Yes, that was utterly brilliant, I was laughing out loud during lunch at the pizza joint when I read that.
And thanks, Kieran, for posting that here as I had wanted to give it the high praise it merits but while I still read Unfogged routinely I haven’t commented there for about 5 or 6 years, and never regularly, and I’m not about to start again until the return of the Mahdi Ogged.
Im surprised this has caused such an – ahem – ‘storm’ – I came across a blog about a year ago, while searching for information about Wendy Brown and Judith Butler, written by a lesbian mother who decided not to raise her child as either a boy or a girl. I presumed from it that I was way behind the times, and gender-less-ness was now an accepted way of rearing a child.
Gender (as socially constructed) is not the issue here; so far they’re raising the child sexless. I mean they won’t even tell the grandparents if their grandchild has a wang dang doodle or a hoo ha.
“I’ll be the one to say it: these people are morons.”
Seconded. This is child abuse. Isn’t it illegal to conduct science experiments on people without their consent? This would never have gotten past the ethics board at my university.
Frankly I’m not so concerned about the attempts to raise the child without a gender – I’m pretty sure that when the two older boys testicles descend and the hormones kick in that little problem will take care of itself. A similar (or exactly the same!) process will do the same for Storm. The atrocious names may require a few extra years of therapy, but hell we all have issues with our parents.
What bugs me is the ‘unschooling’ nonsense, and the whole notion that raising children without even the most half-assed of sloppily enforced boundaries is beneficial to their development going completely unchallenged. Its been as about as thoroughly debunked as psychological theories can be. These people aren’t just crappy parents – they’re lazy ones (probably – I’ll admit I don’t know for certain). Disciplining kids is hard work. Letting them ‘run wild and free’ is easy as chips. Doesn’t make it any less negligent.
Oh and Dsquared and Ajay clearly win the internet for the month of May.
I don’t buy “moronic”. The coherent philosophical presumption would have to be that gender-identity is strongly molded before childhood or latency. I really don’t think that’s true. I really don’t think that, if true, being conventionally gendered is necessarily oppressive or oppressing. But it’s not moronic. And it sure as heck ain’t child abuse (think about the level of psychic determinism you presume, MPAVictoria). Non-schooling doesnt necessarily mean there’s no structure to the day and no behavioral boundaries.
The self-appointed culture police need to chill or save their vapors for the 1001 more conventional ways to be bad parents. Differences are beautiful!
We now return to our regularly scheduled hippie-stomping.
May I immediately contradict myself and say you’re absolutely right, especially on the hippy stomping (when discussing this with someone else on Facebook the tempation to make snide references to tainted bong-water was almost too strong to resist.)
Let me say as the proud uncle of three very different, and in certain respects differently raised little nephews I’m all for diversity. I’m also the dissident in the family in that I maintain that home-schooling can be beneficial and non-socially isolating (even if I wouldn’t do it to my kids.)
However, I do sense a certain ‘cultural default,’ if you will, in the press that the removal of boundaries and structure (the ‘Hippy’ paradigm for want of a better word) is enlightened and beneficial and the kids will turn out fine in the end, while Tiger Mom is going to forever crush the spirits of her unfortunate brood. Its just not true – I’d give better than even odds that little Storm, Jazz, Kia and whatever other Autobots this family produces will either a) be in Juvie by their 15th birthdays, b) will change their names to Joe, Jack and Bobby and become a dynasty of ultra-conservative Republican congress-critters. Either outcome is clearly the result of just criminally bad parenting.
I was pointed to this story today, and recalled this piece from last month. (If you follow the link, scroll down and look at the black and white photo before reading.)
A century ago, children were initially dressed in non-gendered clothes, following a progression that maps more or less to Kohlberg’s cog-dev theory of gender identity and gender stability.
So while forcibly raising a ‘genderless’ child in this manner is silly, the perceived silliness comes from the contrast with the extreme gendering of infants through clothing in North America, seen when people who encounter sprogs and wish to make smalltalk make a guess of their gender based upon what they’re wearing. In other parts of the world, you’re allowed to ask.
This is not at all new, and surely not fantastically uncommon. (Though the first seriously committed example I personally came across, perhaps 14 years ago, was also in Canada – ?)
What I’d love to read … something that no matter how things turned out could not fail to interesting and educational …. is how these bold child-raising plans have have turned out. There is surely reasonable data on this by now given all the folks trying exactly this plan/”experiment”. Attention journalists: _here_ is an attention-grabbing story that will bring you world-wide fame.
Speaking as a loving grandparent who failed miserably in interesting my own daughter in trucks, cars and construction equipment as a young child, I see no harm in the attempt. Now if only someone can figure out a way to fight off the recent trend in ubiquitous princess equipment…
There oughta be a law. For example, blog commenters with gender-unspecific pseudonyms: can they at least appear in pink or blue, so we know how to behave toward them?
How is it that I’ve never heard of Quorn? Experts recommend I eat it. It was discovered growing in a field in 1960. With that space alien name? Did everyone else know about quorn?
People are jumping on the “unschooling” stuff, but, from the linked article, the other children are 2 and 5, so they would both be too young to go to a conventional school in some societies, such as Germany. It is also significantly underdescribed in the article (which hasn’t stopped Daragh jumping in an filling the gaps I see). Allowing children to discover through their own curiosity is consistent with arranging the environment so that the right questions come up, a technique advocated by a certain 18th century figure ….
I’d give better than even odds that little Storm, Jazz, Kia and whatever other Autobots this family produces will either a) be in Juvie by their 15th birthdays, b) will change their names to Joe, Jack and Bobby and become a dynasty of ultra-conservative Republican congress-critters
How much better than even odds are you prepared to give? I might be persuaded into a quite substantial wager that a) a middle-class family will not see the very unusual outcome of having all three of its children put into juvenile custody at a very young age, combined with one b) that three Canadians will not all enter US politics. If I could be bothered to look up whether Ontario even had incarceration for 14-year-olds I might make that into a very substantial wager, but somehow “making even a token effort” seems like a category mistake in context.
We had a long argument on the Unfogged thread that birthed An [X] Named Storm about “unschooling” or “autonomous learning,” during which some charismatic stallion came along and heroically linked this essay (written by someone more sympathetic to alternative pedagogies than I am). It evaluates three different schools, the first of them called “The School Around Us,” built to hew closely to the views of authors like A.S. Neill and Jon Holt who impelled the “unschooling” trend. We report, you decide.
There is very strong evidence – Acquired by the simple expedient of videotaping appropriate child/adult interactions (like a kindergarden or creche)- that most people react highly diffrently to identical behavior from even very small children depending on what gender they belive the kid has. In other words, gendered socialization starts before we can even talk, and never lets up. Trying to shortcircut that by not telling is an interesting idea, but I dont think it will work- most people will likely just mentally categorize the spud as one or the other and act accordingly, but you might manage to expose a kid to a mix of socialization pressures from the surrounding world if the guesses are not uniform… but this is not going to be child abuse in any sense of the term, at most the kid fairly likely to wind up a bit of a tomboy or a somewhat effiminate boy. Hardly the end of the world.
most people will likely just mentally categorize the spud as one or the other and act accordingly
Giving three possible outcomes: different people have different gender expectations and assumptions, and it all kind of averages out; or people’s gender expectations and assumptions tilt towards little Neut’s biological sex; or people’s assumptions tilt towards the other one, there being after all only the two possibilities to choose from. (An sf writer wrote somewhere that when she was little she thought the reason why grown-ups were so concerned about keeping their crotches covered up was that everyone had something different – after all, if everyone’s was more or less the same, nobody would have anything to be embarrassed about.) At which point we’ve still got a society that imposes different expectations on boys and girls, plus one little boy who everyone thinks is a girl and whose mother doesn’t correct that impression. That’s the abusive part.
