Also, I gotta say re: using your kids as a political statement. Just because someone is going on cruise control with their kid's identity and pursuing the "default" gender configs doesn't mean they aren't casting a vote about the politics of identity just as surely as these hippie parents are.
Also as a godless nanny state secularist, I have to admit that my knee jerk reaction to anything from this to crazy Rapture Militia homeschooling is "oh man get them into a totally secular public school ASAP so we can mitigate the impact of their parents because every parent on earth is god-damn insane one way or another."
Edit: Again, you guys, they never said they weren't telling the kid what sex he is. It was an email to friends and relatives. That their other kids want them to tell people "I'm a boy" indicates that this is no big mystery to the kids themselves.
I'm tempted to try and spin off the schooling / homeschooling / unschooling debate into a new thread but I'm pretty sure that debate would be 99% of folks saying that the second two options only produce socially inept mouthbreathers.
I mean, I'm one hell of a socially inept mouthbreather, and I was in public schools from age 5 on. So you know, there are flaws in any social and cultural analysis. :P
I have a really good story about a homeschooled woman who went to a conservative Christian university in Florida before I had to teach a biology class with her. Start a thread, and maybe you'll get to hear it. :P
Also, I gotta say re: using your kids as a political statement. Just because someone is going on cruise control with their kid's identity and pursuing the "default" gender configs doesn't mean they aren't casting a vote about the politics of identity just as surely as these hippie parents are.
Also as a godless nanny state secularist, I have to admit that my knee jerk reaction to anything from this to crazy Rapture Militia homeschooling is "oh man get them into a totally secular public school ASAP so we can mitigate the impact of their parents because every parent on earth is god-damn insane one way or another."
Parents may be insane but the less crazy ones recognize that they cannot possibly provide everything their child needs and so opt for some sort of schooling (private or public) to mitigate the effects of whatever unforeseen components are lacking from their parenting strategy. Parents who believe they know best in all possible regards and try to remove their children from society in order to ensure that their worldview is the only ones the kids are affected by are the most crazy. And it doesn't matter which side of the left-right spectrum their worldview falls under. They are crazypants.
1) I'm not an educator, but there is no way that unschooling is going to result in adults that are worth anything in the adult world. Nobody, at the age of 6, stands up and says "Mommy! I want to learn to spell and do basic math!" instead "Yay cartoons and bikes and dirt and pretend!"
2) There's a difference between not pushing traditional gender roles on your kids and claiming that they don't have or need a gender. Facts are that our species has two gender and our society is well aware of that fact. You can let your little boy play with a My Little Pony and your little girl play with a Tonka truck without making them little more than a megaphone for your political sentiments.
The terms third gender and third sex describe individuals who are categorized (by their will or by social consensus) as neither male nor female, as well as the social category present in those societies who recognize three or more genders. The term "third" is usually understood to mean "other"; some anthropologists and sociologists have described fourth,[1] fifth,[2] and even some[3] genders.
The term has been used to describe Hijras of India, Bangladesh and Pakistan[4] who have gained legal identity, Fa'afafine of Polynesia, and Sworn virgins of the Balkans,[5] among others, and is also used by many of such groups and individuals to describe themselves.
So not really, gender really is fluid.
Okay, you just listed two transgender identities and sworn virgins. Hell, "Fa'afafine" translates to "in the manner of a woman." This is the big problem with people who insist that gender isn't binary: they can't demonstrate anything outside of the binary.
1) I'm not an educator, but there is no way that unschooling is going to result in adults that are worth anything in the adult world. Nobody, at the age of 6, stands up and says "Mommy! I want to learn to spell and do basic math!" instead "Yay cartoons and bikes and dirt and pretend!"
2) There's a difference between not pushing traditional gender roles on your kids and claiming that they don't have or need a gender. Facts are that our species has two gender and our society is well aware of that fact. You can let your little boy play with a My Little Pony and your little girl play with a Tonka truck without making them little more than a megaphone for your political sentiments.
The terms third gender and third sex describe individuals who are categorized (by their will or by social consensus) as neither male nor female, as well as the social category present in those societies who recognize three or more genders. The term "third" is usually understood to mean "other"; some anthropologists and sociologists have described fourth,[1] fifth,[2] and even some[3] genders.
The term has been used to describe Hijras of India, Bangladesh and Pakistan[4] who have gained legal identity, Fa'afafine of Polynesia, and Sworn virgins of the Balkans,[5] among others, and is also used by many of such groups and individuals to describe themselves.
