Have you seen the advert about helping your child with THEIR grammar? It was at the top of the page when I came on to GN today, but has now disappeared, possibly because I was glaring at it. Why can't it just say, for example, "Help your child with grammar"? It reminds me of letters I see at work, often from podiatrists or dieticians. They give the patient's name, so they do know whether they are talking about a man or a woman, and then go on about "them" and "their" instead of "he", "she", "his" and "her ". It reads really awkwardly and I wish they would stop it. 
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I suppose they don't want to refer to a child as 'it' 
Are the letters you receive not a preset format where the 'writer' would just insert Mrs. Bloggs or whatever?
At least GHQ used the correct their
at the side - sorry!! 
The ad would have annoyed me too, had I seen it.
However, I don't generally have a problem with the singular "they/their" to refer to a single person of unspecified gender. We can no longer use 'he'/'his' as used to be the norm, and saying 'he or she' / 'his or her' has now become old fashioned, not to mention clumsy if repeated. Nor can we use 'it' for a person, with the exception perhaps of an unborn or new-born baby.
Yes, we can often re-word a sentence to avoid the problem, but we shouldn't really need to go to such lengths, should we?
'They' serves the purpose very well, although it's worth noting that its use in this wayis nothing new. Many famous authors throughout history have used it and apparently it is even widely used in many versions of the Bible, including the King James version.
So why does the advert bother me, you are probably wondering. Well, I have to admit that I don't really know! I guess I must be guilty of double standards, expecting one thing from us ordinary people and something else from so-called experts. 
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