Eh.. Given the specific nature of the diffrences in the way adults interact with female and male children, if the world is consistently mistaken, that isnt going to do any harm, it will merely tend to produce a quiet and highly socialized boy or a somewhat rambunctious girl. Its not like adults are handing out “guides to how to be a proper man/woman” from age 3. It is a bit subtler than that, with boys being encouraged to be physically active and “not be a baby” and so on, and girls getting told more often to quiet down and be nice, ect. Either socilization pattern is well within the range of childrearing practices across cultures for either gender. The middle case, where diffrent people apply diffrent socialization pressures is actually the only one that might be problematic, as the most likely result is either a very confused child or a highly adept social chameleon.
if the world is consistently mistaken, that isnt going to do any harm
If the world consistently applies the ‘wrong’ set of vague unreasoned preferences, who cares – there’s not necessarily anything ‘right’ about the ‘right’ set. The trouble with these people is that they’re buying that outcome by creating a situation where the adults around a little girl can consistently refer to her as ‘he’, ‘him’, ‘your little boy’ etc, without being corrected by her parents – and that, I think, could be seriously harmful. In power terms they’re in a highly asymmetric relationship with their children, and I think they’re abusing it by taking this experimental approach – it’s not as if they’re going out into the world shorn of all gender labelling themselves.
“People are jumping on the “unschooling†stuff, but, from the linked article, the other children are 2 and 5”
I’ll note from the article that the elder boy has already started school. Moreover, the father of these kids is himself a teacher, so I would be surprised if they don’t all start at some school when they get old enough.
“plus one little boy who everyone thinks is a girl and whose mother doesn’t correct that impression. That’s the abusive part.”
But that won’t be the case for long. By the time the kid starts to interact with people outside the family, he/she will have learned to speak, and can then tell everyone whether he/she is a boy or a girl.
By the time the kid starts to interact with people outside the family, he/she will have learned to speak, and can then tell everyone whether he/she is a boy or a girl.
Good thing parents can’t f*** with their kids’ heads in the first three years of life, eh readers?
I’d take the bet that this won’t turn out any better than any other experiment with childrens’ gender identities, with the caveat that as this one doesn’t involve surgery or drugs there are limits to how bad the worst-case scenario can be. At its own scale, however, I doubt anything good will come of it.
Also, there was a time when I regularly worked with people who were home-schooled and a lot of them were really unpleasant, but then this was probably selection-bias at work as they were drawn from the rightwing gun nut pool rather than the super-Montessori/hippy/anarchist pool.
Disciplining kids is hard work. Letting them ‘run wild and free’ is easy as chips.
Depends on the kid. If we didn’t make an effort to lay down the law for ours, she’d take over and we’d be under the rule of an arbitrary tyrant. I think she wants to direct.
BERKELEY, CA–Citing a refusal to impose limiting social constructs on their offspring, parents Lucas Cady and Kat Loesel reported Monday they will not tell their 4-year-old, Quynn, whether the child is biologically male or female. “Who are Kat and I to say what sexual organs our kid possesses?” asked Loesel, who has dressed Quynn in dull gray smocks since birth and only allows the child to play with toy figures that have been neutered of any conventionally feminine or masculine characteristics. “We think it’s important our child’s frequent questions about girls and boys go unanswered so that Quynn can discover its true sex for itself.” The couple also said that parents should be supportive of children who decide they do not have human genitalia at all.
B) I don’t see why this is particuarly anyone’s business. They seem to feed and clothe and love and shelter their kids. Given that they are probably above-median parents, net-net, and per d-squared, I’ll bet dollars to donuts that Storm ends up with a university degree.
C) The strength of the reaction to this as compared to the like million other ways to be a bad parent suggests the strength of social norms and taboos on gender.
My point was that the first three years are when the really awesome, cosmic levels of headf***age are possible. If parents are doing weird things to a <3-year-old's mind, saying "he'll soon be able to tell his own side of the story" isn't much better than saying "he'll soon be able to earn a living".
…Anyway, about gender socialization, I figure 99% of old warnings about the danger of “gender confusion” are really just expressions of discredited theories about how not to make your kid turn gay, and I say the hell with it.
But bending over backwards to shelter your kid from any sort of socialization that the kid is otherwise going to get from the general culture is probably asking for trouble, whether or not you agree with it. My attitude with these things has always been that I’m not going to try to minimize exposure but I am going to try to inculcate critical attitudes where I can; it’s OK for her to learn from somebody else that girls are like X and boys are like Y, but she’s also going to hear from me when I think that’s nonsense. Probably because that’s how I was raised.
On the one hand, this reminds me very much of those older-fashioned-er cases when one parent or another had simply “wanted a girl/boy” and tried to fight history through child-rearing. On the other hand, cases like this are the precise reason why the phrase “whatever, I should care” is hanging around in the English language.
…Of course, my previous post is itself something of an expression of privilege; the larger culture my kid is getting isn’t one that’s terribly likely to drive her to an early death.
It’s ultimately a case of utopianism vs political change, I think. I mean, what are we trying to bring about – a world full of people whose biological sex is their own business and whose gender is freely-chosen and indeterminate, or a world full of people who have a known sex identity and a gender to match, but who don’t give a damn about gender roles? The second is a world a bit like ours, which is achievable through political change; the first is an utterly transformed world, which is only achievable one Storm at a time.
I’m with nick s way back at #10. I see no way in which this family’s decision is any more mockable or potentially destructive than the whole pink/blue crap that so many kids are put through — starting before birth with the ceremonial Painting of the Nursery once the sprog’s equipment has been identified — and which has now bizarrely attained the status of “natural” in many places.
There are several references in the comments to this as an “experiment” but the only thing that makes it more of an experiment than “here, let’s drown you in pink and Barbies/blue and race cars” is that it is less common.
That, and the fact that everyone the kids are ever going to meet outside their immediate family is still living in a world of boys and girls. I’ve got a son who’s into musicals and a daughter who thinks skirts are weird and freaky; I am absolutely 100% behind any attempt to challenge the gender stereotypes that warp and restrict actually-existing boys and girls. But the actual existence of boys and girls is non-negotiable for me, as (I strongly suspect) it is for the boys and girls themselves.
The only thing I am tempted to be overly judgmental about is whatever role the parents had in bringing about the publicity. Aspect X of the way I am raising my child(ren) is flogged far and wide seems to be the questionable “experiment” and in general independent of the details of X. I am reminded of a case that I recall as being somewhat well-known back in the day (but not coming up with the appropriate search terms to find any information on–I seem to recall New York City in the ’40s or ’50s) when a father held a press conference at the birth of his daughter to announce that she was going to be a “genius”. The choice to hold a press conference was the telling part rather than anything else in how he intended to bring that about.
