Well, you two are lucky enough for arrest to come up as the primary concern.
Some of us less fortunate people have to worry about losing bits to frostbite.

Un-schooling works quite well in the early grades. When you think about it, early reading skills, early math, etc. can all be learned through normal daily activities. Everything doesn't have to be "taught" in structured school to be learned. As kids get older it does get harder.

I was home schooled through 4th grade & my brother through 6th grade, with a lot of it being closer to un-schooling - we had a maximum of two hours/day of "school", taught by our mom. [The nearest school was a two-hour drive away.] When we started public school, we really had no problems. I'm much more of an introvert than my brother, which I think has more to do with inherent personality than being home schooled, as he was home schooled two years longer than I was so if that was the "cause" then he should be more introverted. Neither of us ever had any academic problems.

As for the name, we also both have very unusual names, not because our parents were "trying to make us unique", but because those were the names they liked.

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"[English] not only borrows words from other languages; it has on occasion chased other languages down dark alley-ways, clubbed them unconscious and rifled their pockets for new vocabulary."
-James Nicoll, can.general, March 21, 1992

For the record:
source.

I think keeping the gender a secret just makes for a lot of unnecessary confusion until it is revealed one way or another.

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raising a boy as a boy and raising a girl as a girl has been done since forever so there might be some good in it.. seriously though i think that this is just unfair! i feel bad for the baby..

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oh please do click this!
The sweeter the apple, the higher the branch. The quieter the fart, the nastier the smell.
GUESS WHO??

Those parents have issues...I mean I understand you wanting to raise your kids to be unconfined by society's standards, and that's one thing, you can let your boys play with dolls and wear pink, if little girls can play w/ cars and wear blue, then little boys should be able to wear pink, but pretending the kid is genderless is well...uh...cruel...besides hasn't it been proven that regardless, you kinda know your gender from a young age?
Isn't there that story of that boy that had a botched circumsition and a "doctor" convinced the parents to give him a sex change operation and raise him as a girl named "Brenda" but "Brenda" never adapted to being a "girl" (because she really wasn't supposed to be one)? I mean he was little, it's not like it happened when he was old enough to know what boys and girls are supposed to look like, so I think there thought process of "We don't want people to put gender labels on it" is kinda dumb...(and I hate using the word "it" to describe someone, but English doesn't really have gender-neutral verbs/adverbs/nouns)
All in all there's a plethora of issues here, from the kid possibly being gender-confused to being an insufferable brat, to an arrogant jerk later on in life because "it doesn't need to conform to society's standards"
I'm all for expressing yourself, but I think this is pushing it a little too far since it's not their lives they are playing with, but their child's life.

i agree with tofu queen a little home school never hurt anyone.... not any more than public school......(shudder) another day another topic....

i think i can see why they didn't want to talk about the gender because alot of people automatically plan out what type of activities they will encourage the child to do (based on the gender),
Examples of the cliches that come out once the gender is discovered:
"oh it's a boy! cant wait to see him on the foot ball team!"
"oh it's a girl she's going to be a looker!"

it can get really shallow, its like expecting someone to do certain things BECAUSE of their out ward appearance even thought they might be different inwardly! (stereotyping)
by not mentioning the gender, ppl really just have to look at the baby as a human being and watch how it will turn out

That's wrong, actually. My mother has run across someone online who 'unschools.' As far as I can tell those particular parents are just having a knee-jerk reaction to the term schooling. (associating it with a jelly-mold kind of system) What is actually done is the parent teaches in a rather spontainious manner - no planning, just keeping your eyes open so you can turn anything into a history lesson that that the child will enjoy kind of thing.

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Atashi wa Hana Bara.

While I do not believe in gender roles, I think the child at least needs to know that most other people in the society think differently. If the child is born with ambiguous sex, then it can't be helped. But since the child was not, I'm more questioning whether the parents can really raise the child genderless, since language & culture (at least the Western one) apparently demand otherwise. Lastly, I wonder if the child would "decide" what gender to be in adulthood, because, I think that if you raise a child perfectly genderless, it won't have the idea of gender as the society knows it today, hence it won't be able to choose a gender from the binary system. Certainly, the child would have a sexual identity because that's biological, but probably won't see why our society have certain traits and roles assigned to specific genders.

thats still unfair,what if ,for example, the parent sucks at math? school provides complete education since each teacher is specialized in a certain subject

/facepalm.

Ok, so girls and boys should be able to act however they want, if their male children want to put on dresses or whatever, that's fine.

