Does the gender of your child make your parenting experience harder or easier? More fun and exciting? More rewarding and meaningful? To be honest, the only experiences I can speak to are my own.
My male-born toddler is more rough-and-tumble and enjoys testing boundaries. My school-aged child who is self-identified as female likes talking back and emotionally manipulating me.
Are those behaviours due to their gender? No. I don’t pat myself on the back just because I have a son. And my husband doesn’t flaunt his participation in "girly" activities.
Watch: The horoscopes as new parents. Post continues below.
As a millennial who grew up with internet culture and saw the rise and fall of various social media trends, here’s why we need to stop using #boymum and #girldad.
It’s the wrong way to confront gender stereotypes.
As humans, we instinctively desire a sense of belonging. Whether it’s using hashtags, hosting a gender reveal party, doing personality quizzes or reading our horoscopes, we like categorising our experiences so that we feel we are part of something bigger than ourselves.
But the problem with categorising a child based on their anatomy is that it creates harmful expectations for how they should or should not behave.
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