So not really, gender really is fluid.
That's a very interesting read, and I think I'm using the term gender improperly - I assume that sex would be better. Our species has 2 sexes - male and female. And it doesn't matter one bit if you let your male child play with what our society has decided are traditionally female child's toys and vice versa. It seems pretty damned irresponsible and like you're shortchanging the child quite a bit by forcing them to be little more than an example of the parents' views.
I'm sorry for those who sensibilities are harmed by this but its clear - its wackadoo.
Let's get past whether or not this is a good parenting technique. It clearly isn't as their other child's unhappiness with the situation attests to but let's assume we don't know whether or not this is beneficial.
The motivation for this is not to be a good parent. Its to send a message - its "a tribute to freedom and choice in place of limitation, a stand up to what the world could become in Storm's lifetime" and (as grammatically questionable as the email was) that makes it pretty clear they are undertaking this ideologically. Its not about the child's best interest but teaching the world a lesson.
Frankly, I think this approach clearly manifests in the rest of their parental decisions. "What we noticed is that parents make so many choices for their children. It's obnoxious." Oh? Like the decision not to let their children shit on the floor? Not to let them eat candy all day? Its disingenuous and wrong headed. Yeah maybe their two boys pick out pink clothes... or maybe Mommy who wants to make a point has a finger on the scale. I'm sure the older boys are the ones to braid their long hair too.....
And finally it reveals a kind of twisted pessimism. Apparently, they believe the only way to eliminate detrimental gender roles is to eliminate genders.
Also, I gotta say re: using your kids as a political statement. Just because someone is going on cruise control with their kid's identity and pursuing the "default" gender configs doesn't mean they aren't casting a vote about the politics of identity just as surely as these hippie parents are.
Actually, using evidence to determine something is the exact opposite of politicizing. How hard could it possibly be to go with the gender that is incredibly likely based off the sex until some behavioral evidence demonstrates otherwise?
1) I'm not an educator, but there is no way that unschooling is going to result in adults that are worth anything in the adult world. Nobody, at the age of 6, stands up and says "Mommy! I want to learn to spell and do basic math!" instead "Yay cartoons and bikes and dirt and pretend!"
2) There's a difference between not pushing traditional gender roles on your kids and claiming that they don't have or need a gender. Facts are that our species has two gender and our society is well aware of that fact. You can let your little boy play with a My Little Pony and your little girl play with a Tonka truck without making them little more than a megaphone for your political sentiments.
The terms third gender and third sex describe individuals who are categorized (by their will or by social consensus) as neither male nor female, as well as the social category present in those societies who recognize three or more genders. The term "third" is usually understood to mean "other"; some anthropologists and sociologists have described fourth,[1] fifth,[2] and even some[3] genders.
The term has been used to describe Hijras of India, Bangladesh and Pakistan[4] who have gained legal identity, Fa'afafine of Polynesia, and Sworn virgins of the Balkans,[5] among others, and is also used by many of such groups and individuals to describe themselves.
So not really, gender really is fluid.
That's a very interesting read, and I think I'm using the term gender improperly - I assume that sex would be better. Our species has 2 sexes - male and female. And it doesn't matter one bit if you let your male child play with what our society has decided are traditionally female child's toys and vice versa. It seems pretty damned irresponsible and like you're shortchanging the child quite a bit by forcing them to be little more than an example of the parents' views.
That too is also a bit misleading:
An organism's sex is defined by the gametes it produces: males produce male gametes (spermatozoa, or sperm) while females produce female gametes (ova, or egg cells); individual organisms which produce both male and female gametes are termed hermaphroditic.
My point is these things are by nature very fluid and non-rigid, making the parents in the OP perfectly right in being upset with people's obsession of trying to push Storm into either box A or box B.
I agree with you and nothing breaks my heart more than hearing a parent say that they don't want their son to be "faggoty" (or the less offensive but sadly more common variants: "X is for girls, you're a boy" "Who's my big strong boy/pretty little girl") because he shows interest in dolls or something pink.
I don't recall it resulting in the collapse of gender roles or society, so everyone just fucking relax.
Can't really equate that with this. If it were common practice it wouldn't be outside normal gender roles, which is what the issue is here, the complete abandonment of them for the sake of abandoning them.
