2×09 Raising Girls

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Do hospitals really give seminars to gay dads on how to clean a vagina when they have a newborn girl? We had to check out this myth and other girl-related issues in a two-dad house hold. We brought on Eli and Ido, a NYC couple with two girls to discuss gay dads raising girls in the age of #girlpower and #metoo.

It turns out that in a ‘vagina seminar’ in hospitals for newborn girls “they basically teach you to clean from the vagina to the anus and never the other way around,” concludes Ido Bendet-Taicher, father of two girls and husband of Ido.

Not having a women in the house, gay dads may face some issues raising girls that they have to seek education themselves, even if they’ve been with women before coming out. “One day our older daughter complained she has pain in her chest,” reflects Ido, “and she kept complaining, so I had to ask a girlfriend of mine about it and she was the one who told me that girls experience pain in the area before the beginning of the development of the breasts. I didn’t know about it.”

Another interesting thing is that according to the dads, the fact that the girls come from a same-sex family doesn’t differentiate the way they play. “You would expect from kids in a same-sex family that when they play with dolls they would play not only mommy and daddy, but they don’t do that, and that’s really interesting,” says Eli. “I told them once, ‘you know you can also play mommy and mommy or daddy and daddy,’ and they said no, they wanted to play only mommy and daddy.”

Our Guests: Eli and Ido Bendet-Taicher

Eli and Ido live in NYC and have been together for over 15 years, 11 of them as a married couple. Eli is the head of global learning and development at Outbrain, an Ad Tech company, and Ido is the head of professional services at Bizzabo, an event software platform company. Eli and Ido participated in the innovative AOL documentary series Connected, which showed their life as a same-sex family in NYC.