Best of luck to Hobbit Humphrey and Jake England-Johns, who made headlines last week when they announced that they are keeping the sex of their 17-month-old child a secret to avoid "gender bias’’. In explaining their decision, the couple said: “Gender neutral refers to us trying to behave neutrally towards the child, rather than trying to make them neutral. We're not trying to make them be anything. We just want them to be themselves.”

While I don’t doubt for a minute the good intentions that drive their thinking, I worry their noble ambition is doomed to failure.

In my five years of being a parent I have concluded that it is almost impossible to stop the pervasive expectations of gender having at least some impact on children – however gender-neutral your parenting style is.

It’s important to be clear about what we are talking about here. Gender neutral isn’t a sub-category that falls somewhere between boy and girl. It means – for me anyway – letting your child play and explore the way children are supposed to.

Gender stereotypes are nonsense. They tell us that boys are hard-wired to be strong and brave and to like football, fighting and the colour blue.

For girls, they teach meekness and deference and put a premium on beauty over intellect. They tell them they look best in pink and should - at all times - be gentle and nice.

This is usually the point in the conversation when parents interrupt to explain how girly their girl is and how boisterous their boy is, as proof that gender is innate and not a product of our environment.

When I found out I was having a baby girl, I wanted her to be free of gender roles.

It started off well, because I didn’t have to do anything.

She played with what she wanted to play with. I didn’t police her toy box and I didn’t ban pink.

As she entered her toddler years and her personality solidified, her early preferences became clear.

She liked sharks. For a while she was adamant she WAS a shark. She loved pirates and dinosaurs, singing, dancing and baseball caps. During that time, most of her clothes were bought from the boy’s section (because that’s where all the pirates and dinosaurs were). No big deal.

Then when she started nursery and CBeebies and Disney films were on the agenda, I noticed a shift. She went from being the only girl dressed as a pirate on the "Princesses and Pirates" day to telling me her favourite colour was pink and her greatest wish in life was to ride on a sparkly unicorn with all her family. She still loved all the things she had before, while also developing stereotypically feminine interests.

Children, left to their own devices, will naturally develop interests and personality traits from both sides of the gender spectrum, because the line that morphs from blue to pink is nothing more than a social construct.

I don’t know any adults who I could easily put into a feminine or masculine box – and children are no different.

Rather than guarding a child’s sex as some great secret, we should be working to convince advertisers, the media – and yes, some parents – to drop their creepy pink and blue brain obsession.

Our society is heavily gendered and one where girls and women face sex-based discrimination and violence. That is one of the reasons I would never tell my daughter that being a girl is something to be hidden.

To be fair to the parents in this case, there’s no suggestion they are going to carry on this parenting strategy indefinitely.

They acknowledge that there will come a time when they can’t and when that happens, they say, they will let their child choose their pronouns and gender.

For good reason. No amount of secrecy would stop society seeing and treating my daughter as the girl she is. For better or worse, her life will be shaped by the fact that she is female.

So I remind her what girls are: strong, brave, clever, amazing. I explain her female body and how it works and emphasise her right to privacy and respect.

I’ve made it clear that nobody is ever allowed to hit her – including me - no matter how angry they are or what they say she has done to deserve it. Because across the UK and the world, violence against women is rife and women are all too often blamed for the abuse they suffer.

Being a girl or a boy shouldn’t limit or define any of our children.

We should marvel at the full colour and spectrum of their personalities and interests and see them as they are: whole people, not constrained by the outdated stereotypes attributed to their sex.

I understand the desire to keep the tiny person you have created in a bubble of love and safety, inured from the sharp corners of the world. That is natural and stems from the unique and all-consuming love that a parent has for their child.

But it takes a village to raise a child and when it comes to eradicating gender stereotyping, an individualist approach simply won’t cut it.