Firstly, the best way to avoid gender disappointment is to refuse expectation of one gender over the other from the get-go.
When getting pregnant, every chance is halved in terms of gender possibility. There’s no guarantee for one over the other, and there’s truly nothing you can do to increase or decrease the chances in any which direction.
One of the best things to remember is that your child is not a “do-over” when it comes to your own childhood. For example, if you are posing this question as the mother– perhaps a woman who fully expected and anticipated a daughter, a little girl who you’d take shopping and do makeovers with and treat just differently somehow than how you were treated as a child– then you may be caught up in re-doing your own childhood over.
If anything, the only mirroring we should be doing in this case is considering how you would feel if your parents were disappointed that you weren’t the opposite gender. Ridiculous, right? You had no control over that. You’re innocent! And you definitely didn’t ask to be here. Your parents chose to have a child, how dare they prefer that you arrive differently. You are as you are, and you deserve love just as you are.
So does your baby.
I swore I was going to have a little girl, almost so much that I didn’t even consider what it would be like to have a boy. It wasn’t even a thought in my mind. And yet somehow, at our gender reveal ultrasound, I saw special little boy parts bounce across the screen and I’ve never felt more stunned in my entire life. Me, a boy mom?
Now? I can’t even imagine having had a girl! I love my son so much. He has taught me things about myself I’ve never known, and he’s loved me unconditionally, not in the same manner in which his Dad loves me, but it’s as if my little guy fully believes I’m a superhero, and I can do anything.
If you believe in a higher being, know that this source provides to us not what we want, but what we need. The daughter you got in exchange for the son you always wanted may cure cancer someday. The little boy who calls you “Mommy” that wasn’t the little girl you always dreamed of may discover planets, unity, vaccines, deeper bonds in humanity, who knows!
To be disappointed in the gender of your child is to not fully welcome what this life has in store not just for you, not just for him or her, but for all of us.