It’s true that the fantasy assumes that you can somehow separate gender relations from every other power relation out there, or the development of gender from every other stage and process of development. Ironically, they’re giving this kid less room to play and experiment with gender than most kids get: the kid gets a special new rigid gender role, which is “uncertainty” and “being put in awkward conversations with adults and other kids” and “being discouraged from telling people what s/he ‘really’ is.” This sucks about as much as being a boy-gendered or a girl-gendered kid, but rejecting it isn’t very straightforward, and may well be discouraged by the parents. That’s the ridiculous part, as I see it— that and the fact that s/he becomes a huge, sucking magnet for everyone’s anxieties about gender, almost a scapegoat, which is certainly where I would draw the line as a parent (even if I thought the experiment was a good idea for other reasons, and I don’t). At least if the kid gets to figure out an existing gender role that has been diversified and questioned by zillions of other people, he or she has a lot more autonomy— and a lot more processing power left over to devote to all the other difficult stuff kids need to figure out…
To what extent do practical considerations make the parent’s actions morally problematic?
The parent’s approach is experimental – and most experiments fail, particularly when they involve radical departures from existing models. The rigidity and utopianism of the parent’s professed beliefs does not bode well. They have basically taken it upon themselves to derive, implement, and teach an entire novel social system. I doubt they are up to that challenge.
Unfortunately, the consequences of this experiment will be bourne by the children, who never had the opportunity to consent.
Ajay (ajay?) and d^2^ will surely squirrel the Internet they deservedly won for that away somewhere along with all their other won ‘nets over the years.
But the comments here are confusing me. “Not telling other people your newborn baby’s gender” is so different from “forbidding your talking-age child from knowing his or her gender or revealing his or her gender to people” that I can’t even process what some of the rest of you are saying. Here’s what Storm’s parent said:
We thought that if we delayed sharing that information, in this case hopefully, we might knock off a couple million of those [gender-role] messages by the time that Storm decides Storm would like to share,†says Witterick. [brackets my addition for clarity, and bold my added emphasis, which I guess is obvious because people can’t speak in boldface]
So. Uh. It’s reasonable to assume that [a] Storm will know Storm’s own gender pretty much as soon as Storm is old enough to know the words for he and she, and [b] Storm will be free to tell whoever Storm wants, or to just smirk and say, “heh, wouldn’t you like to know.”
I mean, really? adam? sbk? MPAVictoria? Phil? Matt? How is not telling people your newborn baby’s gender until your baby’s old enough to speak more destructive than, say, not telling people the presumed gender of a foetus, which people do all the damn time without anyone caring? THE BABY HAS EXITED THE WOMB, ITS SEX PARTS MUST NOW BE KNOWN TO US. …really? why?
Come to think of it, I’d bet something approaching fifty percent of people who know me by the nickname everyone uses for me offline and online (Salient, originally to tease me for my tendency to overuse the phrase “the salient point here is” x) and possibly even by picture (god there have been mistakes before, especially with my old haircut) don’t even know my biological sex, and I’d bet of the CT commenters who I recognize by pseudonym, I don’t have any clue what sex at least half of ’em are. It’s never seemed to cause any problems, and perhaps reduces the amount of effrontery or harassment online, or perhaps is irrelevant, or perhaps we’re all desperately suffering from the not-knowing. (In which case how could we survive the Internet?) I never did care much, and decided to make an effort to stop caring completely right around the time I read An Image of Africa and misguessed Chinua Achebe’s sex. (Which is a little more understandable than misguessing Kieran’s. I think.)
Naming your kid Storm, though, now that is not just mere child abuse, it’s obviously reckless endangerment of your whole community and possibly the world. Last kid that suffered through that name had their hair go white at an early age and started chucking lightning bolts and summoning hurricane-strength wind when upset. Did these parents learn nothing from X-Men?
Phil @ #28 The trouble with these people is that they’re buying that outcome by creating a situation where the adults around a little girl can consistently refer to her as ‘he’, ‘him’, ‘your little boy’ etc, without being corrected by her parents – and that, I think, could be seriously harmful.
But why do you think this? What do you imagine is going to happen?
My point (and it’s not a very interesting or important one) is that we can’t say that there wouldn’t have been a medium-sized pile-on if Kieran had posted a link to advocacy of some other non-optimal form of parenting.
There is a response from Kathy Witterick (the mother) about the fuss here. She comes across as a new ager (‘Jazz was listening to “Free to Be You and Me”‘), but no more deserving of mockery than any other parent trying to find a child-raising path that makes sense. And she explicitly repudiates the “experiment” label.
A few excerpts and some comments to which they seem relevant:
@JP Stormcrow #48: Aspect X of the way I am raising my child(ren) is flogged far and wide seems to be the questionable “experiment†and in general independent of the details of X.
Kathy Witterick writes: “And to protect our children from the frenzy that we did not anticipate, we have declined over 100 requests for interviews from all over the world, including all-expenses paid trips to New York City to tell our story on American morning television.”
@Barry Freed #5: Gender (as socially constructed) is not the issue here; so far they’re raising the child sexless.
KW writes: “None of my family members are gender-free or genderless.”
@Russell Arben Fox #3: I’ll be the one to say it: these people are morons.”, seconded by MPAVictoria at #5.
KW: “The psychologist on the Today Show was willing to make strong, unqualified conclusions about a family he had never met.” Not the only one, apparently.
The final paragraph is “Storm has a sex which those close to him/her know and acknowledge. We don’t know yet about colour preferences or dress inclinations, but the idea that the whole world must know our baby’s sex strikes me as unhealthy and voyeuristic. This is what I know — someday soon, Storm will have something to say about it and in the meantime, I’m just listening carefully.”
Much less moronic than comments #3 and #6, if you ask me.
@Chris Bertram – Of course I’m ‘filling in the gaps.’ As are you, and indeed everyone else on this comment thread. Its difficult to get a holistic understanding of someone’s parenting strategy from a ca. 1,000 word article. These people may be truly horrible parents, or they could be great ones.I’m fully prepared to accept this ‘unschooling’ may indeed be beneficial, but I was referring more generally to the trend in parenting to see the removal of boundaries as ‘beneficial’ (which I believe this article did) while condeming Tiger Mom from the very start. Care to hold off the pre-emptive sneering for once?
@dsquared – as a former resident of Canada myself, born and raised in the plains of Alberta, you’d be surprised how many conservatives head south to start their political careers in the belief that the Tories are wusses. I also felt that the term ‘Republican congress-critter’ might be more resonant for most CT readers than ‘Tory parliamentarian’ and was aiming more for imparting understanding than terminological accuracy. But replace whatever words you like. And yes – it is indeed rare for children from middle-class homes to end up as juvenile delinquents. That might be related to the fact that most middle-class homes go for, in the absence of a less loaded term, ‘traditional’ parenting techniques stressing boundaries and discipline rather than ‘benign’ neglect.
the idea that the whole world must know our baby’s sex strikes me as unhealthy and voyeuristic
The assumption that the world in general needs to know anything at all about Kathy Witterick’s child or children, including whether she has any, strikes me as unhealthy and exhibitionistic.
Tim – what I imagine is going to happen is that an infant is going to get mixed messages from his/her parents about something fundamental to his/her sense of self. If those messages start coming in before the child has the self-awareness and the language ability to correct them, so much the worse.
