Growing up without a brother: Celebrating the power of gender-neutral parenting
A daughters-only family.
What you need to know:
- Growing up in a girls-only home, the writer reflects on love, equality and rejecting society’s pressure for sons.
- As International Women’s Day 2026 approaches, she honours parents who valued daughters equally and resisted gender-based expectations.
I come from a girls-only home. My older sisters and I have a close bond–one borne from a shared womb, a shared upbringing, and childhood memories that will forever be painted in similar colours. I am the youngest of this trio, and I take my position as the lastborn seriously.
We grew up with neighbours who had mixed-gender siblings, but either it was the love at home or the innocence of a child’s mind—it never quite occurred to me that there was anything odd or wrong about not having a brother. My sisters and I shared a room, had a family skirt (one that all three of us could wear), and I got to inherit their clothes and toys as they outgrew them.
If you had asked me, I would have told you that was the right order—either you have just brothers, or just sisters, for convenience. You can, therefore, imagine my confusion when I grew older and started hearing whispers that my family “needed a brother for it to be complete”.
Gender is a non-issue in my family. The drill was simple: go to school, study, get good grades, proceed to university, and excel. Gender has absolutely nothing to do with these things.
As we mark International Women’s Day 2026, I celebrate parents who were content with their children, regardless of gender. I honour those who resisted pressure to “try again” for a son, who refused to treat daughters as placeholders, and who invested equally in the education and future of both their girls and boys.
These parents understood two simple truths. Firstly, children are a gift from God—a conviction especially meaningful for people of faith. Secondly, the duty of a parent is to raise the children they have with love, intention and fairness, not to measure their worth by gender.
My father told me the story of a woman who wanted to kill herself because she did not have a child. She had taken a rope into a bush and tied it to a tree. As she prepared to hang herself, she heard rattling in a nearby bush. When she went to check, she found a woman who, like her, was tired and wanted to kill herself.
When the first woman asked the second woman why she wanted to kill herself, she said she was tired because her children had taken away all her peace. The two women suddenly realised how foolish they had both been. They went back to the village, hand in hand, and agreed that they’d both mother the second woman’s children. When the first woman’s children arrived, they would also support their upbringing.
The moral of the story is that many times, we become too obsessed with what we think we do not have, hence failing to make good use of what we already have. I worry when I read negative online comments about girls, especially from people of my generation. We are more educated than those who came before us. We have access to the world, to new ideas, and to endless information. We consider ourselves enlightened and progressive. Yet we still fall into baseless and unscientific beliefs.
Two weeks ago, I came across a post where a certain famous guy from the US had posted a photo with his three sons. A comment that was highlighted said, “He is lucky he didn’t end up with a useless child.” I am using euphemism rather than the exact words because this is a family paper, and certain words are censored.
This comment did not break my heart because I was affected in any way. It broke my heart because it reminded me the age-old gender issue when it comes to children is still a present issue. The issue persists for reasons I cannot fully name because, as I said at the beginning of this piece, I grew up with parents who remain content with their three daughters.
On this IWD, I invite us to reflect on the negative and unnecessary gender weights that we carry from our upbringing, and examine them against the knowledge that we have and the truth that we know. May we be wise and courageous enough to discard what is false.
The writer is the Research & Impact Editor, NMG ([email protected]).
