionally, as someone pointed out earlier, I think it's a pretty stupid response to "oh noes gender stereotypes r bad" to say "you have no gender!". A better response would be to say "gender stereotypes are bad, you can be whatever you want".
But the principles of the experiment is what effect other people will have on your child if they don't know how to treat it without knowing it's sex. As others have pointed in this thread:
I wasn't even talking about toys there, I'm talking about the different ways people treat male and female infants. The way they're held, the amount of affection they're shown, the amount of time they're held, etc. If a stranger knows whether they're male or female, they will treat them differently for literally no good reason and this will have a major effect on the infants' brain development.
They're not going to keep quiet about the child's sex indefinitely (or tell their child that they have no gender) if we're going by what they did with the older brother. The better response is pretty much what they've already told the older brother of the child, who likes to braid his hair and wear pink stuff because he isn't confined into a particular gender stereotype.
Shanadeus on
0
Options
acidlacedpenguinInstitutionalizedSafe in jail.Registered Userregular
They're not going to keep quiet about the child's sex indefinitely (or tell their child that they have no gender) if we're going by what they did with the older brother. The better response is pretty much what they've already told the older brother of the child, who likes to braid his hair and wear pink stuff because he isn't confined into a particular gender stereotype.
Does he like to braid his hair and wear pink stuff because he isn't confined into a particular gender stereotype or does he like to braid his hair and wear pink stuff because until a certain point children believe and take what their parents say as the absolute universal truth and he's been conditioned to be the perfect buffalo soldier for a new generation of gender warriors as decreed by his parents?
It's hard to separate what a child actually wants, what they're willing to just go with the flow on, and what they do because they expect their parents to want them to want it. Again, not at all a scientific source but my mother once told me about a manipulation she used to use on my siblings and I where let's say we want a drink and there's plenty of apple juice but not so much orange juice, when giving us the option between apple and orange, she'd say apple first and hold it closer to us, which highly influenced the decision to drink apple. To put it in another way, the question was manipulated to illicit the pre-determined answer. To be clear all I'm saying is that if his parents have raised him in the illusion of having his choice of typically gender-biased activities while simultaneously manipulating his choice with phrasings to which there is only one answer, like "Don't you want to be mommy and daddy's brave little gender warrior?" or "See isn't braiding your hair so much more fun than that boring old monster truck toy?" all in an effort to prove their point, then how is that at all better than raising the child without the illusion of choice? I just don't see how raising your kid boy-blue/girl-pink is any more unjust than raising your kid boy-lavender/girl-lavender.
Also why does one have to be a gender warrior to like rainbows and unicorns? I like pink stuff and I bake rainbow cakes, I even try to coordinate my outfits, but I'm no gender warrior. My point is that you can raise a kid to not conform to a specific gender role or stereotype without also making them some sort of political/publicity martyr.
I've heard of people standing on soapboxes to promote their ideals, but standing on their own children?
acidlacedpenguin on
GT: Acidboogie PSNid: AcidLacedPenguiN
0
Options
mrt144King of the NumbernamesRegistered Userregular
edited June 2011
As long as no one is getting feather hair extensions, everything is OK.
Why make choices, when you can use them to send a political message instead.
This was a silly sentiment last year and it's still silly.
If I believe that {x} is bad for my child, I will probably want to shield them from {x}. I will probably also make political statements about {x}. These are not mutually incompatible behaviors. In this case, x = early-life gender roles.
The implication that it's wrong to raise your child in any politically controversial way means that only hypocrites can be parents.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
Why make choices, when you can use them to send a political message instead.
This was a silly sentiment last year and it's still silly.
If I believe that {x} is bad for my child, I will probably want to shield them from {x}. I will probably also make political statements about {x}. These are not mutually incompatible behaviors. In this case, x = early-life gender roles.
The implication that it's wrong to raise your child in any politically controversial way means that only hypocrites can be parents.
Yes, but this argument of yours ignores the point he's making: that it's not about raising their kid to be free of X, but raising their kid as a political statement about Y.