When my son was three he ‘shot’ me with his p’shoo-stick* and went to tell my wife about it in great excitement – “I’m a man! And you’re a lady! And Daddy’s dead!” Nobody had told him about Oedipus, his mind had just started developing the way little boys’ minds do. That doesn’t mean their parents should call them brave little soldiers and dress them in camo, as indeed we didn’t (my son chose his clothes from quite an early age, and wore mostly red for as long as he could manage it). But there’s a difference between actively challenging the role expectations of a gender-identified child and trying to suspend that identification altogether.
* We didn’t have guns in the house; for that matter, he didn’t think he was playing with guns, he thought he was pointing his p’shoo-stick.
But “get mixed messages from his/her parents about something fundamental to his/her sense of self” is still extremely vague – I don’t have any more idea why you think this is going to be “seriously harmful” than I did before. Your little anecdote if anything suggests that parents don’t have much influence over their children’s identification with gender roles – which would seem to support the view that this is not that big a deal.
What bugs me is the ‘unschooling’ nonsense, and the whole notion that raising children without even the most half-assed of sloppily enforced boundaries is beneficial to their development going completely unchallenged. Its been as about as thoroughly debunked as psychological theories can be. These people aren’t just crappy parents – they’re lazy ones (probably – I’ll admit I don’t know for certain). Disciplining kids is hard work. Letting them ‘run wild and free’ is easy as chips. Doesn’t make it any less negligent.
Not to go off on a tangent here and not to say that these people are letting their kids ‘run wild and free’, but: If you’re looking to point fingers, it’s precisely these sorts of parents who are too lazy (or just plain averse) to discipline their children that are the primary cause of poor school performance. If I had a nickel for every time I heard a parent excuse their kids lackadaisical attitude towards studying and homework by saying “you can’t shackle a free spirit” or some such nonsense . . .
I’m fully prepared to accept this ‘unschooling’ may indeed be beneficial, but I was referring more generally to the trend in parenting to see the removal of boundaries as ‘beneficial’ (which I believe this article did) while condeming Tiger Mom from the very start. Care to hold off the pre-emptive sneering for once?
You mean boundaries concerning studying and doing homework, for example ;-)
“get mixed messages from his/her parents about something fundamental to his/her sense of self†is still extremely vague
It seems fairly specific to me. I’m talking about the consistency and reliability of the world in which the extremely fluid process of infant development takes place, and the parents’ work as guarantor of that. “You are a boy/girl” strikes me as pretty basic stuff, and not stuff that it’s appropriate for parents to mess around with.
Your little anecdote if anything suggests that parents don’t have much influence over their children’s identification with gender roles
You’re conflating gender roles (what’s appropriate to a boy/girl) with gender identity (being recognised as a boy/girl).
The assumption that the world in general needs to know anything at all about Kathy Witterick’s child or children, including whether she has any, strikes me as unhealthy and exhibitionist.
Dude, you mean voyeuristic, unless you’re being a supreme fucking asshole to Kathy Witterick, who had a few pissy relatives calculatedly drop this yes-pun-intended ‘media storm’ on her unanticipatory ass in response to a completely reasonable announcement email to them. (They ‘released’ the email to the press, which strikes me as unconscionably assholish.) KW herself refused most interviews and IMO did the bare minimum to get everybody to go shut up and go away and stop harassing her, which is the opposite of ‘exhibitionist.’ And if you think it’s exhibitionist to announce the birth of one’s child to one’s friends and relatives via Facebook and email, then… never mind, there’s just no way you think that. It’s a completely normal thing to announce.
“You are a boy/girl†strikes me as pretty basic stuff, and not stuff that it’s appropriate for parents to mess around with.
…but …but she said explicitly that Storm / Storm’s brothers / a few others know Storm’s sex. They’re just not announcing it to the rest of the world.
Are you suggesting baby Storm will be checking her/his email and discover ambiguously gender-referential messages from Second Aunt Samantha and get confused? Or that baby Storm will be irrevocably scarred because strangers on the street say “aww, what a cute baby” instead of “aww, what a cute girl/boy?” Or… what?
When my son was three he ‘shot’ me with his p’shoo-stick* and went to tell my wife about it in great excitement – “I’m a man! And you’re a lady! And Daddy’s dead!â€
I didn’t exactly follow what this has to do with… anything. It seems… on the one hand not worrisome or bothersome, but on the other hand really weird and curious… like pretty much every other thing I’ve ever heard a three year old say. But as a side note, I feel like for that story to even make sense the kid has to basically know what a gun is and that it shoots things and that shooting people kills them, so your disclaimer doesn’t make sense to me (not that any of it is any of my business).
Are you suggesting baby Storm will be checking her/his email
No, I was referring back to another commenter’s reporting of how these people raise little Jazz and little Kio – specifically that lots of people assume they’re girls, and they, the parents, don’t correct them. This strikes me as a serious head-f***.
I didn’t exactly follow what this has to do with… anything.
Begins with Fr, rhymes with ‘void’. Being an infant is a weird scary place to be at the best of times; “maybe you’re a boy and maybe you’re a girl, who knows?” doesn’t seem like a good framework to set.
{ 66 comments }
Barry Freed 05.26.11 at 10:47 pm
Yes, that was utterly brilliant, I was laughing out loud during lunch at the pizza joint when I read that.
And thanks, Kieran, for posting that here as I had wanted to give it the high praise it merits but while I still read Unfogged routinely I haven’t commented there for about 5 or 6 years, and never regularly, and I’m not about to start again until the return of
the MahdiOgged.roac 05.26.11 at 11:00 pm
Fabulous. (But what is “Quorn”? I thought it was an illegal assembly on horseback.)
I remember reading a story in Ms. Magazine advocating this, back when. The parents answered gender queries with “An X.”
Russell Arben Fox 05.27.11 at 12:03 am
“When will we live in a world where people can make choices to be whoever they are?”
I’ll be the one to say it: these people are morons.
eilis 05.27.11 at 12:05 am
Im surprised this has caused such an – ahem – ‘storm’ – I came across a blog about a year ago, while searching for information about Wendy Brown and Judith Butler, written by a lesbian mother who decided not to raise her child as either a boy or a girl. I presumed from it that I was way behind the times, and gender-less-ness was now an accepted way of rearing a child.
But no?
Barry Freed 05.27.11 at 12:27 am
Gender (as socially constructed) is not the issue here; so far they’re raising the child sexless. I mean they won’t even tell the grandparents if their grandchild has a wang dang doodle or a hoo ha.
MPAVictoria 05.27.11 at 12:40 am
“I’ll be the one to say it: these people are morons.”
Seconded. This is child abuse. Isn’t it illegal to conduct science experiments on people without their consent? This would never have gotten past the ethics board at my university.
Daragh McDowell 05.27.11 at 1:18 am
Frankly I’m not so concerned about the attempts to raise the child without a gender – I’m pretty sure that when the two older boys testicles descend and the hormones kick in that little problem will take care of itself. A similar (or exactly the same!) process will do the same for Storm. The atrocious names may require a few extra years of therapy, but hell we all have issues with our parents.
What bugs me is the ‘unschooling’ nonsense, and the whole notion that raising children without even the most half-assed of sloppily enforced boundaries is beneficial to their development going completely unchallenged. Its been as about as thoroughly debunked as psychological theories can be. These people aren’t just crappy parents – they’re lazy ones (probably – I’ll admit I don’t know for certain). Disciplining kids is hard work. Letting them ‘run wild and free’ is easy as chips. Doesn’t make it any less negligent.
