Gender creative parenting – when children are allowed to explore gender freely without labels
- Gender creative parenting means choosing not to assign any gender labels to your children and letting them choose what to wear and what toys to play with
- Parents who have implemented gender creative parenting talk about pronouns, clothes and ignoring preconceived notions of gender and identity
Jolene Vargas’ son was a year old when he became “really obsessed with the movie Moana”.
Vargas, then a new mother, embraced her child’s interest in the Disney film, but in doing so she began to feel resistance from those around her.
“A couple of people in my life were kind of just like, ‘Moana is a princess. That’s a girl thing’,” she recalls. But that didn’t stop her from looking in the girls’ section for Moana-themed clothing for her son. As the years went on, his interests became more clear.
“Every time we went to Disneyland, he was more drawn to princess things and the princesses themselves than anything else,” she explains. “We would try to get him things from Marvel like Spiderman stuff, and he just had no interest in it … and then when we would get him something that was Moana or Disney princess he was all in love with it, so it just felt wrong to be like, ‘Oh, you can’t play with this’.”
Her son is now five with a little brother, and she’s since found the language to describe her style of raising her kids: gender creative parenting. “My child is gender creative. He just expresses himself however he wants to,” she says.