1) I'm not an educator, but there is no way that unschooling is going to result in adults that are worth anything in the adult world. Nobody, at the age of 6, stands up and says "Mommy! I want to learn to spell and do basic math!" instead "Yay cartoons and bikes and dirt and pretend!"
I didn't realize the Montessori method was so unknown to a lot of people. Kids like to learn. Hell, they do it by accident. Kids are just built to learn shit and they tend to want to emulate the larger world. My daughter is very eager the learn the alphabet, for example. She's not even 2. They also learn shit by playing, especially when they're very young.
I don't recall it resulting in the collapse of gender roles or society, so everyone just fucking relax.
Can't really equate that with this. If it were common practice it wouldn't be outside normal gender roles, which is what the issue is here, the complete abandonment of them for the sake of abandoning them.
Also, different childhood gender roles doesn't imply no childhood gender roles. You can bet your ass that Roosevelt was getting hard cider mixed into his milk because people thought that was a good idea back then.
I don't recall it resulting in the collapse of gender roles or society, so everyone just fucking relax.
Can't really equate that with this. If it were common practice it wouldn't be outside normal gender roles, which is what the issue is here, the complete abandonment of them for the sake of abandoning them.
Moving away from a strict gender binary doesn't entail abandoning the concept of gender entirely.
It's more like a shift from considering gender as a binary to considering gender as a spectrum or other more fluid range of possible combinations.
1) I'm not an educator, but there is no way that unschooling is going to result in adults that are worth anything in the adult world. Nobody, at the age of 6, stands up and says "Mommy! I want to learn to spell and do basic math!" instead "Yay cartoons and bikes and dirt and pretend!"
I didn't realize the Montessori method was so unknown to a lot of people. Kids like to learn. Hell, they do it by accident. Kids are just built to learn shit and they tend to want to emulate the larger world. My daughter is very eager the learn the alphabet, for example. She's not even 2. They also learn shit by playing, especially when they're very young.
Well yeah I'm sure it works great up to the point where you have to start learning multiplication and division and how to work in a structured environment like the rest of the world.
Free spirit all you want, odds are your boss is still going to want you there at 9.
I submitted an entry to Lego Ideas, and if 10,000 people support me, it'll be turned into an actual Lego set!If you'd like to see and support my submission, follow this link.
1) I'm not an educator, but there is no way that unschooling is going to result in adults that are worth anything in the adult world. Nobody, at the age of 6, stands up and says "Mommy! I want to learn to spell and do basic math!" instead "Yay cartoons and bikes and dirt and pretend!"
I didn't realize the Montessori method was so unknown to a lot of people. Kids like to learn. Hell, they do it by accident. Kids are just built to learn shit and they tend to want to emulate the larger world. My daughter is very eager the learn the alphabet, for example. She's not even 2. They also learn shit by playing, especially when they're very young.
Montessori is a bit more structured though - you go to school and guide your education. The people I have known who homeschool and ended up leaning toward unschooling taught their children very little because the boundary between where they learn and where they play was blurred to the point of nonexistance.
I've got nothing against homeschool (couldn't do it myself as I don't feel like I know enough about teaching, let alone about the individual subjects) to adequately relate them to a child), but unschool is exactly what it sounds like - the opposite of school. Yeah, you might have some happy kids, but it's a real bummer when those kids grow up and realize that their parents never got around to teaching them things like the scientific method, trigonometry, or computer programming.
I don't recall it resulting in the collapse of gender roles or society, so everyone just fucking relax.
Can't really equate that with this. If it were common practice it wouldn't be outside normal gender roles, which is what the issue is here, the complete abandonment of them for the sake of abandoning them.
If somebody did that these days and made it public, people would freak out in exactly the same way, for more or less the same reasons. It may piss other people off that the parents are being irritating hippies, but I do not view this as being particularly psychologically scarring to the child.
There are much, much, bigger fish to fry when it comes to weird shit parents do when raising their kids that doesn't necessarily fall under "abuse" in a legal sense.
See also:
Christian Scientists (no medical treatment for diseases)
Vegan diets for newborns
Child beauty pageants
Anti-vaccine crowd
etc
1) I'm not an educator, but there is no way that unschooling is going to result in adults that are worth anything in the adult world. Nobody, at the age of 6, stands up and says "Mommy! I want to learn to spell and do basic math!" instead "Yay cartoons and bikes and dirt and pretend!"
