Before Garth was born, I kept quiet about my feelings, but I know a great many people who have been more vocal about their preference for girls. Parents in much of northern Europe already prefer girls to boys, and although recent polls show that American fathers still express a slight partiality for sons, that preference seems to be decreasing. Certainly American parents who are interested in adoption want girls; according to one article, between seventy and ninety percent of adoptive parents indicate a preference for a female child.

In a much less scientific—but still very suggestive—sample, two of my friends experienced slumps of depression after it was revealed that the healthy fetuses they were carrying were male. And countless other friends, relatives, and acquaintances—women and men alike—have expressed to me their desire for girls. In fact, in the last five years I’ve known of only one person who was hoping for a son. And he was an ex-Marine with two daughters.

It's a intriguing sign of our times. Elsewhere—in parts of China, India, and Africa, for example—people still want only their livestock to be born female. Elsewhere, sons are valued and the number of daughters is still limited through abortion, infanticide, and neglect. But now we’re seeing a shift in that old pattern; now—at least among some circles—we tend to hope for girls.

Obviously the pendulum has swung too far, as such pendulums almost always do, though when I consider the world's destroyed daughters, the human babies resented or slaughtered because of their gender, the girls taught by their mothers to loathe themselves because of their sex and to pass that loathing on to their own daughters, I can't help but feeling something akin to relief that, unreasonable as the result may be in the short term, at least the pendulum has moved at all. Here, finally, girls are being cherished as they should have been everywhere, all along.

There are reasons for the current shift in prejudice. I know of several men who have hoped for daughters because their relationships with their own fathers had been so toxic. With a girl, they felt they stood a better chance of breaking out of the authoritarian chains of a certain kind of masculinity. But most of the parents I know seem to feel that a daughter offers more possibilities and fewer challenges than a son. In a culture in which women are now able to enjoy opportunities beyond their roles as family members, I suspect that having a girl means having a child who might come close to having it all.

These days we'd like to think that a daughter can grow up to enjoy status and accomplishments equal to any man's. But at the same time we imagine raising the first female President of the United States, we still consider women to be the glue that bonds families together. A son is a son till he takes a wife, but a daughter's a daughter all her life, still appears to have its reverberations in our unconscious understanding of sons and daughters.

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