It's the difference between "I'm raising my child to ignore gender roles" and "I'm raising my child so that they act in a certain way to further my ideology about gender roles". It's the difference between "Son, it's ok if you wear pink" and "Son, you should wear pink".
Yes, but this argument of yours ignores the point he's making: that it's not about raising their kid to be free of X, but raising their kid as a political statement about Y.
It's the difference between "I'm raising my child to ignore gender roles" and "I'm raising my child so that they act in a certain way to further my ideology about gender roles". It's the difference between "Son, it's ok if you wear pink" and "Son, you should wear pink".
This conflates two separate objections, one of which has merit, one of which does not.
The objection that has merit: teaching your child to think for himself is very hard, potentially impossible, because they're looking to you for cues regarding appropriate behavior, and even really subtle statements and actions can reward or discourage behaviors.
The objection that does not have merit: they're using their kids to make a political statement.
Guess what? The first objection matters regardless of whether the issue is political or not. I can say "my kids can choose whatever profession they want" but if all I ever talk about is how cool doctors are and how interesting medicine is, if I smile subtly when one of them says "I wanna be a doctor!" and frown subtly when one of them says "I wanna be a fireman!" then I'm pushing them towards being doctors, and my posturing about being such a progressive freewheeling parent is insincere.
Why does the second objection bug me so much? Because it's not just confusing the issue. It's not just meaningless noise. The subtext is that you can't raise your children in any way that is not firmly mainstream. Why is it a political statement to raise your child unrestrained by gender roles, but not a political statement to raise them with mainstream gender roles? Because the former is weird. That's all. It's unusual. If it were common, it wouldn't be a political statement. "This is bad because it is unusual" is a mental trap that stymies discussion.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
Meh, I'm pretty sure what they are doing is something that goes beyond "raising your child in the image of your own values because you feel it's best for them," and into "going out of your way to raise your child to be an extension of your own thumb into the eye of society (and even biology), regardless of what may be best for the child."
More simply, the concept seems to be based on an idea of "don't force it on the child, let the child discover" and yet the practice seems to require a whole lot of forcing it, and a whole lot of shielding them from any discovery.
In general, though, I prefer to be a conscientious objector in the Gender Wars as a whole. I rarely find much sense in anyone's soap box on these matters. It seems to me that popular enlightened thoughts on these matters could scarcely be any more irrational and contradictory.
I think that's my big thing - he's still picking up the gender roles his parent favor. It's not like the older kid's dancing around as the Gender Explorer independent of his parents' belief system. He's still getting plenty of social gender expectation, but what he's soaking up is just different than virtually anyone else he will ever interract with in a social system that isn't restricted to his parents and their close associates.
This simply will not work.. unless the child never interacts with outside society. Sure, little Billy (or Pat) will be hunky dory playing with barbie dolls, toy trucks, and peeing sitting down.. until he does it in front of the other little males (or little females). I mean, it's great that parents are about letting their kids choose to make those gender decisions, but once you are put into society you will probably conform pretty quickly. While parents are blamed for introducing gender roles to the children, society is responsible for enforcing them.
Demerdar on
0
Options
MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
Yes, but this argument of yours ignores the point he's making: that it's not about raising their kid to be free of X, but raising their kid as a political statement about Y.
It's the difference between "I'm raising my child to ignore gender roles" and "I'm raising my child so that they act in a certain way to further my ideology about gender roles". It's the difference between "Son, it's ok if you wear pink" and "Son, you should wear pink".
This conflates two separate objections, one of which has merit, one of which does not.
The objection that has merit: teaching your child to think for himself is very hard, potentially impossible, because they're looking to you for cues regarding appropriate behavior, and even really subtle statements and actions can reward or discourage behaviors.
The objection that does not have merit: they're using their kids to make a political statement.
Guess what? The first objection matters regardless of whether the issue is political or not. I can say "my kids can choose whatever profession they want" but if all I ever talk about is how cool doctors are and how interesting medicine is, if I smile subtly when one of them says "I wanna be a doctor!" and frown subtly when one of them says "I wanna be a fireman!" then I'm pushing them towards being doctors, and my posturing about being such a progressive freewheeling parent is insincere.
