Just a mother and her baby.
Someone wrote…
A friend of mine told me that he knows a woman, and when her baby was born, she told the doctors not to tell her their gender so she could spend the first moments of their life as just a mother and her baby, not a mother and her son or daughter. She felt it was more important to bond with her child as a person than as a “boy” or “girl.”
What’s your experience?
Posted by julian on May 25th, 2010 at 08:00 am
Category: your voice 16 comments »
May 25th, 2010 at 9:36 am |
I hope to always treat my future children this way. The pressure of gender is so unnecessary.
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May 25th, 2010 at 11:29 am |
That’s amazing. Kudos to that woman.
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May 25th, 2010 at 12:54 pm |
heartwarming
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May 25th, 2010 at 1:45 pm |
Thats beautiful, my mom didn’t know what I was [my dad knew but wouldnt say] but my grandma kept saying because I was so big she carried me like a boy? I surprised everyone, when they say may your first child be a masculine child, I wasn’t what they had in mind.
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May 25th, 2010 at 3:01 pm |
It’s kind of hard to change the diaper of an infant without noticing their physical gender.
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May 25th, 2010 at 3:19 pm |
My grandparents were disappointed that my mother and father had three girl children. The first one was OK. The second one disappointed them. When the third was a girl, they kinda gave up. When their fourth child was born a boy, they were so relieved – someone to carry on the family name…
Dear grandchild, my gift to you is a whole lot of baggage that made me miserable my whole life and so I want you to have it.
Kudos on the apocryphal mother and her child.
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May 25th, 2010 at 3:27 pm |
“It’s kind of hard to change the diaper of an infant without noticing their physical gender.”
I think she meant the literal first few moments of the child’s life, right after it came out of her. Not, like, the first month. That’d be silly.
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May 25th, 2010 at 3:31 pm |
Sounds like something rich people would strive to do – leave all the messy details of the nether regions to a nurse. It would be an interesting psychological experiment if you could have a child raised for the first three years of their life by parents who had no idea what the child’s gender was.
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May 25th, 2010 at 6:15 pm |
It’s hard to raise children gender-neutrally without ‘pushing your non-gender agenda onto a helpless child’.
This usually said by people who push binary-gender agendas onto helpless children.
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May 25th, 2010 at 8:42 pm |
Awesome story, just made me think of this comic:
http://www.asofterworld.com/index.php?id=29
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May 26th, 2010 at 3:02 am |
“It’s kind of hard to change the diaper of an infant without noticing their physical gender.”
Yeah, but this was a story about seconds after birth, at which point it’s perfectly possibly to not know what kind of genitals the baby has. Especially
[encyclopedia mode]
since many male infants are born with their genitals tucked inside them. Gravity only makes the genitals visible a few days later and during the first days of life it may take a doctor’s eye to recognise the boy as physically male.
[/encyclopedia mode]
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May 26th, 2010 at 5:09 am |
That’s precious
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May 26th, 2010 at 5:46 pm |
I want to shake that woman’s hand.
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May 28th, 2010 at 7:49 pm |
I think I read about a couple in Holland or Germany or something around that area who are raising their kid without gender, whatsoever, until the child decides what, if any, gender ze will be. They’re not telling friends or relatives what sex ze is. Loads of people are slagging them off, but I think it’s great. I think a lot of us would have gone through much less ‘but I have a vagina/a penis so I must be a woman/man and wear pink/blue!’ type feelings if we’d been raised that way.
Gender neutral child raising FTW!
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May 28th, 2010 at 10:17 pm |
Just a reminder – physical sex and gender = 2 different things. How would the doctor know what gender the kid is? The doctor will only be able to report on physical sex.
Also, the kid’s name from the comment in 14 is Pop and is from Sweden.
http://www.thelocal.se/20232/20090623/
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May 29th, 2010 at 12:09 pm |
Thanks for that B-Rae. I stumble-upon’d the story and I forgot to bookmark it. I was pretty far off with location though :P
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