Boy in a girl: what to do if a child behaves “not according to gender” - Larisa Surkova

Parents are often frightened when a boyrefuses to play war toys or cars, but prefers to dress up dolls with a sister or girlfriends. And if the girl is a tomboy, she's ashamed: "Well, you're a girl." But if it's a little further than playing games? If the child does not fully understand who he really is? How to behave with an entangled teenager - to try to break or accept the way it is? There are many questions. We understand the situation together with the psychologist - mother of five children and candidate of science Larisa Surkova.Photo: GettyImages

And it's not alien to the stars

Only the lazy ones did not discuss the situation thathas been going on in the broken Pitt and Jolie family for several years now. We are talking about their 10-year-old daughter Shiloh. The girl cuts her hair short, wears exclusively men's clothing, prefers samurai swords to dolls, and asks to be called Peter. A year ago, Shiloh learned that there is a sex change operation, and now asks her parents to take her to a plastic surgeon. According to Western media, the father of the family is seriously concerned about the situation, but Angelina is calm about her daughter's behavior. Larisa Surkova, psychologist, PhD, and mother of many children:- The situation in the family of Jolie and Pitt is complicated inanalysis, because we do not know what is really going on with them. Talk about the true transgender behavior Shiloh difficult. We see that the spouses are getting divorced, but we do not know what quarrels there were and how the girl won the attention of her parents. I'm not going to be surprised if 2-3 years pass and she turns into a beautiful young lady who will wear lush skirts, high heel shoes and become a supermodel. Such behavior of the child can be a kind of protest and a way to attract attention. So the child can demonstrate that some values relative to one of the parents are not important to him and he wants to be more attached and loved by the other parent. Jolie's Hollywood colleague Charlize Theron is also solid: her adopted son Jackson prefers wearing girlish dresses and skirts. The star does not go against the boy and admits that she does not care about what other people think about it. The same opinions are held by the beauties of Megan Fox and Gwen Stefani, whose sons are not averse to turning into Hollywood princesses, trying on Elsa's dress from the cartoon "The Cold Heart".Angelina Jolie and her daughter. Shilo - rightPhoto: GettyImages And if the children Jolie - Theron, Stephanie and Fox - are still small enough to make any serious conclusions about their gender, the offspring of other celebrities have already succeeded in changing the sex for real. The best-known example is Chaz Bono, a 48-year-old daughter, and now the son of singer Sher. Seven years ago, she changed her gender and passport and now lives a happy and fulfilling life for a man. Initially, the stellar mother took such a decision to her daughter in hostility and did not even talk with Chaz, but eventually calmed down and now loves the child as he is.- About Cher, I can say that she is a good boy, she behaved like a good mother, who did not give up her son. The main problem in such situations is the child's non-acceptance of his parents.

Dolls against robots

Let's go back to the situation when from early childhoodThe boy is not interested in cars at all, but he takes great pleasure in babysitting his older sister's dolls. And vice versa, the girl refuses to be a cute princess, preferring to wear a baseball cap and play with boys. - Do you know what my son said? That he is no longer Igor, but Masha! Like, he doesn't want to be a boy anymore, - through the humorous intonations in the voice of Kristina, the mother of a three-year-old son, clear notes of panic break through.Cher and her now son Chaz BonoPhoto:GettyImagesYou can, of course, laugh and forget - they say, in six months it will pass, like smoke from white apple trees. Or you can get a strong dose of stress and lose sleep for a long time, which is most likely what will happen to particularly anxious mothers. What to do? Experts give universal advice: first of all, throw away the panic! At an early age, such statements by children do not have serious consequences and, as a rule, are the cause of inappropriate behavior of parents.- Often boys between the ages of 4 and 6 saythat they want to be girls, and this has nothing to do with the fact that they are not satisfied with their own sex. Just the position of the girl in our society is more profitable, because since childhood they say: give the girl, do not touch the girl. Once a boy understands this and chooses to be a girl: he dreams of becoming a girl, wearing dresses, but this does not mean that the baby does not accept his sex. The expert emphasizes: if there are no such conversations, the son simply loves dolls or the daughter is interested in more robots than Pups, do not interfere with this and expose the child to ridicule. It is better to ask questions about why this happens. Ask the child why he wants it?- If in the behavior of a schoolboy or teenager there are moments that cause the experience of parents, it makes sense to seek help from a specialist - psychologist or psychiatrist.

Genes or a mistake in the heavenly office?

True transgenderism, or gender non-acceptance,given to a person at birth, is a rare phenomenon. And yet such people do exist. They say about them: “When the souls were given bodies in the heavenly office, the angels messed something up.” The metaphor is beautiful, but tragic: in our society, transgender people are not understood and accepted, considering this feature a deviation and a perversion. That is why parents, when they learn the bitter truth about their children, experience a real shock. They lose control of their emotions, can say a bunch of terrible words to the child or completely erase the offspring from their lives. This is where the biggest mistake of adults lies.Megan Fox and her son Noah-Shannon Photo: GettyImages According to Larisa Surkova, the mother and father should understand that in this situation the interested person is not they, but the one who feels himself not in his body. And the main task is to give him the maximum help, and not to break through the knee, trying at any cost to rectify the situation.- There is a small percentage of people who havethere was a failure at the genetic level, and they feel like a person of the wrong gender. We cannot fix anything, we cannot get into their genetic code. In such situations, there is often a risk of suicide, when a person feels like a man in a woman's body, and vice versa, when parents and society do not understand and accept him. That is why emotional support from loved ones and making plans for the future in accordance with how the child would like to feel is important. Transgenderism cannot be cleaned out or corrected. This is exactly the case when an older person can think about changing gender, because only then does he begin to feel happy.