Why does the second objection bug me so much? Because it's not just confusing the issue. It's not just meaningless noise. The subtext is that you can't raise your children in any way that is not firmly mainstream. Why is it a political statement to raise your child unrestrained by gender roles, but not a political statement to raise them with mainstream gender roles? Because the former is weird. That's all. It's unusual. If it were common, it wouldn't be a political statement. "This is bad because it is unusual" is a mental trap that stymies discussion.
Yes, but this argument of yours ignores the point he's making: that it's not about raising their kid to be free of X, but raising their kid as a political statement about Y.
It's the difference between "I'm raising my child to ignore gender roles" and "I'm raising my child so that they act in a certain way to further my ideology about gender roles". It's the difference between "Son, it's ok if you wear pink" and "Son, you should wear pink".
This conflates two separate objections, one of which has merit, one of which does not.
The objection that has merit: teaching your child to think for himself is very hard, potentially impossible, because they're looking to you for cues regarding appropriate behavior, and even really subtle statements and actions can reward or discourage behaviors.
The objection that does not have merit: they're using their kids to make a political statement.
Guess what? The first objection matters regardless of whether the issue is political or not. I can say "my kids can choose whatever profession they want" but if all I ever talk about is how cool doctors are and how interesting medicine is, if I smile subtly when one of them says "I wanna be a doctor!" and frown subtly when one of them says "I wanna be a fireman!" then I'm pushing them towards being doctors, and my posturing about being such a progressive freewheeling parent is insincere.
Why does the second objection bug me so much? Because it's not just confusing the issue. It's not just meaningless noise. The subtext is that you can't raise your children in any way that is not firmly mainstream. Why is it a political statement to raise your child unrestrained by gender roles, but not a political statement to raise them with mainstream gender roles? Because the former is weird. That's all. It's unusual. If it were common, it wouldn't be a political statement. "This is bad because it is unusual" is a mental trap that stymies discussion.
Except you are again making the exact same mistake I talked about. It's right there in your last paragraph. You basically repeated back exactly what you said before.
Your comments about pushing your kid into being a doctor is exactly what, it seems anyway, is happening here and is what people are complaining about. And you are very mistaken if you think people don't think it's creepy when it's something non-political too. There's even a phrase for it, long before these parents came around. It's called "living through your children".
To be specific to this issue, it's not about raising your child unrestrained by gender roles, it's about raising your child to embody a certain role (a gender role, if you would) that lies outside the mainstream as a way to thumb your nose at society through your children. (or, again, this is the impression some people seem to be getting) It's not about a freedom from roles, it's about pushing them into a different role. It's no different then raising your kid to believe he has to be a doctor and if he isn't one, he's a failure in your eyes.
shryke on
0
Options
MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
To be specific to this issue, it's not about raising your child unrestrained by gender roles, it's about raising your child to embody a certain role (a gender role, if you would) that lies outside the mainstream as a way to thumb your nose at society through your children. (or, again, this is the impression some people seem to be getting) It's not about a freedom from roles, it's about pushing them into a different role. It's no different then raising your kid to believe he has to be a doctor and if he isn't one, he's a failure in your eyes.
This is most assuredly not the issue at hand, at least for most people. Pressuring your child to become a doctor does not draw nearly the same vitriol as pressuring your child to avoid traditional gender roles. Earlier in the thread someone said: "Is it wrong that I hope one of these new trendy gender neutral kids grows up to be a serial killer?" I doubt they would say the same of a child whose parents were encouraging them to go into medicine.
In fact, many people earlier in the thread were complaining that the parents were refusing to make good choices for their child--children are not qualified to make certain choices, the line went, and part of being a good parent is making those choices for them. But of course this is the opposite of what you've just said: you've just said that the problem is that the parents are making a choice, the choice of a non-standard gender role. So even if what you say is true, it is certainly not capturing what people have been saying earlier, or the vitriol or force with which they have been saying it.
