"It" is typically reserved for inanimate, non-sentient objects in English.
Besides, the story wasn't about a generic child, but a "small boy, maybe 6 or 7 years old" and was referred to with "his", "he", etc. multiple times.
Besides, the story wasn't about a generic child, but a "small boy, maybe 6 or 7 years old" and was referred to with "his", "he", etc. multiple times.
We often use neuter (gender-neutral) pronouns in English, just not this one. I've heard native English speakers say things like "If a mother wants to use the nursing room, they can just key in the code in their pamphlet". There are definitely restrictions on using 'gender-neutral they' but this kind of usage is totally normal.
Which is a great sentence, because semantically the pronoun referent is obligatorily female and singular. And yet, we use 'they' in this context. Which shows (among other things) that syntactic requirements can be relatively divorced from semantics. C'mon, that's pretty cool, right?
My two cents.