Some languages (particularly German) use the neutral gender when referring to children. It's actually quite jarring for me as a German to have a child (especially a generic child) referred to as "he" or "she" in English.
You're right, of course, but this sounds pretty rude in English. It would be nice if there was some way to privately suggest a correction without making a big deal out of things.
As someone who speaks other languages, I know there's a point where it's hard to make progress because you are fluent enough to be understood easily and yet you make significant mistakes that nobody will bother to correct unless you ask.
I don't actually understand the downvotes you are getting, unless people think that this just isn't adding to the conversation, but in the interests of making lemonaide:
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?
A language is defined in terms of how it is used, but a language is not supposed to be used in the way it was defined, if so, we'd still be speaking proto-indo-european, or maybe we'd never be able to speak, as there wouldn't exist any grammar before a language existed. So, being a grammar nazi is plain stupid.
Be charitable. If you haven't been exposed to actual linguistics (and know about things like PIE), you have the current, normal, common-sense view on language, which is that what you speak is normal, and what speakers of any other dialect or language do it wrong. I've heard intelligent, university educated people say things like "I don't want to learn $Language with an accent". The fact that no such 'accent-less' language exists is simply not a fact that they know. Such misconceptions about, and people who suffer under them are misguided, not stupid.
Misconceptions do not matter here. One may have misconceptions, but this does not justify correcting people for their grammatical errors on a thread that has nothing to do with grammar or whatsoever and thus hijacking it. It should be obvious that a serious lot of people here are not native-speakers.
