A new study has found that transgender parents “hesitate” to give their children a gender label. While it may be easy to think that the essentials of parenting are the same regardless of race, culture and sexual orientation/identity, there can be some noticeable differences.
These differences are important for child development, and that is why researchers are constantly looking into parenting methods, how they vary, and what implications (if any) it could have on how children grow up and develop.
The world is a diverse place, and the more the world knows about parenting, the more they can understand how humans evolve and develop.
According to Medical Xpress, a new study has found that many transgender parents are hesitant to label young children’s gender identity. This study was done by Pennsylvania State University, and it can be read in full here.
The team of researchers found that transgender parents of children between the ages of 1.5 and 6 years old are second-guessing labeling their child’s gender identity. These results are suggesting that children with transgender parents may play in ways that conform to “gendered societal expectations,” while others play in more expansive ways.
It is already known that mis-gendering someone can cause great harm to a person’s mental and physical health, but that transgender parents are offering their children a supportive environment to explore how they feel, and develop their own sense of self-identity and expression.
Rachel G. Riskind, lead co-author on the study, state that there is a strong link between the child’s age and the likelihood that their parents will assign their gender a label.
This means that the older the child is, the more likely a parent is to give their child a label. Transgender parents are more likely to label their elementary school child’s gender, but not their toddlers.
What this study did not explore was the likelihood that a transgender parent would give their child a gendered name, or what pronouns they would use for their children.
What is clear is that they are still hesitant to label their child’s gender until they are old enough to express for themselves what their gender is. A school-aged child has a better grasp on sexual identity, and is therefore able to express how they feel inside.
The study looked at web-based surveys of 64 non-binary and binary transgender parents to come to their conclusions. In total, 41% of the participants did not report their child’s current gender identity, and labeled it as “unknown.”
Sources: Medical Xpress, Frontiers