Raising Gender-Neutral Children

07/30/2019

Raising Gender-Neutral Children

My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style.
Maya Angelou

"Three-year-old twins Zyler and Kadyn Sharpe scurried around the boys and girls clothing racks of a narrow consignment store filled with toys. Zyler, wearing rainbow leggings, scrutinized a pair of hot-pink-and-purple sneakers. Kadyn, in a T-Rex shirt, fixated on a musical cube that flashed colorful lights. At a glance, the only discernible difference between these fraternal twins is their hair — Zyler’s is brown and Kadyn’s is blond." So begins an article on the NBC News website about parents choosing to raise gender-neutral children.

"Is Zyler a boy or a girl? How about Kadyn? That’s a question their parents, Nate and Julia Sharpe, say only the twins can decide. The Cambridge, Mass., couple represent a small group of parents raising 'theybies' — children being brought up without gender designation from birth. A Facebook community for these parents currently claims about 220 members across the U.S.

'A theyby is, I think, different things to different people,' Nate Sharpe told NBC News. 'For us, it means raising our kids with gender-neutral pronouns — so, 'they,' 'them,' 'their,' rather than assigning 'he,' 'she,' 'him,' 'her' from birth based on their anatomy.'"

And, in an article found in the Exchange Essentials collection, "Anti-Bias Education," Louise Derman Sparks and Julie Olsen Edwards outline some anti-bias education goals educators can use to help them ensure each child is supported as a unique and valuable individual:

"(Identity) Each child will demonstrate self-awareness, confidence, family pride, and positive social/group identities.

(Diversity) Each child will express comfort and joy with human diversity, accurate language for human differences, and deep, caring human connections.

(Justice) Each child will increasingly recognize unfairness (injustice), have language to describe unfairness, and understand that unfairness hurts.

(Activism) Each child will demonstrate a sense of empowerment and the skills to act, with others or alone, against prejudice and/or discriminatory actions.

Derman-Sparks & Edwards (2010)"

Source: "Boy or girl? Parents raising 'theybies' let kids decide," by Julie Compton, nbcnews.com, July 19, 2018

Connect 4 Learning - Flip the Curriculum.

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