Oh and Dsquared and Ajay clearly win the internet for the month of May.
b9n10nt 05.27.11 at 1:49 am
I don’t buy “moronic”. The coherent philosophical presumption would have to be that gender-identity is strongly molded before childhood or latency. I really don’t think that’s true. I really don’t think that, if true, being conventionally gendered is necessarily oppressive or oppressing. But it’s not moronic. And it sure as heck ain’t child abuse (think about the level of psychic determinism you presume, MPAVictoria). Non-schooling doesnt necessarily mean there’s no structure to the day and no behavioral boundaries.
The self-appointed culture police need to chill or save their vapors for the 1001 more conventional ways to be bad parents. Differences are beautiful!
We now return to our regularly scheduled hippie-stomping.
Daragh McDowell 05.27.11 at 2:13 am
@b9n10nt
May I immediately contradict myself and say you’re absolutely right, especially on the hippy stomping (when discussing this with someone else on Facebook the tempation to make snide references to tainted bong-water was almost too strong to resist.)
Let me say as the proud uncle of three very different, and in certain respects differently raised little nephews I’m all for diversity. I’m also the dissident in the family in that I maintain that home-schooling can be beneficial and non-socially isolating (even if I wouldn’t do it to my kids.)
However, I do sense a certain ‘cultural default,’ if you will, in the press that the removal of boundaries and structure (the ‘Hippy’ paradigm for want of a better word) is enlightened and beneficial and the kids will turn out fine in the end, while Tiger Mom is going to forever crush the spirits of her unfortunate brood. Its just not true – I’d give better than even odds that little Storm, Jazz, Kia and whatever other Autobots this family produces will either a) be in Juvie by their 15th birthdays, b) will change their names to Joe, Jack and Bobby and become a dynasty of ultra-conservative Republican congress-critters. Either outcome is clearly the result of just criminally bad parenting.
nick s 05.27.11 at 2:26 am
Bravo to the lyricists.
I was pointed to this story today, and recalled this piece from last month. (If you follow the link, scroll down and look at the black and white photo before reading.)
A century ago, children were initially dressed in non-gendered clothes, following a progression that maps more or less to Kohlberg’s cog-dev theory of gender identity and gender stability.
So while forcibly raising a ‘genderless’ child in this manner is silly, the perceived silliness comes from the contrast with the extreme gendering of infants through clothing in North America, seen when people who encounter sprogs and wish to make smalltalk make a guess of their gender based upon what they’re wearing. In other parts of the world, you’re allowed to ask.
Timothy Scriven 05.27.11 at 2:38 am
Well, for what it’s worth, I agree with their choice. Anything else would be imposing gender on the child.
Although naming a child “storm” is just criminal.
bxg 05.27.11 at 3:10 am
This is not at all new, and surely not fantastically uncommon. (Though the first seriously committed example I personally came across, perhaps 14 years ago, was also in Canada – ?)
What I’d love to read … something that no matter how things turned out could not fail to interesting and educational …. is how these bold child-raising plans have have turned out. There is surely reasonable data on this by now given all the folks trying exactly this plan/”experiment”. Attention journalists: _here_ is an attention-grabbing story that will bring you world-wide fame.
H.P. Loveshack 05.27.11 at 3:36 am
Ah, the blank slate strikes again!
grackle 05.27.11 at 4:05 am
Speaking as a loving grandparent who failed miserably in interesting my own daughter in trucks, cars and construction equipment as a young child, I see no harm in the attempt. Now if only someone can figure out a way to fight off the recent trend in ubiquitous princess equipment…
b9n10nt 05.27.11 at 4:30 am
Daragh McDowell @ 9
We agree that we now have new opportunities to justify lazy parenting as alternative and transcendent.
Side note: remember when we still said “rationalization”. Now we reference “neuroscience” and use terms like “motivated reasoning”.
Tangurena 05.27.11 at 4:54 am
I guess it is time to rewatch all those Pat skits from Saturday Night Live.
Colin Danby 05.27.11 at 5:02 am
There oughta be a law. For example, blog commenters with gender-unspecific pseudonyms: can they at least appear in pink or blue, so we know how to behave toward them?
McSmack 05.27.11 at 5:12 am
How is it that I’ve never heard of Quorn? Experts recommend I eat it. It was discovered growing in a field in 1960. With that space alien name? Did everyone else know about quorn?
b9n10nt 05.27.11 at 6:34 am
@ 17
No thanks. I’d rather screen for projections.
Chris Bertram 05.27.11 at 6:34 am
People are jumping on the “unschooling” stuff, but, from the linked article, the other children are 2 and 5, so they would both be too young to go to a conventional school in some societies, such as Germany. It is also significantly underdescribed in the article (which hasn’t stopped Daragh jumping in an filling the gaps I see). Allowing children to discover through their own curiosity is consistent with arranging the environment so that the right questions come up, a technique advocated by a certain 18th century figure ….
Chris Bertram 05.27.11 at 6:36 am
“When will we live in a world where people can make choices to be whoever they are?â€
Perhaps someone should mail them a copy of _Being and Nothingness_ so they can relax (not that it normally has that effect).
dsquared 05.27.11 at 7:00 am
I’d give better than even odds that little Storm, Jazz, Kia and whatever other Autobots this family produces will either a) be in Juvie by their 15th birthdays, b) will change their names to Joe, Jack and Bobby and become a dynasty of ultra-conservative Republican congress-critters
How much better than even odds are you prepared to give? I might be persuaded into a quite substantial wager that a) a middle-class family will not see the very unusual outcome of having all three of its children put into juvenile custody at a very young age, combined with one b) that three Canadians will not all enter US politics. If I could be bothered to look up whether Ontario even had incarceration for 14-year-olds I might make that into a very substantial wager, but somehow “making even a token effort” seems like a category mistake in context.
Doctor Slack 05.27.11 at 9:55 am
We had a long argument on the Unfogged thread that birthed An [X] Named Storm about “unschooling” or “autonomous learning,” during which some charismatic stallion came along and heroically linked this essay (written by someone more sympathetic to alternative pedagogies than I am). It evaluates three different schools, the first of them called “The School Around Us,” built to hew closely to the views of authors like A.S. Neill and Jon Holt who impelled the “unschooling” trend. We report, you decide.
Thomas Jørgensen 05.27.11 at 10:27 am
There is very strong evidence – Acquired by the simple expedient of videotaping appropriate child/adult interactions (like a kindergarden or creche)- that most people react highly diffrently to identical behavior from even very small children depending on what gender they belive the kid has. In other words, gendered socialization starts before we can even talk, and never lets up. Trying to shortcircut that by not telling is an interesting idea, but I dont think it will work- most people will likely just mentally categorize the spud as one or the other and act accordingly, but you might manage to expose a kid to a mix of socialization pressures from the surrounding world if the guesses are not uniform… but this is not going to be child abuse in any sense of the term, at most the kid fairly likely to wind up a bit of a tomboy or a somewhat effiminate boy. Hardly the end of the world.