I think the only explanation of the vitriol or force with which people have objected in this thread is that people are attached to gender roles in a way that leads them to take the very existence of alternate lifestyles as a deeply personal attack.
I also think that the motives you impute to the parents--raising the children in this way in order to thumb one's nose at society (rather than in order to benefit their children) themselves reflect this same attitude, wherein we identify with what's normal and then take the existence of alternate ways of life to be a direct attack on us--something that is being done to us and against us.
I also think that the motives you impute to the parents--raising the children in this way in order to thumb one's nose at society (rather than in order to benefit their children) themselves reflect this same attitude, wherein we identify with what's normal and then take the existence of alternate ways of life to be a direct attack on us--something that is being done to us and against us.
Again... and it's very subjective, but... it seems to me that this is not simply a matter of raising one's child according to certain values, even certain non-conformist values. I am not saying that values + non-mainstream = thumbing-the-nose or thumb-in-the-eye. I'm saying that I can recognize a distinction (IMHO) between 1) living and passing on non-mainstream values, and 2) rearing a child in such a manner as to launch a misguided and ineffective passive-aggressive attack on mainstream values, without due concern for whether it is good for the child, and more importantly, without due concern for whether or not the attack itself is actually kind of hypocritical wrt those non-mainstream values that spawned it.
If your value system says we shouldn't wear pants, that's fine. Raising your child to feel the same way about pants, well, that's what parents do. Guide them to understand why people wear them, and why the child will be expected to wear them often, and do your best to uphold your values, knowing that you can't change the human race in one generation. But sending your kid to first grade in his underwear, or trying to get others to not wear pants around him, and so forth, that's where it's not just about your values any more, but about you trying to control the universe to your ends, and at a cost to others.
I don't think or hope that kids like this will become serial killers. I do think, however, that what the parents are doing runs a high practical risk of giving the kids all sort of irrational hang-ups or even over-reactive obsessions about gender roles, which would seem to be counter-productive. Like anything else, I'd rather hear that the parents are teaching the child to be open-minded, and to recognize gender role bias in everything, and to think outside of it. You can do that pretty well irrespective of trying to create an odd bubble-existence for them, and I'm pretty sure you can actually do it much more successfully by carefully immersing them in - and actively guiding them through - the exact sorts of things you want to teach them to recognize and avoid.
I think that some of the responses are again confusing the fact that these parents are hiding the infant's sex from the world and the idea that they will hide the concept of gender from the kid as it ages.
If you look at the example given with the older brother, it looks to me like they have spent a lot of time discussing society's expectations and how to deal with the fact that he won't be meeting them. My guess is that the idea is to prevent the kid from being socialized into a gender role before they can even talk and before the parents can explain the concept of gender. As other people in this thread have pointed out, people treat infant boys and infant girls differently.
Kistra on
Animal Crossing: City Folk Lissa in Filmore 3179-9580-0076
0
Options
acidlacedpenguinInstitutionalizedSafe in jail.Registered Userregular
Yes, but this argument of yours ignores the point he's making: that it's not about raising their kid to be free of X, but raising their kid as a political statement about Y.
It's the difference between "I'm raising my child to ignore gender roles" and "I'm raising my child so that they act in a certain way to further my ideology about gender roles". It's the difference between "Son, it's ok if you wear pink" and "Son, you should wear pink".
This conflates two separate objections, one of which has merit, one of which does not.
The objection that has merit: teaching your child to think for himself is very hard, potentially impossible, because they're looking to you for cues regarding appropriate behavior, and even really subtle statements and actions can reward or discourage behaviors.
The objection that does not have merit: they're using their kids to make a political statement.
Guess what? The first objection matters regardless of whether the issue is political or not. I can say "my kids can choose whatever profession they want" but if all I ever talk about is how cool doctors are and how interesting medicine is, if I smile subtly when one of them says "I wanna be a doctor!" and frown subtly when one of them says "I wanna be a fireman!" then I'm pushing them towards being doctors, and my posturing about being such a progressive freewheeling parent is insincere.
