You would have to be living under a rock to not have heard the story about Baby Storm. We even touched on the story here on the Life360 blog last week, and websites, blogs, and news shows all over are still talking about Baby Storm and Storm’s family’s decision to keep the baby’s gender a secret.

Outside of Storm’s brothers, parents and the midwives who helped deliver the infant no one else knows whether Storm is a boy or a girl.

The parents made the choice to keep baby Storm’s gender a secret. This is not a far cry from how they’re choosing to raise their other children, two boys who occasionally dress in girl’s clothes and wear their hair long and in braids.

In my personal opinion, I say more power to them. Though they obviously won’t be able to (nor would they want to, I assume) actually try and raise Storm to be genderless through school, public restrooms alone end that theory right off the bat. But I firmly support trying to navigate a child away from the gender roles that society and many marketing, clothing and toy companies try and force young children into for as long as they possibly can.

If you would like to see proof of just how much society pressures young kids into gender roles, simply take a look at the hundreds of comments that have been made all over the Internet talking about this story. The fact that so many people think that baby Storm’s gender is any of their business, or that by not buying into what a clothing company says their child should be wearing that these parents are somehow hurting their child, is proof enough that they should keep the gender to themselves.

If there were a media storm about my child’s gender I would be working even harder to keep it secret. The true lesson of this story is not whether or not Kathy Witterick and husband David Stocker (Storm’s parents) decide to keep their child’s gender secret, because research has shown it’s not harmful and it’s not anyone else’s business, anymore than whether a mother is breastfeeding, co-sleeping, or whether she chooses cloth or disposable diapers is anyone else’s business. It’s simply NOT.

The lesson here is how obsessed we, as Americans, are with what other people are doing in their own homes, and how America needs to a serious lesson in minding our own business.

So please, the next time this comes up in conversation at the PTA meeting or you see a conversation online about it, make sure your response is, “Who Cares?”

America, let’s worry about our own homes and stop worrying about parents who aren’t doing anything but raising a baby the best way they know how. And to Kathy Witterick and husband David Stocker, more power to you.