he/she wants?

I would like to know an opinion of a native speaker or see some website as a proof.

"it" can be used to refer to a baby or a child when the gender is not clear from the context.

In the sentence we are discussing the impersonal "The child" is used, so it would be natural to follow that usage with "it". Where possible, I would use a name followed by he or she e.g. "(Little) Tom's crying because he's tired."

From this extract you'll see that there are a lot of examples of the usage of "it" with child (apart from the Tatoeba sentence we are discussing).

https://www.google.com.au/#q=%2...+because+it%22

Thanks.

Yes, as patgfisher said, if the gender is unclear, we do tend to use 'it' in spoken English to refer to the person until we know what gender it is. For example, when someone is pregnant we'll ask, "is it a boy or a girl?" and if the mother doesn't want to know then the child will be an 'it' until it is born. The mother might say, "Oh, it's kicking!"

In this sentence we don't know the gender so I chose to say 'it' because 'he/she' is awkward at best. In written English, it's more common to see 'he/she' or sometimes 's/he', whereas in spoken English we do use it.

I am a native English speaker. My mother is Belgian and I lived in Antwerp (and was sent to the local schools) from my fourth to tenth year, as well as directly after graduating from university. I majored in Dutch at UC Berkeley and later attended the Dutch State School of Interpreting and Translating in Maastricht, although I did not complete the programme. I have lived in Utrecht, Rotterdam and Maastricht in the Netherlands, and Geel and Antwerp in Belgium. I have translated one complete book (publication pending) and several small documents. I do not, however, have any translating credentials. When I speak or write Dutch I tend to use Belgian Dutch but of course I can read and understand Netherlands Dutch as well.

While it (gender unknown pronoun) can be used, in real life if the speaker really knows why the child is crying, he or she is also very likely to know the sex of the child, so the speaker would likely say he or she rather than it.

As pargfisher implies, we'd quite likely actually use the child's name.

This would be a more natural-sounding English sentence.

Tom is crying, because he wants to eat.