Phil 05.27.11 at 11:29 am
most people will likely just mentally categorize the spud as one or the other and act accordingly
Giving three possible outcomes: different people have different gender expectations and assumptions, and it all kind of averages out; or people’s gender expectations and assumptions tilt towards little Neut’s biological sex; or people’s assumptions tilt towards the other one, there being after all only the two possibilities to choose from. (An sf writer wrote somewhere that when she was little she thought the reason why grown-ups were so concerned about keeping their crotches covered up was that everyone had something different – after all, if everyone’s was more or less the same, nobody would have anything to be embarrassed about.) At which point we’ve still got a society that imposes different expectations on boys and girls, plus one little boy who everyone thinks is a girl and whose mother doesn’t correct that impression. That’s the abusive part.
Shay Begorrah 05.27.11 at 11:44 am
Obligatory Tangential Onion Reference.
Montessori School Of Dentistry Lets Students Discover Their Own Root Canal Procedures
If I had been brought up as a birl I might not be so reflexively snide about alternative child rearing methodologies.
Thomas Jørgensen 05.27.11 at 12:34 pm
Eh.. Given the specific nature of the diffrences in the way adults interact with female and male children, if the world is consistently mistaken, that isnt going to do any harm, it will merely tend to produce a quiet and highly socialized boy or a somewhat rambunctious girl. Its not like adults are handing out “guides to how to be a proper man/woman” from age 3. It is a bit subtler than that, with boys being encouraged to be physically active and “not be a baby” and so on, and girls getting told more often to quiet down and be nice, ect. Either socilization pattern is well within the range of childrearing practices across cultures for either gender. The middle case, where diffrent people apply diffrent socialization pressures is actually the only one that might be problematic, as the most likely result is either a very confused child or a highly adept social chameleon.
Phil 05.27.11 at 1:15 pm
if the world is consistently mistaken, that isnt going to do any harm
If the world consistently applies the ‘wrong’ set of vague unreasoned preferences, who cares – there’s not necessarily anything ‘right’ about the ‘right’ set. The trouble with these people is that they’re buying that outcome by creating a situation where the adults around a little girl can consistently refer to her as ‘he’, ‘him’, ‘your little boy’ etc, without being corrected by her parents – and that, I think, could be seriously harmful. In power terms they’re in a highly asymmetric relationship with their children, and I think they’re abusing it by taking this experimental approach – it’s not as if they’re going out into the world shorn of all gender labelling themselves.
Norwegian Guy 05.27.11 at 1:34 pm
“People are jumping on the “unschooling†stuff, but, from the linked article, the other children are 2 and 5”
I’ll note from the article that the elder boy has already started school. Moreover, the father of these kids is himself a teacher, so I would be surprised if they don’t all start at some school when they get old enough.
“plus one little boy who everyone thinks is a girl and whose mother doesn’t correct that impression. That’s the abusive part.”
But that won’t be the case for long. By the time the kid starts to interact with people outside the family, he/she will have learned to speak, and can then tell everyone whether he/she is a boy or a girl.
Phil 05.27.11 at 1:59 pm
By the time the kid starts to interact with people outside the family, he/she will have learned to speak, and can then tell everyone whether he/she is a boy or a girl.
Good thing parents can’t f*** with their kids’ heads in the first three years of life, eh readers?
Alex 05.27.11 at 2:05 pm
I’d take the bet that this won’t turn out any better than any other experiment with childrens’ gender identities, with the caveat that as this one doesn’t involve surgery or drugs there are limits to how bad the worst-case scenario can be. At its own scale, however, I doubt anything good will come of it.
Norwegian Guy 05.27.11 at 2:06 pm
“Good thing parents can’t f*** with their kids’ heads in the first three years of life, eh readers?”
My intended meaning was: Good thing parents can f*** less with their kids’ heads after the first three years of life.
Alex 05.27.11 at 2:07 pm
Also, there was a time when I regularly worked with people who were home-schooled and a lot of them were really unpleasant, but then this was probably selection-bias at work as they were drawn from the rightwing gun nut pool rather than the super-Montessori/hippy/anarchist pool.
Matt McIrvin 05.27.11 at 2:28 pm
Depends on the kid. If we didn’t make an effort to lay down the law for ours, she’d take over and we’d be under the rule of an arbitrary tyrant. I think she wants to direct.
JP Stormcrow 05.27.11 at 2:29 pm
Obligatory Tangential Onion Reference.
Obligatory Utterly On Target Onion Reference, “Progressive Parents Refuse To Tell Child Its Sex”
Andrew Edwards 05.27.11 at 2:37 pm
A) Look, obviously they are nutty hippies.
B) I don’t see why this is particuarly anyone’s business. They seem to feed and clothe and love and shelter their kids. Given that they are probably above-median parents, net-net, and per d-squared, I’ll bet dollars to donuts that Storm ends up with a university degree.
C) The strength of the reaction to this as compared to the like million other ways to be a bad parent suggests the strength of social norms and taboos on gender.
Phil 05.27.11 at 2:39 pm
My point was that the first three years are when the really awesome, cosmic levels of headf***age are possible. If parents are doing weird things to a <3-year-old's mind, saying "he'll soon be able to tell his own side of the story" isn't much better than saying "he'll soon be able to earn a living".
Phil 05.27.11 at 2:40 pm
as compared to the like million other ways to be a bad parent
Show working, with particular reference to comparative length of CT comments threads on all those other ways to be a bad parent.
Matt McIrvin 05.27.11 at 2:44 pm
…Anyway, about gender socialization, I figure 99% of old warnings about the danger of “gender confusion” are really just expressions of discredited theories about how not to make your kid turn gay, and I say the hell with it.
But bending over backwards to shelter your kid from any sort of socialization that the kid is otherwise going to get from the general culture is probably asking for trouble, whether or not you agree with it. My attitude with these things has always been that I’m not going to try to minimize exposure but I am going to try to inculcate critical attitudes where I can; it’s OK for her to learn from somebody else that girls are like X and boys are like Y, but she’s also going to hear from me when I think that’s nonsense. Probably because that’s how I was raised.
dsquared 05.27.11 at 2:53 pm
On the one hand, this reminds me very much of those older-fashioned-er cases when one parent or another had simply “wanted a girl/boy” and tried to fight history through child-rearing. On the other hand, cases like this are the precise reason why the phrase “whatever, I should care” is hanging around in the English language.
ajay 05.27.11 at 2:54 pm
31: yeah, thanks for that Alex, I’d successfully avoided remembering “The Wasp Factory” right up to that point.
Matt McIrvin 05.27.11 at 2:54 pm
…Of course, my previous post is itself something of an expression of privilege; the larger culture my kid is getting isn’t one that’s terribly likely to drive her to an early death.
Phil 05.27.11 at 3:22 pm
It’s ultimately a case of utopianism vs political change, I think. I mean, what are we trying to bring about – a world full of people whose biological sex is their own business and whose gender is freely-chosen and indeterminate, or a world full of people who have a known sex identity and a gender to match, but who don’t give a damn about gender roles? The second is a world a bit like ours, which is achievable through political change; the first is an utterly transformed world, which is only achievable one Storm at a time.
Substance McGravitas 05.27.11 at 3:34 pm
Storm made me think of the revival of Hebrew. I think Storm may have an easier time of it. Except for that stupid name.
tomslee 05.27.11 at 5:30 pm
I’m with nick s way back at #10. I see no way in which this family’s decision is any more mockable or potentially destructive than the whole pink/blue crap that so many kids are put through — starting before birth with the ceremonial Painting of the Nursery once the sprog’s equipment has been identified — and which has now bizarrely attained the status of “natural” in many places.
