Truesee's Daily Wonder

Baby Storm with father David Stocker in Toronto. Storm, who is 4 months old, is being raised as genderless. Photo taken on May 7, 2011.

Steve Russell/Toronto Star

Storm’s parents have hit a nerve.

They’ve been called “selfish,” “irresponsible,” “reprehensible,” “profoundly ignorant” and child abusers, all because they don’t want you or anyone else to know whether their 4-month-old baby has a vagina or a penis.

The story, written by the Star’s Jayme Poisson, has received more hits and vitriol than any other story ever published on thestar.com.

Why?

Well, sex always sells, and gender is the moment’s hot-button issue. Maybe Storm’s parents, Kathy Witterick and David Stocker, will prove themselves revolutionary, and 40 years from now high school students will perceive the current maelstrom as we now do the interracial romance Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner — quaint and archaic.

But I think there’s more at play than cultural obstinacy. Something more personal. My bet? Witterick and Stocker’s decision triggers our insecurities as parents.

Somewhere deep beneath the wrath lurks a muffled voice that wonders: “Am I too controlling of my kids?”

Let’s go back to those adjectives. Who was the last parent to be derided as a selfish, reprehensible child abuser? Ah yes, Tiger Mother Amy Chua, whose book championed the polar opposite approach to parenting. While Witterick and Stocker promote total freedom and exploration for their children, Chua extols control and duty. Storm’s parents let their two older boys pick their own clothes at 18 months. Chua forced her 4-year-old to practise piano for three hours a day and threatened to burn all her stuffed animals if she didn’t play “perfectly.”

Beneath your horror, deep down, a voice whispers: “Should I have pushed my kids harder to excel?”

The Mommy Wars continue to rage, fuelled by our insecurities and the mounting scientific studies that reveal, mostly, how damaging we are to our children. (My recent favourite: stressed-out parents cause their children to have more flus and colds.) Parents used to mimic what their parents did. Now, we have hundreds of experts telling us hundreds of contradictory things. We choose our poison, and then defend it militantly.

And we feel threatened by anyone who’s taken a different tack.

Storm’s parents aren’t winging it. They have an expert of their own — Alfie Kohn, an American writer and education critic. I tried to get his book, Unconditional Parenting, from the public library, but a waiting list was sparked by last weekend’s story about Storm. So, I bought the second last copy from Indigo Books.

Unconditional parents, Kohn posits, raise authentic, confident humans instead of drones by drawing on fountains of patience and unconditional love. Your kid screams his head off? You don’t send him to his room for a time-out, which Kohn calls solitary confinement.

Instead, you approach the situation as a “teachable moment” and try to uncover the root of your child’s anger. Instead of instilling a “mindless obedience” to your rules, you involve your kids in writing them.

There’s no carrot either — by giving your son a sticker for peeing in the potty, you are polluting his inner volition and teaching him to do things only for approval, Kohn says.

As a parent, he says, you should address the whole child all the time, and not just his or her behaviour.

I managed 100 pages, out of duty for this column.

I salute Witterick and Stocker. The path they’ve chosen as parents sounds just as exhausting as Chua’s, who studied treatises on violin technique when not sitting in on all three hours of her daughter’s violin lessons every Saturday.

They, too, are über-parents.

They, too, think the stakes are high. If Chua’s daughters didn’t get scholarships to Harvard “and perform virtuoso duets for the Supreme Court justices,” she would have failed as a parent.

For Storm’s parents, if the baby’s gender was decided for him or her, it presumably could smother the child’s authentic self, and cause depression down the road. Kohn says children who experience “love withdrawal” through time-outs “tend to have lower self-esteem. They display signs of poorer emotional health overall and may even be more apt to engage in delinquent acts.”

In the end, it comes down to control — controlling what our kids become, or what they don’t become.

I think Storm will turn out just fine, like most kids do. He’ll look at his penis at some point and look at his dad’s, and announce he is a boy. Or she’ll look at her vagina and her mother’s, and declare she is a girl.

Then she’ll put on some brown corduroys and rain boots, and rush outside to play.