Why does the second objection bug me so much? Because it's not just confusing the issue. It's not just meaningless noise. The subtext is that you can't raise your children in any way that is not firmly mainstream. Why is it a political statement to raise your child unrestrained by gender roles, but not a political statement to raise them with mainstream gender roles? Because the former is weird. That's all. It's unusual. If it were common, it wouldn't be a political statement. "This is bad because it is unusual" is a mental trap that stymies discussion.
not at all was the objective of my argument. I had a giant if clause (that in retrospect I should have bold size 7'd) where my objection was IF the parents are manipulating the data to produce desired results to justify a political stance then I have an objection. I don't have an objection if they're genuinely doing what they think will prepare their children to become happy, less prejudiced, and successful people, because you can't really ask for more from people provided the values they're teaching at least align with human rights. With that said, we can argue the values and their individual merits until we're blue in the face but we'll never know which group this family falls under.
I'm sure it wasn't meant in your meaning but I got the impression from your post that you assert that shryke and I are arguing from the "that's different and different is bad" angle, and while I can't speak for shryke I can say that is not my angle.
I think that the ideal parent is someone who tries to give their children the best shot at life given the limited information and resources they have at the time that each decision is made. the problem is that nearly every aspect of our society is prejudiced in various forms-- even though it is wrong, the reality is that people will persecute these kids for being different. My fear is that these parents might not be acting in the interest of giving their kids the best shot by knowingly introducing some extra complications whose benefits are uncertain which seems to be a high risk/low reward situation.
While I agree with their ideal, I think the flaw in their reasoning is that the kids they produce are the equivalent of bleeding edge technology. That is to say that there is a lack of consensus on where this parental method will end up, a lack of knowledge on how individual decisions affect the implementation itself, and a clearly demonstrated industry resistance to change. I feel like the parents are betting on the best case scenario here being that these kids become the front line casualties who pave the way for a gender equal society by bearing the brunt of the opposition, and that just doesn't sit right with me-- the juice isn't worth the squeeze in my opinion. As it stands, a handful of children with the perfect ideals within a sea of people who have the status quo ideals cannot bring about the change I think the parents want to have made.
It would be better for them to attempt to lobby their local public school board and/or PTA asking for gender equality to be discussed, encouraged, and integrated into the curriculum so the ideals can be spread out across a larger portion of the children's generation. Parents who might not agree with the ideal of raising their own kids with the "nonstandard" gender role should at least be on board with teaching their children about acceptance. If this hypothetical program were introduced as early as preschool by the time that generation is able to discuss and understand gender roles in deeper contexts they'd be more receptive to exploring their own gender and will ultimately figure out what works for them. This idea would mitigate the negativity inflicted on each individual child by distributing the opposition to change risk aspect across the whole generation instead of on a handful of martyrs.
Kistra, I think at this point the discussion has become less about the "parents hiding child's sex from the world" news item in the OP and more speculation about the intent of the parents given that and how they're currently raising the other son.
acidlacedpenguin on
GT: Acidboogie PSNid: AcidLacedPenguiN
0
Options
MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
Again... and it's very subjective, but... it seems to me that this is not simply a matter of raising one's child according to certain values, even certain non-conformist values. I am not saying that values + non-mainstream = thumbing-the-nose or thumb-in-the-eye. I'm saying that I can recognize a distinction (IMHO) between 1) living and passing on non-mainstream values, and 2) rearing a child in such a manner as to launch a misguided and ineffective passive-aggressive attack on mainstream values, without due concern for whether it is good for the child, and more importantly, without due concern for whether or not the attack itself is actually kind of hypocritical wrt those non-mainstream values that spawned it.
You say that, and yet I remember last year that, with an entirely different set of parents, people were saying the exact same thing. This indicates to me that people are not actually evaluating the parents at all, but rather, that regardless of the real attitudes or motives of the parents they are going to interpret their parenting choice as a direct personal attack. So I remain skeptical.
Posts
But maybe someone is allergic to Tylenol, but Aleve works much much better? Why force Tylenol on them for the sole purpose of 'different is WRONG!'?