But, denying that the kid has a gender? It boggles the mind. The kid has a penis or doesn't. Sure, there are cases where someone is actually sexless, but this ISN'T one of those.

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"It is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science."

I'll post a more sensible answer when I'm done laughing, and my stomanch stops hurting.

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There are times when you will miss what you never had. I wonder how you will find what you so desperately need.

I have mixed feelings on this one.

On one side, it's pretty silly to totally deny gender, because (except in rare cases) it's a basic fact and research has shown over and over that males & females are just different from each other, from birth and even before.

On the other side, I'm absolutely against pushing kids into any pre-set gender roles.

I have three boys, and I never tried to "hide" that they are boys, from themselves or anyone else. At the same time, I've tried to let them choose what they want to do, wear, etc. regardless of whether it's traditionally male or female. There have definitely been times when I've told them, "I'm totally fine with that, but if you wear it to school you might get teased about it" and then left it up to them. ALL three of them have gravitated to traditionally "boy" things ~90% of the time, from a very early age - other kids of course may be different. I never EVER felt pushed towards "traditionally female" pursuits, and yet that's where most of my interests lie.

At my sons' preschools, there has always been a definite difference between what the boys generally choose to play and what the girls generally choose to play. Granted, by preschool age there's been a fair amount of conditioning, but even though all kids are encouraged to participate in whatever activities they want to -- the boys will play house for a little while and then go back to running around, while the girls will run around for a little while and then go back to playing house (broad generalization & of course there are exceptions, but you get the idea).

As for un-schooling and home schooling, they can work very very well in the younger grades but as kids get older, they're less effective unless the parent doing the teaching is great at all subjects or has some other resource person for the areas they're weak in. I remember my mom having some trouble with teaching my brother social studies when he was being home schooled in 6th grade; I think she was missing some of the teacher's manuals or something and the questions were weird so she wasn't quite sure what was being asked. (We used textbooks etc. from the closest public schools.)

As for public schools....I enjoyed 5th grade, and I guess 12th grade wasn't so bad. In between, though, even though the schools weren't "bad" and (most of) the teachers weren't awful, I would rather have been almost anywhere else in the world. (College was great, though.)

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"[English] not only borrows words from other languages; it has on occasion chased other languages down dark alley-ways, clubbed them unconscious and rifled their pockets for new vocabulary."
-James Nicoll, can.general, March 21, 1992

Gender in the strictest terms is just to define the biological difference. Of course there are cases that you can't just define "male" or "female" but this is obviously not one of those cases.

Now this idea of trying to give your kids true freedom to choose gender is noble. I guess the so called "theory" behind this method is that you'd let a child explore on it's own and let them gravitate to whatever interests them. This is all done of course without having any "male" or "female" tags over them so they can naturally choose what type of person they want to become. Normal children, raised under a gender, will in general, assume societal and environmental influences on what constitutes to male and female behaviour and interests.

Since there is no ambiguity over the gender, the issue is when this genderless child chooses the opposite from his/her actual gender (feminine male or masculine female). In the early ages this is especially crucial for socializing with other children/people. Other children might be too young to understand this gender issue and easily (out of lack of understanding and maturity) bully a boy wearing a dress.

What this boils down to is how well the parents can 'hide' their child's gender until they actually decide what they want to be like. Because (for example) if others know it is a boy in a dress (as opposed to girl wearing a dress), that might have made their child's life that much more difficult to deal with (which is something a parent shouldn't ever want).

Now even if you succeed in the stage above (you have properly hidden the gender and your child has chosen what they want to be)... the issue again rises up in romance. Is your partner ready to deal with it? While you may say your partner should love you regardless of what is or isn't between your legs, sometimes it isn't that simple. Take a biological male who chooses they want to be female, and has interest in males. Once you reveal that you are actually a guy, but chose to be a girl, your partner now has this conflict of being a homosexual. Can they deal with it now?

While I understand that the parents want to 'allow' their child to choose a gender... with how society is setup, this could potentially make their child live through harassment and suffering.

On a side note... I feel like this genderless child is female. I say this because the complications of a girl being a guy (tomboy) and the variants are a lot less complicated and generally more accepted in comparison to a guy being a girl.

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Because it's a mutant?

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Everyday I'm tumblin'

I agree that society does kind of push into specific gender roles, but I still think this isn't exactly a good method to prevent it from happening.
It CAN prevent, but as some said, the child might go through some suffering.
What I would hope is for parents to be able to raise their kids (with a gender) so that they can understand that although there are specific gender roles in the society, they can feel free to be themselves and not conform to that...but to a degree.