I didn't realize the Montessori method was so unknown to a lot of people. Kids like to learn. Hell, they do it by accident. Kids are just built to learn shit and they tend to want to emulate the larger world. My daughter is very eager the learn the alphabet, for example. She's not even 2. They also learn shit by playing, especially when they're very young.
The Montessori method and unschooling seem similar but are slightly different. In a Montessori school, kids learn through play, but the environment is specifically constructed so that kids learn the lessons the educators want them to learn. You can decide to count to 1000 by building a cube (did that!) or learn that blue + yellow = green while simultaneously practicing motor skills by pouring blue and yellow water together (did that too!) at a given time, but you can't say "Enough of this boring crap, Imma watch TV." Unschoolers would let their kids just watch TV.
Jeep: that's what I was saying? I specified not caring what their socio-political aims were because the details are less important than providing some kid a counterbalance to his parents' personal blend of crazy.
But I could be totally wrong, and the homeschoolers might be right. I have to accept their right to give it a whirl for the sake of avoiding everyone being rammed into the wrong solution en masse and our culture not tinkering with enough potential ways to approach.
Likewise (and to avoid thread derailment) -- I think the likely outcome of this parental gender news experiment will be minor, but maybe their kid will get held more as a baby and end up as some emotionally insightful f1 driver / poet / psychiatrist and everyone will drift towards androgyne-babies as a more common choice to early development and we'll all look archaic, like Victorian patents dozing babies with Laudanum.
Jeep: that's what I was saying? I specified not caring what their socio-political aims were because the details are less important than providing some kid a counterbalance to his parents' personal blend of crazy.
But I could be totally wrong, and the homeschoolers might be right. I have to accept their right to give it a whirl for the sake of avoiding everyone being rammed into the wrong solution en masse and our culture not tinkering with enough potential ways to approach.
Likewise (and to avoid thread derailment) -- I think the likely outcome of this parental gender news experiment will be minor, but maybe their kid will get held more as a baby and end up as some emotionally insightful f1 driver / poet / psychiatrist and everyone will drift towards androgyne-babies as a more common choice to early development and we'll all look archaic, like Victorian patents dozing babies with Laudanum.
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.
And I see no reason why a kid should have gendered role models instead of role models in general. In fact, wouldn't a kid properly raised in a relatively gender neutral way have twice the number of role models than a gendered one? Properly being the key word. (Note: I don't agree with most of this couple's methods. The homeschooling method especially.)
Incidentally, I'd argue that current gender roles (at least in North America) are incredibly unhealthy for both sides. Males are expected to be emotional retards among other things, and female expectations are all over the goddamn map. Doing something to keep your keep one's children from being trapped inside those roles is most certainly looking out for their well-being.
What the two of you said sums up my thought on the matter.
Shanadeus on
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mrt144King of the NumbernamesRegistered Userregular
Also, I gotta say re: using your kids as a political statement. Just because someone is going on cruise control with their kid's identity and pursuing the "default" gender configs doesn't mean they aren't casting a vote about the politics of identity just as surely as these hippie parents are.
Actually, using evidence to determine something is the exact opposite of politicizing. How hard could it possibly be to go with the gender that is incredibly likely based off the sex until some behavioral evidence demonstrates otherwise?
But we construct these genders. Being an American man has nothing to do with the scientific method. I am assuming the parents' point here is less about "most people with dongs consider themselves dudes," than all of trained behaviors and social assumptions packed into these genders.
You really think giving a son a blue t-shirt with a baseball bat on it, a book about trucks, and a couple GI Joes isn't just as much a political statement as sending a gender-vague email?
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JuliusCaptain of Serenityon my shipRegistered Userregular
1) I'm not an educator, but there is no way that unschooling is going to result in adults that are worth anything in the adult world. Nobody, at the age of 6, stands up and says "Mommy! I want to learn to spell and do basic math!" instead "Yay cartoons and bikes and dirt and pretend!"
I didn't realize the Montessori method was so unknown to a lot of people. Kids like to learn. Hell, they do it by accident. Kids are just built to learn shit and they tend to want to emulate the larger world. My daughter is very eager the learn the alphabet, for example. She's not even 2. They also learn shit by playing, especially when they're very young.
Well yeah I'm sure it works great up to the point where you have to start learning multiplication and division and how to work in a structured environment like the rest of the world.
Free spirit all you want, odds are your boss is still going to want you there at 9.
A.) Kids will learn math and shit voluntarily. Because math is awesome. Hell, you could even argue that traditional school is the worst way to learn these things because kids and people don't enjoy being forced to do things.
