If you really want to get to know someone, you don’t ask what’s between their legs
David Stocker
Parenting marks to be a pivotal foundation in an individual’s life. It contributes to shaping one’s identity and to a great extent, fixes the lens of an individual to perceive the world. The discipline of Psychology provides us with the attachment styles that pave the way to the relationships that one beholds as he evolves as an individual. Along with the kind of attachment style one has with the parents, there are a number of factors that decide one’s relationship with them.
Those factors could be a lot on which we do not even have control on. The relationship of our parents with their parents, the social and economic status of our parents when they became parents, and whether the baby was a planned or unplanned one could be a few factors that demarcate the parent-child relationship.
Out of the many factors, gender contributes massively to the way children are perceived by parents. In India, the era of patriarchy, withheld gender-biased parenting to a large extent as it was in tandem with the contemporary thoughts then. Today, in the modern time of being gender sensitive and contributing to equality, gender-biased parenting still exists. The causes then and the causes today could be different but it exists in the most subtle and indirect ways. It’s so deeply rooted in the unconscious, that it has happened to be the most obvious way of parenting, even without consciously choosing or questioning its ways.
The sex of an individual is ascribed by birth and gender is something which is for him to explore. Sex refers to the anatomy of an individual. Gender includes the adjectives associated with the sex and conforming social norms linked to the specific sex. Gender is, however, a free will and choice of an individual to choose.
Sadly, in the gender-biased society, like a lot of other personal preferences, gender preference is also decided by the society for an individual. It is no more a choice but an imposed decision that compels us to be a certain way. Society keeps reminding the individual of his gender in multiple ways. It hampers the freedom to think and feel unfiltered. Subtly, the individual starts to think and feel from the lens of the big filter called ‘gender’.
The career preferences, the clothes, the dating partner and the ways of life are then unconsciously chosen by considering the gender. Many times, the individuals themselves lack an insight of being trapped, in the trap of this gender-biased thinking construct seeded in them.
Gender-neutral parenting is all about bringing up kids without enforcing gender roles on them. Instead, they are allowed to choose who they want to be.
David Stocker
There are ways it could be achieved
- Being Colour Neutral: Letting go of the cliched bias with respect to colours associated with genders. Blue is used for men and pink for women. This begins right from the mom-to-be baby showers to the clothes of the new born baby.
- Choosing A Gender Free Name: The name is the most important aspect in gender neutral parenting. The names, just like colours, have gender associations. Choosing a gender-free name will avoid the gender conformity from parents while addressing their child and can in turn help the child to think and feel by his choice.
- Exposing The Child To Gender-Neutral Games: According to Erik Erikson, games contribute massively in the child’s psychosocial stages of development. Providing gender-neutral games could hamper the process of developing gender-unbiased thinking in the child.
- Refrain From Using Phrases Like “ Daddy’s Princess, Mumma’s Boy”: Such phrases denote and direct how an individual having a specific sex should behave in order to fulfil the requirement of the assigned gender to that sex.
- Asking For Prefered Pronouns At The Age Of 18: 18 is considered to be an age of being an adult, at which an individual has a fully developed brain anatomically. It would be wiser and sensitive to ask the child about his preferred pronoun and use it while addressing him.
- Parents Need To Show The Children That There Are No Gender-Specific Tasks: In the quest to promote and abide by gender-neutral parenting, it is a mandate that the parents themselves indulge in gender-neutral activities. Performing the household chores on the basis of efficiency rather than gender needs to be the focus.
The society we are in today is witnessing the biggest transitions of its times. Each household consists of a member highly educated, liberal and unbiased, however, intends to protect his child from society which is radical in nature along with wanting to be liberal. The parents who consciously make a choice of raising their children in gender-neutral ways, always have no control over what will happen to the child other than at home.
Gender bias has been rooted in the most subtly unconscious ways over which even society itself is blind. Somewhere the innate idea of letting the child be, letting the child choose, and being humane in accepting other humans as humans has been fairly lagging behind. It is even beyond being educated or uneducated, it is today about making a choice of allowing children to be and their parents to choose their ways of parenting.
As a result of this societal threat today, the parents who wish to raise their children in gender-neutral parenting, hold themselves back which in turn affects the child in falling prey to stereotypical gender-biased parenting. It is time we stop constantly pitching into the professional and personal preferences of the child from a gender-biased lens.
Gender-neutral parenting promotes career choices on the basis of the authentic self, aptitude, and interest and not because of the gender aspect. It results in a reduction of guilt and shame among the children who fail to identify gender norms. It lets children widen their horizons and see the world. It is time that we see children regardless of their gender because it is beyond dolls for girls and cars for boys.