There are several references in the comments to this as an “experiment” but the only thing that makes it more of an experiment than “here, let’s drown you in pink and Barbies/blue and race cars” is that it is less common.
Phil 05.27.11 at 5:42 pm
That, and the fact that everyone the kids are ever going to meet outside their immediate family is still living in a world of boys and girls. I’ve got a son who’s into musicals and a daughter who thinks skirts are weird and freaky; I am absolutely 100% behind any attempt to challenge the gender stereotypes that warp and restrict actually-existing boys and girls. But the actual existence of boys and girls is non-negotiable for me, as (I strongly suspect) it is for the boys and girls themselves.
Phil 05.27.11 at 5:43 pm
“warp and restrict the life-chances of”, that should have been.
JP Stormcrow 05.27.11 at 5:48 pm
The only thing I am tempted to be overly judgmental about is whatever role the parents had in bringing about the publicity. Aspect X of the way I am raising my child(ren) is flogged far and wide seems to be the questionable “experiment” and in general independent of the details of X. I am reminded of a case that I recall as being somewhat well-known back in the day (but not coming up with the appropriate search terms to find any information on–I seem to recall New York City in the ’40s or ’50s) when a father held a press conference at the birth of his daughter to announce that she was going to be a “genius”. The choice to hold a press conference was the telling part rather than anything else in how he intended to bring that about.
sbk 05.27.11 at 6:45 pm
It’s true that the fantasy assumes that you can somehow separate gender relations from every other power relation out there, or the development of gender from every other stage and process of development. Ironically, they’re giving this kid less room to play and experiment with gender than most kids get: the kid gets a special new rigid gender role, which is “uncertainty” and “being put in awkward conversations with adults and other kids” and “being discouraged from telling people what s/he ‘really’ is.” This sucks about as much as being a boy-gendered or a girl-gendered kid, but rejecting it isn’t very straightforward, and may well be discouraged by the parents. That’s the ridiculous part, as I see it— that and the fact that s/he becomes a huge, sucking magnet for everyone’s anxieties about gender, almost a scapegoat, which is certainly where I would draw the line as a parent (even if I thought the experiment was a good idea for other reasons, and I don’t). At least if the kid gets to figure out an existing gender role that has been diversified and questioned by zillions of other people, he or she has a lot more autonomy— and a lot more processing power left over to devote to all the other difficult stuff kids need to figure out…
adam@nope.com 05.27.11 at 6:52 pm
To what extent do practical considerations make the parent’s actions morally problematic?
The parent’s approach is experimental – and most experiments fail, particularly when they involve radical departures from existing models. The rigidity and utopianism of the parent’s professed beliefs does not bode well. They have basically taken it upon themselves to derive, implement, and teach an entire novel social system. I doubt they are up to that challenge.
Unfortunately, the consequences of this experiment will be bourne by the children, who never had the opportunity to consent.
rfriel 05.27.11 at 6:59 pm
The connection is pretty weak and tangential, but still, all I could think of was this.
Salient 05.27.11 at 7:54 pm
Ajay (ajay?) and d^2^ will surely squirrel the Internet they deservedly won for that away somewhere along with all their other won ‘nets over the years.
But the comments here are confusing me. “Not telling other people your newborn baby’s gender” is so different from “forbidding your talking-age child from knowing his or her gender or revealing his or her gender to people” that I can’t even process what some of the rest of you are saying. Here’s what Storm’s parent said:
We thought that if we delayed sharing that information, in this case hopefully, we might knock off a couple million of those [gender-role] messages by the time that Storm decides Storm would like to share,†says Witterick. [brackets my addition for clarity, and bold my added emphasis, which I guess is obvious because people can’t speak in boldface]
So. Uh. It’s reasonable to assume that [a] Storm will know Storm’s own gender pretty much as soon as Storm is old enough to know the words for he and she, and [b] Storm will be free to tell whoever Storm wants, or to just smirk and say, “heh, wouldn’t you like to know.”
I mean, really? adam? sbk? MPAVictoria? Phil? Matt? How is not telling people your newborn baby’s gender until your baby’s old enough to speak more destructive than, say, not telling people the presumed gender of a foetus, which people do all the damn time without anyone caring? THE BABY HAS EXITED THE WOMB, ITS SEX PARTS MUST NOW BE KNOWN TO US. …really? why?
Come to think of it, I’d bet something approaching fifty percent of people who know me by the nickname everyone uses for me offline and online (Salient, originally to tease me for my tendency to overuse the phrase “the salient point here is” x) and possibly even by picture (god there have been mistakes before, especially with my old haircut) don’t even know my biological sex, and I’d bet of the CT commenters who I recognize by pseudonym, I don’t have any clue what sex at least half of ’em are. It’s never seemed to cause any problems, and perhaps reduces the amount of effrontery or harassment online, or perhaps is irrelevant, or perhaps we’re all desperately suffering from the not-knowing. (In which case how could we survive the Internet?) I never did care much, and decided to make an effort to stop caring completely right around the time I read An Image of Africa and misguessed Chinua Achebe’s sex. (Which is a little more understandable than misguessing Kieran’s. I think.)
Naming your kid Storm, though, now that is not just mere child abuse, it’s obviously reckless endangerment of your whole community and possibly the world. Last kid that suffered through that name had their hair go white at an early age and started chucking lightning bolts and summoning hurricane-strength wind when upset. Did these parents learn nothing from X-Men?
Matt McIrvin 05.27.11 at 10:11 pm
Eh, now that I read the actual article it sounds to me like they’re mostly just tweaking their friends and relatives. Carry on.
Phil 05.27.11 at 10:16 pm
I mean, really? adam? sbk? MPAVictoria? Phil? Matt?
Salient – I’m tempted to repeat the arguments I made at #25, #28 and #37 (which you haven’t addressed), but I’ll resist.
Tim May 05.28.11 at 12:23 am
Phil @ #28
The trouble with these people is that they’re buying that outcome by creating a situation where the adults around a little girl can consistently refer to her as ‘he’, ‘him’, ‘your little boy’ etc, without being corrected by her parents – and that, I think, could be seriously harmful.
But why do you think this? What do you imagine is going to happen?
tomslee 05.28.11 at 1:07 am
Show working, with particular reference to comparative length of CT comments threads on all those other ways to be a bad parent.
I can’t think of another thread on parenting, which I guess is the point. A quick google shows a few posts from 2004-2006 and that’s it.
Phil 05.28.11 at 9:34 am
My point (and it’s not a very interesting or important one) is that we can’t say that there wouldn’t have been a medium-sized pile-on if Kieran had posted a link to advocacy of some other non-optimal form of parenting.
tomslee 05.29.11 at 12:34 pm
There is a response from Kathy Witterick (the mother) about the fuss here. She comes across as a new ager (‘Jazz was listening to “Free to Be You and Me”‘), but no more deserving of mockery than any other parent trying to find a child-raising path that makes sense. And she explicitly repudiates the “experiment” label.
A few excerpts and some comments to which they seem relevant:
@JP Stormcrow #48: Aspect X of the way I am raising my child(ren) is flogged far and wide seems to be the questionable “experiment†and in general independent of the details of X.
Kathy Witterick writes: “And to protect our children from the frenzy that we did not anticipate, we have declined over 100 requests for interviews from all over the world, including all-expenses paid trips to New York City to tell our story on American morning television.”
