What are parents to do when their child says he's tired of being a child, and wants to be a roadrunner? If there's not another child (who wants to be a puh-sychiatrist) sitting nearby, ready to dissuade him, the parents have to step in and say no, you can't do that. You have to go to school, you have to eat the dinners we make, you have to go to the store.
What if their child wants to go around naked? What could be more natural than to go au natural? The parents need to say that no, when you go outside, you must wear clothes.
Most parents have probably experienced children who don't want to eat their vegetables. Even though it's perfectly possible to live without eating vegetables, parents are right to instill proper eating behavior in their children.
Perhaps, they think, it's all just a phase, and the child will grow out of it.
But look into another case that the New York Times thinks should be handled differently.
But as advocates gain ground for what they call gender-identity rights, evidenced most recently by New York City’s decision to let people alter the sex listed on their birth certificates, a major change is taking place among schools and families. Children as young as 5 who display predispositions to dress like the opposite sex are being supported by a growing number of young parents, educators and mental health professionals.
Doctors, some of them from the top pediatric hospitals, have begun to advise families to let these children be “who they are” to foster a sense of security and self-esteem. They are motivated, in part, by the high incidence of depression, suicidal feelings and self-mutilation that has been common in past generations of transgender children. Legal trends suggest that schools are now required to respect parents’ decisions.
Children aren't allowed to do a lot of things, including choosing their education, their health care, and even their diet. The reason is patently obvious: children don't have the intelligence, education, experience, and common sense to make these kinds of decisions. Yet they are presumed in this case to know their gender identity, at an age when children's knowledge about the difference between men and women can be summed up with a quote from Kindergarten Cop.
Perhaps the child in this article will, in fifteen years, be living as a woman and say that he always felt he should be a female. But what if it is just a phase?
Picture a three year old boy who did something naughty in public, got scolded by his mother, and started pouting. Later, he spied a little girl being treated very nicely by her mother. All of a sudden, in his three year old mind, he thinks he was treated bad because he's a boy, not because he was naughty.
Is this worth ruining a child's life by allowing his fantasy to continue like this? It does seem unusual to see the child in this article fixating for this long, but if I had to choose between the opinion of a five year old child and a child psychiatrist, I know what I'd choose.