By Scott Williams

Although his parents might object to me calling him such, two-year-old Pop is a social experiment.

The Swedish toddler's mom and dad, eschewing social gender constraints, refuse to let anyone know whether the child is a boy or girl. They never use pronouns to refer to the toddler, and have outfitted the child with everything from dresses to pants. They also regularly change the child's hairstyle.

“We want Pop to grow up more freely and avoid being forced into a specific gender mould from the outset,” Pop’s mother said. “It's cruel to bring a child into the world with a blue or pink stamp on their forehead.”

While the outcome of this informal experiment might answer some long-standing questions about how much of gender is biological and how much is conditioned by the culture, it may come at the expense of Pop. It wouldn't be the first time.

More than 40 years ago, a botched circumcision on a twin brother prompted parents to raise Bruce Reimer as "Brenda." He had reconstruction work and was encouraged to dress and act like a girl. As his brother Brian tells it, "the only difference between him and I was he had longer hair." Only when Bruce/Brenda began to rebel against femininty as a teen did his father tell him the whole story.

After bouts with anger and depression, Bruce changed his name to David and underwent surgical procedures and hormone treatments to become a man. He eventually married and was able to have a normal sex life and, despite being unable to father children of his own, did raise three children with his wife.

But by then, David's psychological trauma was exacting its toll. After a separation from his wife, a job loss, and the death of his twin brother, David committed suicide in 2004. In the years before, he had publicly spoken of his ordeal, labeling the gender identity experiment a crushing failure.

Before adolescence blew the lid off of everything, those who said it was nurture not nature that determined gender identity had pointed to the Reimer case as proof. Eventually Johns Hopkins University, which had initially encouraged the Reimers to allow Bruce to be Brenda, abandoned its gender reassignment ideals.

You would think that people would learn, but with our current cultural tendency to reject anything that limits our ability to define our own humanity, the practice continues. One of the current parenting fads is to delay puberty with hormonal treatments until a child settles what gender most closely matches his or her feelings.

The whole thing is much simpler than we make it out to be. Sexual identity, both physical and emotional, is by God's design. He created male and female to correspond to each other, both physically and emotionally. Sure, there are cultural norms that either downplay or caricature gender attributes. Some may be harmful, but others (like pink and blue) are benign and petty.

It's okay and even healthy to reject narrow, often arbitrary, gender constraints. It's foolish, on the other hand, to pretend that these differences are completely devoid of divine design. True balance comes from understanding God's original design and operating within that realm.

Nowhere does God mention pink and blue.  He does not forbid men to cry or women to do auto mechanics. He has, however, created men to be risk-takers, providers, initiators and achievers, and women to be responders, nurturers, and to experience life as a holistic blend of mind and emotion. And He has also created us as infinitely unique individuals who vary wildly within those male/female designs. Understanding God's design provides both structure and freedom.

I hope Pop's parents realize the futility of their blank slate approach to gender before the damage is done. With Pop due to become a big brothersister in the next few months, that realization can't come too soon.

By Scott Williams

The National Center for Health Statistics last week documented a dramatic rise in children born to unmarried mothers—and it attributed much of the increase to women in the 20s and 30s choosing to have children outside of marriage. "It's been a huge increase—a dramatic increase," said one center official. "It's quite striking."

The rise in unwed pregnancies is not just happening in the United States, but throughout most highly developed countries. In fact, compared with 13 other European nations and Japan, the U.S. out-of-wedlock marriage rate is somewhere in the middle of the pack.

Some countries have been on the rise for some time, others just recently. In Japan, the incidence of non-marital births is still low. In Scandinavian countries, it generally makes up half of all births, if not more. Here's the data for each country from 1980, and from the most recent surveys:

Country	1980	Current
Japan	1%	2%
Italy	4%	21%
Spain	4%	28%
Canada	13%	30%
Germany	12%	30%
Ireland	5%	33%
Netherlands	4%	40%
United States	18%	40%
United Kingdom	12%	44%
Denmark	33%	46%
France	11%	50%
Norway	15%	54%
Sweden	40%	55%
Iceland	40%	66%

If Iceland's non-marital birthrate seems unthinkably high, consider that the rate for 20-24 year-olds in the U.S. is a near-identical 60 percent rate. Nearly a third of births to 25-29 year-olds in the U.S. are also outside of marriage.

Social scientists are scrambling to explain the consistent, widespread surge in births outside marriage. Most focus on three primary factors: increased sexual activity outside marriage; the relaxing of social disapproval of out-of-wedlock childbearing; and the number of women delaying or forgoing marriage. In fact, the most recent Census Bureau data indicates that 40 percent women giving birth outside marriage are in cohabiting relationships.

Although we demographers may have a handle on the "what", few have effectively explained the "why" of women choosing to have children outside marriage. Has their view of marriage become jaded and cohabitation become the new marriage? Is pregnancy a woman's attempt to draw her man from a sexual relationship into a more committed marriage-type arrangement? Is motherhood a consolation prize leftover from childhood dreams of marrying Prince Charming and raising a family together?

No developed society can last for long when it fails to offer security and safety for its women and children, and direction and accountability for its men and adolescents. By distancing sex from procreation and childbearing from marriage, we effectively fragment our society into a collection of individuals who see love, sex, marriage and children as commodities that exist solely for their own happiness. In the meantime, we're bringing children into a world of instability and egocentrism that perpetuates the cycle exponentially.

Data continue to show that a child does best when raised in a stable, loving home with a mother and father each contributing uniquely to that child's development and happiness. While it's possible for a young mother to raise the child alone, it still puts the child at a disadvantage. Often unmarried mothers have much less time and money—two important elements for raising a child—than their married counterparts. And research is also beginning to show that a father plays an integral part in the development of a child.

And while it's possible for a cohabiting couple to raise children, data continue to show that those relationships fail at a much higher rate than traditional marriages. So, again, children of cohabiting couples often end up spending part of their developmental years without the optimal benefit of both parents.

So why is cohabitation seeing such a sharp rise in this country and so many others? Part of it is many couples settle for convenience over the more difficult but stable option. That often shows in the arguments they use against getting married. We'll look at some of those arguments in a followup post soon.