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21st Century Parenting and the Facts of Life
Imagine that you live in California, Minnesota, or Massachusetts and your precocious 8-year-old comes home with some probing questions.
“Mommy, where do babies come from?”
You’ve already thought this through — you’re going to answer honestly but not tell her more than she asked to know.
“Well, they come from Mommies and Daddies. Mommies have what is called an egg, but a little tiny one, and Daddies have what is called sperm. The egg and the sperm get together and a baby starts to grow. Mommies have something called a uterus where the tiny growing baby goes to live and get bigger until it is big enough to be born.”
“But my teacher says that some kids have two mommies or two daddies instead of a mommy and a daddy. How can they have a baby?”
“They can’t have one together. They have to borrow an egg or a sperm from a different mommy or daddy.”
“But doesn’t that mommy or daddy want their baby?”
“I guess not.”
“But if it’s two daddies, nobody has a u-u-“
“Uterus.”
“Yes — that. Where is the baby going to grow?”
“They have to find a mommy who will grow the baby.”
“Then the baby grows in the mommy’s tummy but she doesn’t want the baby?”
“Well, she might want the baby, but she’s helping out the daddies because they want a baby.”
“But then the baby won’t have a mommy and the mommy won’t have her baby!”
“No. The mommy and baby won’t have each other”
“But I like having a mommy. And mommies do lots of things that daddies don’t do — like my hair.”
“That’s true. I guess the daddies have to learn to do what the mommies usually do and the mommies have to learn to do what the daddies usually do.”
“I don’t like that.”
She thinks for a minute.
“My teacher says that boys are sometimes really girls and girls are sometimes really boys.”
“What do you think she means when she says that?”
“I don’t know, but sometimes I like to kick the ball with the boys. Does that mean I’m really a boy?”
“No. Sometimes girls like to do things with boys or boys like to do things with girls, but they are still boys and girls.”
“But then how can a boy be a girl or a girl be a boy?”
“Well, I guess she means that some boys feel like girls and some girls feel like boys.”
“Does that mean when I feel like kicking a ball I feel like a boy so I’m really a boy?”
“No. Girls who like to do boy things are sometimes called tomboys, but they are still girls.”
“But if I felt like I was a boy, could I become a boy and grow up to be a daddy?”
“No, you can never be a daddy, only a mommy.”
“But if I felt like a boy, wouldn’t I want to be a daddy? Why can I only be a mommy?”
“Because you were born with eggs and uterus, which is what you need to be a mommy.”
“Because I’m a girl.”
“Yes — because you’re a girl.”
“Then why does my teacher tell me I might be a boy and tell the boys they might be girls if boys can never be mommies and girls can never be daddies?”
You are stumped. This is a level of confusion you will never be able to explain.
Published in General
How disturbing are we talking about? On the assumption that it’s potentially worse than discovering you’re adopted*, how much worse?
Merina, I don’t mean this in any accusatory way, but do you know this to be true, or suspect it to be true? This is not a leading question and I certainly don’t mean to imply that one’s opinion can only be informed by direct experience.
* I’ve known people for whom being adopted has been a genuine trauma, as well a people who seem to love their parents all the more for it.
Now, this sounds like an interesting story.
When my brothers told me I was adopted, I thought, “Well, thank Cod for that!” Imagine how disappointed I was when I learned that I really was related to those people I lived with.
Tom, I don’t interview kids about such things, but I do know kids, having raised a passel and worked with them in many capacities. Kids have surprisingly strong ideas about families, Mommies and Daddies, how they came into the world and so on. They love to hear stories about how they were born and how happy you were to have them. You’d be surprised how much they understand.
Well, we all hope to learn we are adopted when we are teenagers.
I don’t have to imagine living in California. And this two mommies thing drives me nuts. I’ve raised 7 kids, in public and private schools and 3 of my kids are adopted. But really, this is just another in a long line of things parents have to explain. How do you tell an 8- year old mommy doesn’t want to be married to daddy anymore? Or why her two cousins have the same mommy but different daddies? Or another cousin has a mommy and apparently no daddy. Our kids can handle more than they should have to, unfortunately.
There’s not much you can do about it, but it is confusing. I have read, however, that so long as MOST of the families a child sees and interacts with are solid two-parent families–even children of single Moms–that’s a pattern the child will want to emulate. Still, in my experience, children have a pretty strong sense of what Mommies and Daddies are supposed to be and how they fit into the picture. Especially the younger ones don’t like to have that picture challenged.
Yeah, but I was three.
You were just very, very precocious.
We have a family at our Christian school with three boys. The mom has been a surrogate three times. They explain that Mommy is helping people who can’t have babies to have babies. I think that’s a big idea for a kindergartener to process. But their kids seem to have accepted it, for now. Who knows about when they are older.