(note, I know nothing about painkiller. For all I know, they could be the same thing).
(your original post, that is)
On the whole I don't trust the average person to be a great teacher, even without considering motive.
Steam (Ansatz) || GW2 officer (Ansatz.6498)
Because public schools are frequently terrible (in the US, at least) and private schools are frequently either hideously expensive, synonymous with religious or other traditions you find distasteful to expose your kids to, or both (when they exist in your area at all)?
Even someone who is a mediocre teacher is more likely to successfully educate their child, provided that they have the time to dedicate to it, than the over-worked and under-paid teachers staffing a low-income school district's public school.
I would compare it to sending gay kids to bible camps to get the gay taught out of them. It just doesn't work like that, you are what you are, sometimes you don't really have the option of choice.
I guess I just don't get it. Unless their kid is one of the extreme minority that ends up wanting a sex change there is no real choice to be made here, if it's a boy he's gonna want to be a boy, and if it's a girl she's going to want to be a girl. This all seems like rather pointless controversy to me.
I'm assuming s/he isn't going to end up like his/her parents and become a controversy creating attention seeker. :P
Additionally, as someone pointed out earlier, I think it's a pretty stupid response to "oh noes gender stereotypes r bad" to say "you have no gender!". A better response would be to say "gender stereotypes are bad, you can be whatever you want".
But what is really disturbing is this:
Go Google that story and read it, it's 10 minutes max. The "X" kid in question is portrayed as some kind of superchild, and the entire thing makes extraordinarily biased assumptions as to the benefits of not being told a gender, and completely plays down the potential pitfalls - other children, for example, quickly get over it and suddenly are converted to the idea, rather than being the quasi-demonic repositories of groupthink that are more familiar from South Park or, well, real life. Any parent who was gullible or unthinking enough to be genuinely persuaded by that story is being a fucking idiot at degree level.
Who lives in such a community who is more qualified to teach their child at home let alone able? Homeschooling is pretty comfortably the territory of the religious and the fairly well off.
But the principles of the experiment is what effect other people will have on your child if they don't know how to treat it without knowing it's sex. As others have pointed in this thread:
They're not going to keep quiet about the child's sex indefinitely (or tell their child that they have no gender) if we're going by what they did with the older brother. The better response is pretty much what they've already told the older brother of the child, who likes to braid his hair and wear pink stuff because he isn't confined into a particular gender stereotype.
Does he like to braid his hair and wear pink stuff because he isn't confined into a particular gender stereotype or does he like to braid his hair and wear pink stuff because until a certain point children believe and take what their parents say as the absolute universal truth and he's been conditioned to be the perfect buffalo soldier for a new generation of gender warriors as decreed by his parents?
It's hard to separate what a child actually wants, what they're willing to just go with the flow on, and what they do because they expect their parents to want them to want it. Again, not at all a scientific source but my mother once told me about a manipulation she used to use on my siblings and I where let's say we want a drink and there's plenty of apple juice but not so much orange juice, when giving us the option between apple and orange, she'd say apple first and hold it closer to us, which highly influenced the decision to drink apple. To put it in another way, the question was manipulated to illicit the pre-determined answer. To be clear all I'm saying is that if his parents have raised him in the illusion of having his choice of typically gender-biased activities while simultaneously manipulating his choice with phrasings to which there is only one answer, like "Don't you want to be mommy and daddy's brave little gender warrior?" or "See isn't braiding your hair so much more fun than that boring old monster truck toy?" all in an effort to prove their point, then how is that at all better than raising the child without the illusion of choice? I just don't see how raising your kid boy-blue/girl-pink is any more unjust than raising your kid boy-lavender/girl-lavender.
Also why does one have to be a gender warrior to like rainbows and unicorns? I like pink stuff and I bake rainbow cakes, I even try to coordinate my outfits, but I'm no gender warrior. My point is that you can raise a kid to not conform to a specific gender role or stereotype without also making them some sort of political/publicity martyr.
I've heard of people standing on soapboxes to promote their ideals, but standing on their own children?
