What is gender creative parenting? We spoke to parents who let their kids explore gender freely
Jolene Vargas’ son was a year old when he became “really obsessed with the movie ‘Moana.'”
Vargas, then a new mom, embraced her child’s interest in the Disney film, but in doing so she began to feel pushback from those around her.
“A couple people in my life were kind of just like, ‘Moana is a princess. That’s a girl thing,'” she recalled. 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, even though she and her husband introduced him to other parts of the Disney universe too. “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 5 with a little brother, and she’s since found the language to describe her style of raising her kids: gender creative parenting. She shares her journey on TikTok under the username @mommademagic.
“My child is gender creative. He just expresses himself however he wants to,” she says.
For Vargas, gender creative parenting means, “never restricting them on anything based off of societal standards.”
Vargas found the term through another family on TikTok who has a non-binary child. They’re not alone. The hashtag #gendercreativeparenting has more than 11.3 million views on the video-sharing app. One video posted by “Raising Them” author and sociologist Dr. Kyl Myers has garnered 1.2 million likes in which they explain the journey of raising their child in a gender creative way.
Harley Maher, who uses he and they pronouns, shares videos about gender creative parenting on their account @harlecryptid.
Maher describes gender creative parenting as “choosing not to assign any gender labels.” He discovered the parenting style via a Facebook group even before he welcomed his child.
“That way your kids can basically, without any type of preconceived notion of gender, identity, discover and explore gender in all of its vastness and allow them to figure out who they are without having any type of gendered ideals pushed on them before they’re even old enough to really understand what that means.”
For Maher’s family, this means using only the gender-neutral pronouns they/them for their child as well as not limiting them on what they can wear or what toys they play with.
“If they want to wear, say, a Batman T-shirt with a rainbow tutu, they’re more than welcome to… (and) we’ve got a mixture of My Little Pony and dinosaur figures, so it’s just very open,” Maher says. “We’re really getting to see our kids shine and how their personality is developing.”
The whole goal for Maher is to “follow their (child’s) lead with it.”
“I want them to feel like they’re not being pushed into any kind of mold of who they have to be,” they say. “At this point, our kid is 2 and a half, so their gender is an unknown. It’s not that we’re trying to push them to be non-binary or anything – it’s just they don’t have the capacity at this point to tell us, ‘Hey, this is how I feel, these are the pronouns I want to use.'”
Why people choose gender creative parenting
One reason Maher wanted to parent this way is to let their child truly “know who they are.”
“I’m really hoping that it instills a strong sense of identity and sense of self, because I feel like it’s important for everyone.”
There’s “not only one specific way to parent” that can lead to a “positive upbringing,” says Dr. Shawna Newman, director of child and adolescent psychiatry at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York, but she believes “kids have a sense of their identity, including their own sense of gender, very young, maybe starting as young as 2 years old.”
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