Parenting: Is biology winning out in child gender debate?

IT USED to be so simple, didn’t it? Pink for a girl, blue for a boy. And maybe yellow if you weren’t entirely sure. Then the issue became a political hot potato and suddenly gender was a bit more of a grey area.

Why not, you might ask. In a supposedly equal world, there is no reason why we should still conform to outdated gender stereotypes. And so, at the extreme end of the spectrum, you have the Cambridgeshire couple who, for five years, raised their child as ‘gender neutral’. Beck Laxton and Kieran Cooper allowed Sasha to alternate between girls’ and boys’ clothing and play with both dolls and trucks, referring to the child not as he or she but as “the infant”.

“Stereotypes seem fundamentally stupid,” said Laxton at the time. “Why would you want to slot people into boxes? Gender affects what children wear and what they can play with, and that shapes the kind of person they become. I start to get cross with it if it skews their potential.”

Once school came into the picture, however, the ambiguity became more difficult to maintain, and the couple eventually revealed last month that Sasha is, in fact, a boy. They admitted they had been labelled “loonies” by fellow parents, but they’re not alone in fearing the harm gender stereotyping can do.

Edinburgh primary schools, for example, are considering a plan to end the tradition of boys and girls lining up separately outside class and competing separately at sports days in a bid to tackle bullying and what they call ‘gender issues’. And there is a growing movement in the US to end the “segregation” of aisles in toy shops, urging parents to vote with their Post-Its by writing slogans such as: “Your girl needs Joe too,” on a GI Joe toy, and: “What about dads?” on the baby dolls.

Hamleys in London has already begun the revolution by removing the sexist labelling for its toys and arranging them instead by type, such as arts and crafts, dress-up and dolls, without specifying whether they are for one gender or another.

Ah, but we can fight it all we like, says chartered psychologist Dr Jack Boyle, a member of the British Psychological Society who specialises in work with children and adolescents, but this is one battle we can never win. “How we turn out in life doesn’t depend as much on parenting as people think it does,” he insists.

“It depends on your genetic inheritance, your nervous system, the opportunities in life, the people you meet, the area you’re brought up in ... parenting comes only fifth or sixth in the list of importance. The exception would be abusive parenting,” he adds, “but let’s say parenting is what we call ‘good enough’, then lots of other factors are important.”

As an illustration, he points to parents who have two or three children. “Often they’re entirely different despite the fact they had, by and large, the same kind of parenting.”

But don’t all parents, albeit subconsciously, treat boys and girls differently? “Of course we do,” he says, almost incredulous that I might ask. “That’s because they are different.”

Even if a parent consciously gives a male child a doll to play with instead of cars or a make-up set instead of a chemistry set, Dr Boyle claims it will make very little difference in the long term. “The boy will reject that because he’ll know his pals don’t play with dolls. Children identify with children of the same gender very early on,” he explains, “probably as early as pre-school age, and that is set much more firmly by the time they start primary school. The boys talk to the boys and the girls talk to the girls. Boys play different games, more aggressive or forceful games.

“If ever there was a proverb that’s true, it’s birds of a feather flock together. We are comfortable, by and large, with people who are like us. We feel safe in their company, we anticipate the responses of these people, we anticipate empathy.”

And, since external influences have more to do with gender identity than parenting, the only way to change these preconceived roles is to remove those external influences all together. “Boys are genetically attracted to different pursuits to girls. It doesn't matter how you try and change that, the child will resist it,” says Dr Boyle.

“Only if you go and move into a community of like-minded people, stuck in the middle of the Canadian prairies and you’re cut off from contact with people with opposing views, then your own views can be sustained. But that is very difficult to do.”