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Yes, but this argument of yours ignores the point he's making: that it's not about raising their kid to be free of X, but raising their kid as a political statement about Y.
It's the difference between "I'm raising my child to ignore gender roles" and "I'm raising my child so that they act in a certain way to further my ideology about gender roles". It's the difference between "Son, it's ok if you wear pink" and "Son, you should wear pink".
This conflates two separate objections, one of which has merit, one of which does not.
The objection that has merit: teaching your child to think for himself is very hard, potentially impossible, because they're looking to you for cues regarding appropriate behavior, and even really subtle statements and actions can reward or discourage behaviors.
The objection that does not have merit: they're using their kids to make a political statement.
Guess what? The first objection matters regardless of whether the issue is political or not. I can say "my kids can choose whatever profession they want" but if all I ever talk about is how cool doctors are and how interesting medicine is, if I smile subtly when one of them says "I wanna be a doctor!" and frown subtly when one of them says "I wanna be a fireman!" then I'm pushing them towards being doctors, and my posturing about being such a progressive freewheeling parent is insincere.
Why does the second objection bug me so much? Because it's not just confusing the issue. It's not just meaningless noise. The subtext is that you can't raise your children in any way that is not firmly mainstream. Why is it a political statement to raise your child unrestrained by gender roles, but not a political statement to raise them with mainstream gender roles? Because the former is weird. That's all. It's unusual. If it were common, it wouldn't be a political statement. "This is bad because it is unusual" is a mental trap that stymies discussion.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
More simply, the concept seems to be based on an idea of "don't force it on the child, let the child discover" and yet the practice seems to require a whole lot of forcing it, and a whole lot of shielding them from any discovery.
In general, though, I prefer to be a conscientious objector in the Gender Wars as a whole. I rarely find much sense in anyone's soap box on these matters. It seems to me that popular enlightened thoughts on these matters could scarcely be any more irrational and contradictory.
Except you are again making the exact same mistake I talked about. It's right there in your last paragraph. You basically repeated back exactly what you said before.
Your comments about pushing your kid into being a doctor is exactly what, it seems anyway, is happening here and is what people are complaining about. And you are very mistaken if you think people don't think it's creepy when it's something non-political too. There's even a phrase for it, long before these parents came around. It's called "living through your children".
To be specific to this issue, it's not about raising your child unrestrained by gender roles, it's about raising your child to embody a certain role (a gender role, if you would) that lies outside the mainstream as a way to thumb your nose at society through your children. (or, again, this is the impression some people seem to be getting) It's not about a freedom from roles, it's about pushing them into a different role. It's no different then raising your kid to believe he has to be a doctor and if he isn't one, he's a failure in your eyes.
This is most assuredly not the issue at hand, at least for most people. Pressuring your child to become a doctor does not draw nearly the same vitriol as pressuring your child to avoid traditional gender roles. Earlier in the thread someone said: "Is it wrong that I hope one of these new trendy gender neutral kids grows up to be a serial killer?" I doubt they would say the same of a child whose parents were encouraging them to go into medicine.
In fact, many people earlier in the thread were complaining that the parents were refusing to make good choices for their child--children are not qualified to make certain choices, the line went, and part of being a good parent is making those choices for them. But of course this is the opposite of what you've just said: you've just said that the problem is that the parents are making a choice, the choice of a non-standard gender role. So even if what you say is true, it is certainly not capturing what people have been saying earlier, or the vitriol or force with which they have been saying it.
I think the only explanation of the vitriol or force with which people have objected in this thread is that people are attached to gender roles in a way that leads them to take the very existence of alternate lifestyles as a deeply personal attack.
I also think that the motives you impute to the parents--raising the children in this way in order to thumb one's nose at society (rather than in order to benefit their children) themselves reflect this same attitude, wherein we identify with what's normal and then take the existence of alternate ways of life to be a direct attack on us--something that is being done to us and against us.