B.) I think you greatly overestimate the benefit that that "structured environment" has when going out into the world to work and such.
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mrt144King of the NumbernamesRegistered Userregular
Also, I gotta say re: using your kids as a political statement. Just because someone is going on cruise control with their kid's identity and pursuing the "default" gender configs doesn't mean they aren't casting a vote about the politics of identity just as surely as these hippie parents are.
Actually, using evidence to determine something is the exact opposite of politicizing. How hard could it possibly be to go with the gender that is incredibly likely based off the sex until some behavioral evidence demonstrates otherwise?
But we construct these genders. Being an American man has nothing to do with the scientific method. I am assuming the parents' point here is less about "most people with dongs consider themselves dudes," than all of trained behaviors and social assumptions packed into these genders.
You really think giving a son a blue t-shirt with a baseball bat on it, a book about trucks, and a couple GI Joes isn't just as much a political statement as sending a gender-vague email?
Announcing to the press that you're duding up your son cause fuck those gender bending hippies, would be a political statement.
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mrt144King of the NumbernamesRegistered Userregular
1) I'm not an educator, but there is no way that unschooling is going to result in adults that are worth anything in the adult world. Nobody, at the age of 6, stands up and says "Mommy! I want to learn to spell and do basic math!" instead "Yay cartoons and bikes and dirt and pretend!"
I didn't realize the Montessori method was so unknown to a lot of people. Kids like to learn. Hell, they do it by accident. Kids are just built to learn shit and they tend to want to emulate the larger world. My daughter is very eager the learn the alphabet, for example. She's not even 2. They also learn shit by playing, especially when they're very young.
Well yeah I'm sure it works great up to the point where you have to start learning multiplication and division and how to work in a structured environment like the rest of the world.
Free spirit all you want, odds are your boss is still going to want you there at 9.
A.) Kids will learn math and shit voluntarily. Because math is awesome. Hell, you could even argue that traditional school is the worst way to learn these things because kids and people don't enjoy being forced to do things.
B.) I think you greatly overestimate the benefit that that "structured environment" has when going out into the world to work and such.
1) I'm not an educator, but there is no way that unschooling is going to result in adults that are worth anything in the adult world. Nobody, at the age of 6, stands up and says "Mommy! I want to learn to spell and do basic math!" instead "Yay cartoons and bikes and dirt and pretend!"
I didn't realize the Montessori method was so unknown to a lot of people. Kids like to learn. Hell, they do it by accident. Kids are just built to learn shit and they tend to want to emulate the larger world. My daughter is very eager the learn the alphabet, for example. She's not even 2. They also learn shit by playing, especially when they're very young.
Well yeah I'm sure it works great up to the point where you have to start learning multiplication and division and how to work in a structured environment like the rest of the world.
Free spirit all you want, odds are your boss is still going to want you there at 9.
A.) Kids will learn math and shit voluntarily. Because math is awesome. Hell, you could even argue that traditional school is the worst way to learn these things because kids and people don't enjoy being forced to do things.
B.) I think you greatly overestimate the benefit that that "structured environment" has when going out into the world to work and such.
And so when your kid doesn't want to learn division or basic algebra what do you do?
Making sure kids are enjoying what they learn is important but eventually kids also have to learn that life isn't always what they want to do and sometimes they need to suck it up.
The Montessori method and unschooling seem similar but are slightly different. In a Montessori school, kids learn through play, but the environment is specifically constructed so that kids learn the lessons the educators want them to learn. You can decide to count to 1000 by building a cube (did that!) or learn that blue + yellow = green while simultaneously practicing motor skills by pouring blue and yellow water together (did that too!) at a given time, but you can't say "Enough of this boring crap, Imma watch TV." Unschoolers would let their kids just watch TV.
Not all Montessori schools are the same, but "learning through play" isn't really that accurate. It's self-guided learning, and the activities are more interactive (and some of them are kind of fun), but it's still generally structured and it's not like running around the playground or playing with action figures. There are still goals to be met, especially if the school is accredited, and the child doesn't have complete autonomy over what he chooses to do. (He can choose to work on math first and language second if he chooses, for example, but he can't just eschew language entirely because he likes math better.)
I'm not an expert in unschooling, but my daughter is in a Montessori school and what I've read of unschooling makes it sound pretty different. And by "different" I mean "stupidly unstructured".
