Monica emailed me recently with this query:
Often when I'm reading something from a British person, I'll run into a statement like this: "it made a cute face." OK, so I'm thinking someone's talking about a cute little puppy or kitten.
WRONG!
Said statement is referring to an infant or child!
This one gets my blood boiling every time, because it seems so dehumanizing. Is that actually correct English in ANY form, and if it is, in your experience, is there indeed a difference in usage, and, am I the only American to have this reaction? What about people from the UK? Do they feel the same way?
Now, I was so confident that I'd already written about this phenomenon that I've spent a very long time searching past posts for it. But apparently I haven't.
The quick answer is this: referring to a young child as
it is far more common in British English than American. But. But but but.
But the practice is dying out.
And Monica, you're not the only American to have this reaction. After Grover was born, an English friend (who's in his early 60s) came to pay his regards. He knew her sex, but he repeatedly referred to her as
it. And each time, I corrected him with a
her ('my child is not a thing!') I told this story to other English friends, and they found it a bit surprising that he would use
it when he knew the sex of the child (it would have been more excusable to them if he hadn't known), but not very surprising--after all, they
figured/reckoned, he's probably not that interested in babies and he's old enough to be old-fashioned. She's nearly three years old now, and I'm still recounting the story, so we can safely conclude that it bothers at least one American.
But it's also starting to bother some British people, as evidenced by
this blog entry, where a father recounts doing the
it-she correction. What interested me, though, was one of the commenters who seemed to think it was a (BrE)
storm in a teacup/(AmE)
tempest in a teapot:
You know, people get SO offended when you refer to a child as "It". Even if it's your own child! I can't tell you how often my boss has yelled at me for saying something as simple as, "Yes, it's fine." Or "No, it didn't go to it's father's this weekend."
Sigh. She...it. Whatever.
And that commenter appears to be American. So there's no accounting for tastes.
For a more objective measure, I searched the
Corpus of Contemporary American English and the
British National Corpus for instances of "{child/baby/infant} has {its/his/her/their}". The numbers of hits were small enough that I could make sure that in each case the pronoun referred to the aforementioned child or baby. (The search strings containing
infant got no hits in either corpus.) Of 22 hits in the American corpus, only one had
its. (Three had the gender-neutral
their, and the rest had a gendered pronoun.) In the British corpus (which is a quarter the size of the American one), there were 7 hits, three with
its (and zero with
their). So, 18% of the AmE cases used a gender-neutral pronoun, but only one of those (4.5% of the total) was
it. In BrE 43% of the hits were gender-neutral and all of those used
it.
You could look at that and say "Well, maybe the American corpus had more instances where the writer/speaker knew the sex of the baby", but I don't think that's true. Instead, some of those gendered pronouns in AmE refer to babies/children whose sex isn't known, or to babies generally. It's too rude in AmE to call a baby
it, frowned-upon to use singular
they, so parenting magazines, for instance, just pick
he or
she. Three of the American four
baby has her examples, for instance, were general advice for parents (e.g.
Your baby has her own inborn temperament). There were no BNC hits for
baby has her or
baby has his.
Here's a more targetted search. I looked for "give the baby its/his/her/their own" on
babycenter.com and
babycentre.co.uk.On the UK site, I got only one hit, and that was for
its. But, interestingly, on the AmE site I got as many
its as
their (three each). Now, on the internet, it could be that these people using the American site aren't actually American. But in all the contexts in which the
its occurred, the baby wasn't born yet; parents-to-be were discussing what they would do about names or sleeping arrangements once their babies were born. And you know what? None of those examples bothered me. This one even began with an
it in the question:
23 Oct 2010... safety for the baby, but also so id doesnt get dependent on sleeping next to you, i think its a good idea to give the baby its own bed.
If you'd like to read more about what others say about all this, searching for the phrases "refer to a baby as it" brings up a number of discussions. Searching "refer to the baby as it" is very depressing, as many of the hits are about how (not) to talk to bereaved parents.
And on that note, I think I'll go give Grover a kiss on her sleeping head.