How will this work then?

Oh, I see. Thanks, janea. I was the same. It was my dad to happened to say during a conversation long before I had kids that when a baby cries when it's on its own (or thinks it is), it's either hungry or it thinks it has been abandoned. He had a way with words. So I picked up my babies too when they cried.

Except once, when Minibags was less than four months old and I was still feeding her in the night. She was in a wee cot right beside my bed. She made a wee noise and I thought "Oh no! I'm too tired!" I made a noise that was meant to be reassuring back. She didn't wake me again till morning. When I told MrBags (who could sleep through it all) he said she'd made a contact noise, something that is very common in other species for reassurance during the night when it's dark and they can't see each other. Flocking birds do it during the day too when they're in shrubbery or other vegetation. Obviously I'd happened to make the return contact noise to her and she went back to sleep. Yuss!!

Not long after that she started sleeping round the clock from five till five which, since I'm a lark, suited me fine.

Its not clear at all in the article how far Brand will go re 'without gender' of his forth coming child, it does come across that people are reading too much into it.

Bags I agree with you. I should have been more clear.
I couldn't bear to hear my babies cry and picked them up, cuddled and fed them against the prevailing advice of the time to let them cry and teach them 'discipline'
What I meant was that too many parents don't trust their instinct and rely too much on gurus and doctor Google.

Well said Jean .

I don't agree that parental instinct is a poor thing. It's what all our nearest relatives in the animal world (the other apes) use. Why shouldn't we also?

I did. Okay, it wasn't entirely instinct because obviously I'd learnt some stuff from my parents and from other parents I knew while I was growing up, but none of it was learned from books or "learned articles" written by experts or non-experts.

And, so far at any rate, it seems to have worked in producing independent, reliable, sensible, conscientious, caring adults.

We are animals. We need to remember that more often and trust our "instincts".

Letitia most children (I include my own in this generalisation) are experiments, in one sense.
They are all born into families where Mum and Dad, not have any firsthand experience of bringing up children, basically haven't a clue, and make it up as they go along. Second and subsequent children are all as different as chalk and cheese, so the learning process starts all over again with numbers 2 and 3, and any preconceived ideas about childrearing soon give way to expediency.
Parental instinct is a poor thing compared to the knowledge gleaned from childcare experts, who very often within a generation are cast off and their ideas reviled.
I think people from other cultures would consider the way that children are brought up in this country now and in the past to be bizarre and even harmful.
Assuming that RB's child isn't subject to any physical abuse, I think we should perhaps be a little more tolerant and recognise that his child is just as likely to survive emotionally intact as many other children, including our own grandchildren.

God helps us,the world is mad !i need to go and talk to the cows at least they talk sense

Once again I would point out that gender is a grammatical term. Sex is the biological term.

This Russell Brand thing is such nonsense. I grew up in the 1950s when traditional attitudes were rather more clearcut. Nevertheless, I wore jeans and shorts as well as smocked frocks and had a clockwork train set as well as as a doll's cot. Absentdaughter, some decades later, had a beloved bus that she sometimes took to bed, played football, wore pretty "girly" things, some of them pink, and free-and-easy jeans and pants, depending on her mood. She and I both played with boys and girls when we were children – and her children do so now.

The fact remains that absentdaughter and I were both girls and now we are women. We both enjoy our womanhood. To try to pretend that there is no difference between boys and girls on such a superficial level is simply ridiculous.

It was from the horse's mouth, he was on Jonathan Ross on Saturday.

It's one thing to not "impose a gender" in terms of dressing children in certain colours, offering them gender neutral toys to play with, encouraging stereotypical boys activities to little girls and vice versa however knowing how weird RB can be I would not be at all surprised if he went 10 steps further and refused to give the child a boys or girls name, refuse to say whether indeed it was a boy or girl, dress "it" in a tutu, no matter what the sex.... Etc.

My middle DGD insisted that she was a horse, until she was about 5 . At 6 she insisted that she wasn't a horse after all . Phew sigh of relief there then. Nope at 6 she had morphed into a giraffe . I have an amazingly funny film of her "being a giraffe" . Now at 8 she is finally herself, a little girl with a HUGE imagination.

A child isn't an experiment. A couple did it in Canada and it didn't end well.
I doubt he has the staying power, as Deedaa says. Hopefully his mother and extended family can make up for a 'difficult' father.

The child would also have to be brought up in a bubble and without friends. Once children mix with their peers they soon know who they like,and want to be like and they will tell the child. I have no problem with dressing gender neutral, offering all kinds of toys and experiences etc. but I do think that there is an age when children begin to identify with a gender i.e I'm like mummy /daddy etc. Suspect it will possibly be as damaging as gender stereotyping!

Well of course you can't "impose" a gender on a child. There are well documented cases of children of uncertain gender being brought up as one sex and as they grew up deciding that their parents had got it wrong. Tragically so in some cases when surgery had been involved. You can offer what clothes and toys you like but even very small children tend to have firm ideas about what they like.

Going by his past history this relationship isn't likely to last very long so the child may escape relatively unscathed.

Cried at his own beauty? Good grief.

So are newspaper headlines!

Unless we actually from the horses mouth we have no idea what he really means. Magazines are sensationist.

Anyway - are they particularly aware that there is a difference unless they have a brother or sister or the family walks around naked?

I think Brangelina's daughter chooses to dress as a boy and says she is a boy, but quite honestly I wouldn't have noticed unless someone pointed it out.

He's having a child?

Should we inform Social Services?

We are an all-female family, nine girls until a grandson appeared.
He was just different from before he was two, fascinated by how things work, peering up drain pipes, obsessed by diggers. I gave him a doll and buggy, just as I'd given my daughters trains and trucks. He threw out the doll and put a crane in the buggy.
Once a little boy discovers his willie there's no way he'd want to be gender neutral.

Perhaps not, n&g, but it is the principle that matters, not what some narcissistic Sleb thinks or does.

I'm not sure that is what he means Bags .

We shall see.

But, as my dad used to say, biology will out. And there's nothing wrong with that either, so long as it doesn't restrict people.

There's a lot to be said for not labelling toys as boys' toys or girls' toys. Ditto clothes and footwear. At least until puberty.
A lot to be said for not having certain expectations of girls but not of boys, or vice versa.

If that's what Brand means, I don't have a problem with it.

Poor child will have enough to cope with having him as a father!