If your value system says we shouldn't wear pants, that's fine. Raising your child to feel the same way about pants, well, that's what parents do. Guide them to understand why people wear them, and why the child will be expected to wear them often, and do your best to uphold your values, knowing that you can't change the human race in one generation. But sending your kid to first grade in his underwear, or trying to get others to not wear pants around him, and so forth, that's where it's not just about your values any more, but about you trying to control the universe to your ends, and at a cost to others.
I don't think or hope that kids like this will become serial killers. I do think, however, that what the parents are doing runs a high practical risk of giving the kids all sort of irrational hang-ups or even over-reactive obsessions about gender roles, which would seem to be counter-productive. Like anything else, I'd rather hear that the parents are teaching the child to be open-minded, and to recognize gender role bias in everything, and to think outside of it. You can do that pretty well irrespective of trying to create an odd bubble-existence for them, and I'm pretty sure you can actually do it much more successfully by carefully immersing them in - and actively guiding them through - the exact sorts of things you want to teach them to recognize and avoid.
If you look at the example given with the older brother, it looks to me like they have spent a lot of time discussing society's expectations and how to deal with the fact that he won't be meeting them. My guess is that the idea is to prevent the kid from being socialized into a gender role before they can even talk and before the parents can explain the concept of gender. As other people in this thread have pointed out, people treat infant boys and infant girls differently.
not at all was the objective of my argument. I had a giant if clause (that in retrospect I should have bold size 7'd) where my objection was IF the parents are manipulating the data to produce desired results to justify a political stance then I have an objection. I don't have an objection if they're genuinely doing what they think will prepare their children to become happy, less prejudiced, and successful people, because you can't really ask for more from people provided the values they're teaching at least align with human rights. With that said, we can argue the values and their individual merits until we're blue in the face but we'll never know which group this family falls under.
I'm sure it wasn't meant in your meaning but I got the impression from your post that you assert that shryke and I are arguing from the "that's different and different is bad" angle, and while I can't speak for shryke I can say that is not my angle.
I think that the ideal parent is someone who tries to give their children the best shot at life given the limited information and resources they have at the time that each decision is made. the problem is that nearly every aspect of our society is prejudiced in various forms-- even though it is wrong, the reality is that people will persecute these kids for being different. My fear is that these parents might not be acting in the interest of giving their kids the best shot by knowingly introducing some extra complications whose benefits are uncertain which seems to be a high risk/low reward situation.
While I agree with their ideal, I think the flaw in their reasoning is that the kids they produce are the equivalent of bleeding edge technology. That is to say that there is a lack of consensus on where this parental method will end up, a lack of knowledge on how individual decisions affect the implementation itself, and a clearly demonstrated industry resistance to change. I feel like the parents are betting on the best case scenario here being that these kids become the front line casualties who pave the way for a gender equal society by bearing the brunt of the opposition, and that just doesn't sit right with me-- the juice isn't worth the squeeze in my opinion. As it stands, a handful of children with the perfect ideals within a sea of people who have the status quo ideals cannot bring about the change I think the parents want to have made.
It would be better for them to attempt to lobby their local public school board and/or PTA asking for gender equality to be discussed, encouraged, and integrated into the curriculum so the ideals can be spread out across a larger portion of the children's generation. Parents who might not agree with the ideal of raising their own kids with the "nonstandard" gender role should at least be on board with teaching their children about acceptance. If this hypothetical program were introduced as early as preschool by the time that generation is able to discuss and understand gender roles in deeper contexts they'd be more receptive to exploring their own gender and will ultimately figure out what works for them. This idea would mitigate the negativity inflicted on each individual child by distributing the opposition to change risk aspect across the whole generation instead of on a handful of martyrs.
Kistra, I think at this point the discussion has become less about the "parents hiding child's sex from the world" news item in the OP and more speculation about the intent of the parents given that and how they're currently raising the other son.
You say that, and yet I remember last year that, with an entirely different set of parents, people were saying the exact same thing. This indicates to me that people are not actually evaluating the parents at all, but rather, that regardless of the real attitudes or motives of the parents they are going to interpret their parenting choice as a direct personal attack. So I remain skeptical.