@Barry Freed #5: Gender (as socially constructed) is not the issue here; so far they’re raising the child sexless.
KW writes: “None of my family members are gender-free or genderless.”
@Russell Arben Fox #3: I’ll be the one to say it: these people are morons.”, seconded by MPAVictoria at #5.
KW: “The psychologist on the Today Show was willing to make strong, unqualified conclusions about a family he had never met.” Not the only one, apparently.
The final paragraph is “Storm has a sex which those close to him/her know and acknowledge. We don’t know yet about colour preferences or dress inclinations, but the idea that the whole world must know our baby’s sex strikes me as unhealthy and voyeuristic. This is what I know — someday soon, Storm will have something to say about it and in the meantime, I’m just listening carefully.”
Much less moronic than comments #3 and #6, if you ask me.
Daragh McDowell 06.02.11 at 10:20 am
@Chris Bertram – Of course I’m ‘filling in the gaps.’ As are you, and indeed everyone else on this comment thread. Its difficult to get a holistic understanding of someone’s parenting strategy from a ca. 1,000 word article. These people may be truly horrible parents, or they could be great ones.I’m fully prepared to accept this ‘unschooling’ may indeed be beneficial, but I was referring more generally to the trend in parenting to see the removal of boundaries as ‘beneficial’ (which I believe this article did) while condeming Tiger Mom from the very start. Care to hold off the pre-emptive sneering for once?
@dsquared – as a former resident of Canada myself, born and raised in the plains of Alberta, you’d be surprised how many conservatives head south to start their political careers in the belief that the Tories are wusses. I also felt that the term ‘Republican congress-critter’ might be more resonant for most CT readers than ‘Tory parliamentarian’ and was aiming more for imparting understanding than terminological accuracy. But replace whatever words you like. And yes – it is indeed rare for children from middle-class homes to end up as juvenile delinquents. That might be related to the fact that most middle-class homes go for, in the absence of a less loaded term, ‘traditional’ parenting techniques stressing boundaries and discipline rather than ‘benign’ neglect.
Phil 06.02.11 at 12:24 pm
the idea that the whole world must know our baby’s sex strikes me as unhealthy and voyeuristic
The assumption that the world in general needs to know anything at all about Kathy Witterick’s child or children, including whether she has any, strikes me as unhealthy and exhibitionistic.
Tim – what I imagine is going to happen is that an infant is going to get mixed messages from his/her parents about something fundamental to his/her sense of self. If those messages start coming in before the child has the self-awareness and the language ability to correct them, so much the worse.
When my son was three he ‘shot’ me with his p’shoo-stick* and went to tell my wife about it in great excitement – “I’m a man! And you’re a lady! And Daddy’s dead!” Nobody had told him about Oedipus, his mind had just started developing the way little boys’ minds do. That doesn’t mean their parents should call them brave little soldiers and dress them in camo, as indeed we didn’t (my son chose his clothes from quite an early age, and wore mostly red for as long as he could manage it). But there’s a difference between actively challenging the role expectations of a gender-identified child and trying to suspend that identification altogether.
* We didn’t have guns in the house; for that matter, he didn’t think he was playing with guns, he thought he was pointing his p’shoo-stick.
Tim May 06.02.11 at 7:14 pm
But “get mixed messages from his/her parents about something fundamental to his/her sense of self” is still extremely vague – I don’t have any more idea why you think this is going to be “seriously harmful” than I did before. Your little anecdote if anything suggests that parents don’t have much influence over their children’s identification with gender roles – which would seem to support the view that this is not that big a deal.
ScentOfViolets 06.02.11 at 8:03 pm
Not to go off on a tangent here and not to say that these people are letting their kids ‘run wild and free’, but: If you’re looking to point fingers, it’s precisely these sorts of parents who are too lazy (or just plain averse) to discipline their children that are the primary cause of poor school performance. If I had a nickel for every time I heard a parent excuse their kids lackadaisical attitude towards studying and homework by saying “you can’t shackle a free spirit” or some such nonsense . . .
Don’t get me started :-)
ScentOfViolets 06.02.11 at 8:05 pm
You mean boundaries concerning studying and doing homework, for example ;-)
Phil 06.02.11 at 9:47 pm
“get mixed messages from his/her parents about something fundamental to his/her sense of self†is still extremely vague
It seems fairly specific to me. I’m talking about the consistency and reliability of the world in which the extremely fluid process of infant development takes place, and the parents’ work as guarantor of that. “You are a boy/girl” strikes me as pretty basic stuff, and not stuff that it’s appropriate for parents to mess around with.
Your little anecdote if anything suggests that parents don’t have much influence over their children’s identification with gender roles
You’re conflating gender roles (what’s appropriate to a boy/girl) with gender identity (being recognised as a boy/girl).
Salient 06.02.11 at 11:06 pm
The assumption that the world in general needs to know anything at all about Kathy Witterick’s child or children, including whether she has any, strikes me as unhealthy and exhibitionist.
Dude, you mean voyeuristic, unless you’re being a supreme fucking asshole to Kathy Witterick, who had a few pissy relatives calculatedly drop this yes-pun-intended ‘media storm’ on her unanticipatory ass in response to a completely reasonable announcement email to them. (They ‘released’ the email to the press, which strikes me as unconscionably assholish.) KW herself refused most interviews and IMO did the bare minimum to get everybody to go shut up and go away and stop harassing her, which is the opposite of ‘exhibitionist.’ And if you think it’s exhibitionist to announce the birth of one’s child to one’s friends and relatives via Facebook and email, then… never mind, there’s just no way you think that. It’s a completely normal thing to announce.
“You are a boy/girl†strikes me as pretty basic stuff, and not stuff that it’s appropriate for parents to mess around with.
…but …but she said explicitly that Storm / Storm’s brothers / a few others know Storm’s sex. They’re just not announcing it to the rest of the world.
Are you suggesting baby Storm will be checking her/his email and discover ambiguously gender-referential messages from Second Aunt Samantha and get confused? Or that baby Storm will be irrevocably scarred because strangers on the street say “aww, what a cute baby” instead of “aww, what a cute girl/boy?” Or… what?
When my son was three he ‘shot’ me with his p’shoo-stick* and went to tell my wife about it in great excitement – “I’m a man! And you’re a lady! And Daddy’s dead!â€
I didn’t exactly follow what this has to do with… anything. It seems… on the one hand not worrisome or bothersome, but on the other hand really weird and curious… like pretty much every other thing I’ve ever heard a three year old say. But as a side note, I feel like for that story to even make sense the kid has to basically know what a gun is and that it shoots things and that shooting people kills them, so your disclaimer doesn’t make sense to me (not that any of it is any of my business).
Phil 06.03.11 at 4:50 pm
They ‘released’ the email to the press,
OK, I missed that part.
Are you suggesting baby Storm will be checking her/his email
No, I was referring back to another commenter’s reporting of how these people raise little Jazz and little Kio – specifically that lots of people assume they’re girls, and they, the parents, don’t correct them. This strikes me as a serious head-f***.
I didn’t exactly follow what this has to do with… anything.
Begins with Fr, rhymes with ‘void’. Being an infant is a weird scary place to be at the best of times; “maybe you’re a boy and maybe you’re a girl, who knows?” doesn’t seem like a good framework to set.
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