ElJeffe on
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1) I'm not an educator, but there is no way that unschooling is going to result in adults that are worth anything in the adult world. Nobody, at the age of 6, stands up and says "Mommy! I want to learn to spell and do basic math!" instead "Yay cartoons and bikes and dirt and pretend!"
I didn't realize the Montessori method was so unknown to a lot of people. Kids like to learn. Hell, they do it by accident. Kids are just built to learn shit and they tend to want to emulate the larger world. My daughter is very eager the learn the alphabet, for example. She's not even 2. They also learn shit by playing, especially when they're very young.
Well yeah I'm sure it works great up to the point where you have to start learning multiplication and division and how to work in a structured environment like the rest of the world.
Free spirit all you want, odds are your boss is still going to want you there at 9.
A.) Kids will learn math and shit voluntarily. Because math is awesome. Hell, you could even argue that traditional school is the worst way to learn these things because kids and people don't enjoy being forced to do things.
B.) I think you greatly overestimate the benefit that that "structured environment" has when going out into the world to work and such.
Not everyone likes math. What do?
Kids like math, they will want to learn it.
Besides, what good is a fucking public school going to do them if that's the case?
Babies are little pussies and they never stop crying
A stiff drink will shut them and get them on the road to Presidency. This is why we need social experiments!
Fuck cider, let's un-cure polio and in a generation we'll have a President that can beat up Hitler and Tojo while fucking a Swedish princess from a wheelchair.
And man, someone less lazy than me should totally make the schooling / homeschooling / unschooling / Montessori / structure vs. non-structured learning thread, since I find that whole topic fascinating but ironically enough I can't be bothered while sitting here on campus to cobble up a not-shit OP.
Edit: The whole "kids like math / kids hate math" argument has to include differentiating math itself (manipulating numbers and figuring out patterns) from the traditional way math is taught. From my experience, the majority of kids dig the first and loathe the second.
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Deebaseron my way to work in a suit and a tieAhhhh...come on fucking guyRegistered Userregular
B.) I think you greatly overestimate the benefit that that "structured environment" has when going out into the world to work and such.
For many of us, work is a structured environment. We show up no later than 9AM, go to our assigned seat, wearing our appropriate clothing, and performing our assigned tasks at the direction of our superiors until 5PM.
This isn't really true. Kids don't automatically like all the things they need to learn to function in society, as nice as that would be.
ElJeffe on
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I think we should split off a separate ed theory thread or something, this is getting kind of OT. But the basic idea isn't that you just don't teach kids anything that they don't want to learn, but that you focus on what they DO want to learn.
B.) I think you greatly overestimate the benefit that that "structured environment" has when going out into the world to work and such.
For many of us, work is a structured environment. We show up no later than 9AM, go to our assigned seat, wearing our appropriate clothing, and performing our assigned tasks at the direction of our superiors until 5PM.
And on a less bleak angle, you show up for appointments on time, you meet deadlines, you go to meetings etc..
Announcing to the press that you're duding up your son cause fuck those gender bending hippies, would be a political statement.
Man bites dog is news. Not the other way around.
Every time 15-month old Timmy has a blue Rocket shirt and Janey has a pink pony shirt, it's a statement. The extent to which this statement is very common and not newdworthy isn't the point. there are 30k comments on the yahoo! Article. Decent number of page hits vs. the hits you'd get from "Area Mom buys daughter EZ-Bake oven."
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Deebaseron my way to work in a suit and a tieAhhhh...come on fucking guyRegistered Userregular
edited May 2011
I wasn't going for bleak. I love my tasks, assigned seat and work clothing.
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Also as a godless nanny state secularist, I have to admit that my knee jerk reaction to anything from this to crazy Rapture Militia homeschooling is "oh man get them into a totally secular public school ASAP so we can mitigate the impact of their parents because every parent on earth is god-damn insane one way or another."
Edit: Again, you guys, they never said they weren't telling the kid what sex he is. It was an email to friends and relatives. That their other kids want them to tell people "I'm a boy" indicates that this is no big mystery to the kids themselves.
I mean, I'm one hell of a socially inept mouthbreather, and I was in public schools from age 5 on. So you know, there are flaws in any social and cultural analysis. :P
Parents may be insane but the less crazy ones recognize that they cannot possibly provide everything their child needs and so opt for some sort of schooling (private or public) to mitigate the effects of whatever unforeseen components are lacking from their parenting strategy. Parents who believe they know best in all possible regards and try to remove their children from society in order to ensure that their worldview is the only ones the kids are affected by are the most crazy. And it doesn't matter which side of the left-right spectrum their worldview falls under. They are crazypants.
