How To Raise Your Child to Respect Themselves and Others: The Theybie Way
30th January 2023
We are living in an era nowadays, where people are not shying away from sharing about their likings and how they want to portray themselves. People are breaking the stereotype of gender, now they are expressing themselves as they want to be and they are also gaining the support of a large group of people.
According to trevorproject.org, 33% of the non-binary youth population use the pronoun They/them.
In addition, according to parents.com, a study presented in the journal Pediatrics revealed some interesting stats: "85 % of gender nonconforming youth identify as heterosexual in adulthood."
From the very early days, it becomes like a second nature of humans that whenever a couple is expecting to have a baby, they start asking questions about whether it’s a boy or a girl. It’s time to break this norm if we really want children to discover and understand themselves fully without putting any societal norms on them. Let them come off the idea of how they want to call out or present themselves.
“The goal of the society should be making our future generation comfortable with their choices and teach them to become good human beings, irrespective of their gender.”
Moreover, there’s one entity that’s can play a major role to support theybies which is a teacher. Those teachers, who have the knowledge of inclusive education, know every child is important and special in their own way.
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Now, let’s get to know multiple ways how you can show support and help “Theybies” to understand themselves better:
- Let them figure it out:
From many research studies, it has been found that children can absorb and understand gender norms from an early age. As a teacher, create an environment where no child should be burdened with gender norms, so they can have the full freedom to discover themselves and how they want to turn in the future.
- Understand your conditioning:
We behave and express ourselves in adulthood is deeply connected to our childhood experiences and our elders' expectations towards us. As we grow older, those experiences and expectations shape our lives.
In childhood days, every child got judged for their actions, like a child couldn’t be able to reply back to bullies and people around tagged him that he doesn’t possess the quality of a boy.
Go through all the experiences, which you lived in your life and you can share with theybies to connect better and to make them understand that you support them whatever and however they want to express themselves.
- Use they/them pronoun:
To show that you support theybies community, you need to show via your actions. In your class rather than using gender-specific pronouns like him/her, use them/they. And teach every student to address others with them/they also for regular practice.
- Make parents understand:
There’s no denying that every parent wants the best for their child. However, sometimes parents are also conditioned to follow society norms and they are unconsciously making their children follow that too.
As a special need teacher, you need to organize parent meetings frequently and make theybies parents understand that to give their children the freedom to think and express themselves without imposing gender expectations.
Every Child is Special
Each and every child is unique and special in their own way. They start to lose their uniqueness once they are told that they need to follow and act according to gender expectations.
Now it’s high time, that we as a society let our future generations think freely and give them full freedom of expressing themselves as they want with respect to gender. Our goal should be to make children good people instead of giving gender tags of boy and girl.
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Written By : Ruchi Mehta