Also, not all adopted kids are the biological offspring of people who want them but can’t, for whatever reason, raise them. Try explaining to a kid that her biological mom gave birth and then basically checked out because the kid wasn’t supposed to happen. We’ve had to explain a version of that to our three adopted kids. The sanitized toddler version of the adoption story morphed into the elementary version with a few more age-appropriate details and now they basically have the full teen-ager version. It’s a lot for a kid to handle.
Mine was correcting a history teacher on a variety of things the teacher got wrong about Lord Nelson -largely boiling down to confusing Trafalger and Nile. What apparently sent her over the edge was when I said he was missing an eye and a hand.
At a certain point I realized the issue here was not who was correct, but who was in authority. It was at that time that I realized that while Might make make final, it’s relationship to right was questionable, but finality has a right all its own.
Also, there is a special circle of Hell reserved for the principal who backed this clearly-wrong teacher.
I disagree slightly. Children need to trust those in authority, but when an authority is clearly wrong, that authority needs to be corrected -and seen to be corrected. That is how you build trust in authority. Seeing authority wrong, persist in being wrong, and accepted by other authorities at best confuses the child, and at worst teaches the lesson that authority is corrupt and no authority can be trusted.
One of my earliest ones was when I was playing with a puzzle that was the fifty states. I told a friend that the Alaska piece was wrong because it was smaller then the Texas piece on the puzzle. I explained that Alaska was the largest state in the country.
He insisted I was wrong, and proceeded to gather a consensus of nearby students who all looked at the pieces, and declared Texas the largest state.
Eventually I looked to the teacher to restore sanity to the entire affair. She came over and looked at the pieces, and agreed with the others that Texas was larger than Alaska.
Well, Texas does have a bigger attitude, God bless ’em.
Chesterton was right. People who don’t believe in God will believe anything. For my Atheist friends this is more a shorthand for believing in objective truth than anything. People are so materialistic or naturalistic to think a woman and a man or interchangeable parts on an assembly line. Personhood is all that matters. It is like calling magarine butter or so I have heard.
“Honey, your teacher, if she’s really saying this and believes this, is a scientific illiterate. If she’s saying it and doesn’t believe it, she’s a liar. Either way, you’re leaving that school tomorrow.”
Kim, I can see some serious therapy ahead for those kids. Mom gave away my brothers and sisters? Yikes.
This may not be the case. The sperm and the ovum maybe totally unrelated to this woman. If so I admire this woman’s sacrifice to help childless couples. I have heard where the grandmother has done this for her daughter.
...most kids really trust their teacher and need to retain that trust in order to learn effectively…teacher trust is good in the younger grades. I makes kids feel safe.
Do you think keeping that teacher trust is important if the teacher is saying things like “Bad companies and people with big cars are killing the planet. We have to help stop them…”? Or the Commie teachers who make everyone put all their pens and pencils and notebooks in one pile, that “there are no private possessions – everything belongs to everyone” ? (A father was unable to convince a school to stop the teacher from doing this and had to take his [second or third grade] daughter out of the school.)
I doubt that.
I can’t imagine this not making a child deeply insecure. Why was I kept when that child was given away? (And of course, the answer probably is: mom was paid to have the other baby.)
My four-year-old talks about family connections constantly. How he used to live inside me and then was born, and then his brothers did the same thing. He especially loves hearing about his birth. (Obviously he gets a pretty sanitized version.) Also talking about how I was once Grandma’s baby and how I’ll be his kids’ grandma.
These things are really important to kids because they give them a sense of belonging. Adoption stories can be beautiful too because they “fix” something broken in the world. “Daddy and Daddy paid someone to be a temporary Mommy”, not so beautiful.
I was thinking of a normal infertile couple.
I read about that grandmother case too. I’m split between admiration and finding it creepy. Renting out your body–I don’t know–also kind of creepy. But when the child is a half-sibling, I just find that morally wrong.
Frank, you’re a tough guy, which is why your avatar features a gun. Many, I would say most, children are not tough guys.
Genetically, is it a half-sibling? Is 9 months in the womb and being fed that way pre-birth make you a sibling or just being cared by grandma in a special way? (I don’t know.)
No, Ten, I mean in the cases where the birth mother contributes the egg, which sometimes happens. Sorry I wasn’t clear.
I think her point is that elementary school teachers should be vetted well enough by parents and principals that students of that age shouldn’t have to doubt what they are learning.
Verification of received information is certainly an important skill for any child to develop. But a toddler is not capable of judging the trustworthiness of lessons and teachers. That is a skill to be developed in later years.
We all do, but the point is that that is what teachers are supposed to teach in the era of gender bending, and IMHO, that is where the logic of genderless marriage leads us.
To be fair, it’s always been possible to have more than one mommy or more than one daddy, since there have always been step-parents and adoptive parents. However, usually children have only had one of each at a time.
I think the underlying reality is that adoptive parents don’t necessarily have to be one man and one woman, but biological parents do have to be one man and one woman.