Okay, you just listed two transgender identities and sworn virgins. Hell, "Fa'afafine" translates to "in the manner of a woman." This is the big problem with people who insist that gender isn't binary: they can't demonstrate anything outside of the binary.
Franklin D Roosevelt:
I don't recall it resulting in the collapse of gender roles or society, so everyone just fucking relax.
That's a very interesting read, and I think I'm using the term gender improperly - I assume that sex would be better. Our species has 2 sexes - male and female. And it doesn't matter one bit if you let your male child play with what our society has decided are traditionally female child's toys and vice versa. It seems pretty damned irresponsible and like you're shortchanging the child quite a bit by forcing them to be little more than an example of the parents' views.
EDIT: Damn FDR was adorable as a kid.
Let's get past whether or not this is a good parenting technique. It clearly isn't as their other child's unhappiness with the situation attests to but let's assume we don't know whether or not this is beneficial.
The motivation for this is not to be a good parent. Its to send a message - its "a tribute to freedom and choice in place of limitation, a stand up to what the world could become in Storm's lifetime" and (as grammatically questionable as the email was) that makes it pretty clear they are undertaking this ideologically. Its not about the child's best interest but teaching the world a lesson.
Frankly, I think this approach clearly manifests in the rest of their parental decisions. "What we noticed is that parents make so many choices for their children. It's obnoxious." Oh? Like the decision not to let their children shit on the floor? Not to let them eat candy all day? Its disingenuous and wrong headed. Yeah maybe their two boys pick out pink clothes... or maybe Mommy who wants to make a point has a finger on the scale. I'm sure the older boys are the ones to braid their long hair too.....
And finally it reveals a kind of twisted pessimism. Apparently, they believe the only way to eliminate detrimental gender roles is to eliminate genders.
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
Actually, using evidence to determine something is the exact opposite of politicizing. How hard could it possibly be to go with the gender that is incredibly likely based off the sex until some behavioral evidence demonstrates otherwise?
Also, blue used to be a girl colour.
That too is also a bit misleading:
My point is these things are by nature very fluid and non-rigid, making the parents in the OP perfectly right in being upset with people's obsession of trying to push Storm into either box A or box B.
I agree with you and nothing breaks my heart more than hearing a parent say that they don't want their son to be "faggoty" (or the less offensive but sadly more common variants: "X is for girls, you're a boy" "Who's my big strong boy/pretty little girl") because he shows interest in dolls or something pink.
Can't really equate that with this. If it were common practice it wouldn't be outside normal gender roles, which is what the issue is here, the complete abandonment of them for the sake of abandoning them.
Also, different childhood gender roles doesn't imply no childhood gender roles. You can bet your ass that Roosevelt was getting hard cider mixed into his milk because people thought that was a good idea back then.
Moving away from a strict gender binary doesn't entail abandoning the concept of gender entirely.
It's more like a shift from considering gender as a binary to considering gender as a spectrum or other more fluid range of possible combinations.
Well yeah I'm sure it works great up to the point where you have to start learning multiplication and division and how to work in a structured environment like the rest of the world.
Free spirit all you want, odds are your boss is still going to want you there at 9.
Montessori is a bit more structured though - you go to school and guide your education. The people I have known who homeschool and ended up leaning toward unschooling taught their children very little because the boundary between where they learn and where they play was blurred to the point of nonexistance.
I've got nothing against homeschool (couldn't do it myself as I don't feel like I know enough about teaching, let alone about the individual subjects) to adequately relate them to a child), but unschool is exactly what it sounds like - the opposite of school. Yeah, you might have some happy kids, but it's a real bummer when those kids grow up and realize that their parents never got around to teaching them things like the scientific method, trigonometry, or computer programming.
If somebody did that these days and made it public, people would freak out in exactly the same way, for more or less the same reasons. It may piss other people off that the parents are being irritating hippies, but I do not view this as being particularly psychologically scarring to the child.
There are much, much, bigger fish to fry when it comes to weird shit parents do when raising their kids that doesn't necessarily fall under "abuse" in a legal sense.
