The idea of gender-neutral parenting is slowly gaining popularity and it is definitely a ‘global’ trend. The Global Early Adolescent Study analysed how gender is learned, enforced, and reinforced among early adolescents across 15 countries. The study found that young girls and boys are impacted with socially constructed, gender stereotypes from an early age, resulting in lifelong consequences.
In Sweden the government introduced a new amendment in 1998 aiming for more gender equality in the Education Act. They require all schools to work against gender stereotyping. Some of these changes include teachers selecting stories with more non-traditional plots (i.e. not the typical beautiful princess being saved by the heroic prince) to ensure that they’re not reinforcing any gender stereotypes.
“We prefer the kids to make their own choices of what toys/games to play with – there are no gender rules here,” said parent Tash Carmody. We encourage genderless play and let them discover who they are, who they enjoy playing with and what they like doing. We try to minimize any conscious/unconscious impact that our cultural gender biases may have, for instance that girls are ‘weaker’ or ‘more creative’ or, that boys are ‘smarter’, more ‘boisterous’ or ‘practical’.
“Here we chose to do this without a huge emphasis on changing our pronouns,” she said. ‘He’ and ‘she’ is simply their birth sex pronoun. It’s all the connotations that society place on ‘he’ and ‘she’ that really need to change, rather than the words. ‘They’ becomes confusing for small children, and we generally just use their names.”
From celebrities like 'Adel' to business leaders such as 'Elon Musk', parents are becoming conscious of placing constraints on their children from birth. More parents are making changes, even if it is just buying a more diverse range of toys for their child. Our world is evolving, gender is slowly diluting, and I am sure our children will be much happier for it.
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