See also:
Christian Scientists (no medical treatment for diseases)
Vegan diets for newborns
Child beauty pageants
Anti-vaccine crowd
etc
The Montessori method and unschooling seem similar but are slightly different. In a Montessori school, kids learn through play, but the environment is specifically constructed so that kids learn the lessons the educators want them to learn. You can decide to count to 1000 by building a cube (did that!) or learn that blue + yellow = green while simultaneously practicing motor skills by pouring blue and yellow water together (did that too!) at a given time, but you can't say "Enough of this boring crap, Imma watch TV." Unschoolers would let their kids just watch TV.
But I could be totally wrong, and the homeschoolers might be right. I have to accept their right to give it a whirl for the sake of avoiding everyone being rammed into the wrong solution en masse and our culture not tinkering with enough potential ways to approach.
Likewise (and to avoid thread derailment) -- I think the likely outcome of this parental gender news experiment will be minor, but maybe their kid will get held more as a baby and end up as some emotionally insightful f1 driver / poet / psychiatrist and everyone will drift towards androgyne-babies as a more common choice to early development and we'll all look archaic, like Victorian patents dozing babies with Laudanum.
It should.
But I guess he meant Vegan diets which exclude human milk.
What the two of you said sums up my thought on the matter.
Polio turned him into a man.
But we construct these genders. Being an American man has nothing to do with the scientific method. I am assuming the parents' point here is less about "most people with dongs consider themselves dudes," than all of trained behaviors and social assumptions packed into these genders.
You really think giving a son a blue t-shirt with a baseball bat on it, a book about trucks, and a couple GI Joes isn't just as much a political statement as sending a gender-vague email?
A.) Kids will learn math and shit voluntarily. Because math is awesome. Hell, you could even argue that traditional school is the worst way to learn these things because kids and people don't enjoy being forced to do things.
B.) I think you greatly overestimate the benefit that that "structured environment" has when going out into the world to work and such.
Announcing to the press that you're duding up your son cause fuck those gender bending hippies, would be a political statement.
Not everyone likes math. What do?
And so when your kid doesn't want to learn division or basic algebra what do you do?
Making sure kids are enjoying what they learn is important but eventually kids also have to learn that life isn't always what they want to do and sometimes they need to suck it up.
Not all Montessori schools are the same, but "learning through play" isn't really that accurate. It's self-guided learning, and the activities are more interactive (and some of them are kind of fun), but it's still generally structured and it's not like running around the playground or playing with action figures. There are still goals to be met, especially if the school is accredited, and the child doesn't have complete autonomy over what he chooses to do. (He can choose to work on math first and language second if he chooses, for example, but he can't just eschew language entirely because he likes math better.)
I'm not an expert in unschooling, but my daughter is in a Montessori school and what I've read of unschooling makes it sound pretty different. And by "different" I mean "stupidly unstructured".
Babies are little pussies and they never stop crying
A stiff drink will shut them and get them on the road to Presidency. This is why we need social experiments!
Kids like math, they will want to learn it.
Besides, what good is a fucking public school going to do them if that's the case?
I would have, and I can speak for my friends at the time as well, have stopped taking math at the first chance and never looked back.
Luckily I was a kid so I wasn't given the choice and I took math up through Precalc.
What do?
Fuck cider, let's un-cure polio and in a generation we'll have a President that can beat up Hitler and Tojo while fucking a Swedish princess from a wheelchair.
And man, someone less lazy than me should totally make the schooling / homeschooling / unschooling / Montessori / structure vs. non-structured learning thread, since I find that whole topic fascinating but ironically enough I can't be bothered while sitting here on campus to cobble up a not-shit OP.
Edit: The whole "kids like math / kids hate math" argument has to include differentiating math itself (manipulating numbers and figuring out patterns) from the traditional way math is taught. From my experience, the majority of kids dig the first and loathe the second.
For many of us, work is a structured environment. We show up no later than 9AM, go to our assigned seat, wearing our appropriate clothing, and performing our assigned tasks at the direction of our superiors until 5PM.
This isn't really true. Kids don't automatically like all the things they need to learn to function in society, as nice as that would be.
And on a less bleak angle, you show up for appointments on time, you meet deadlines, you go to meetings etc..
Man bites dog is news. Not the other way around.
Every time 15-month old Timmy has a blue Rocket shirt and Janey has a pink pony shirt, it's a statement. The extent to which this statement is very common and not newdworthy isn't the point. there are 30k comments on the yahoo! Article. Decent number of page hits vs. the hits you'd get from "Area Mom buys daughter EZ-Bake oven."