Boys will be boys

Well, what’s the answer?  Are boys and girls, men and women, really different?  Do they develop differently, play differently, learn differently?  The nature-nurture debate is one that has fascinated me for a long time, and it has come up in a personal way at regular intervals throughout my life.

As a teacher, I am still reminded every so often by the powers-that-be that boys and girls learn differently, and we have to make sure to include lots of different teaching methods to reach both genders.  Yep on the different methods, not so much on its being related to gender.  In my experience, everyone learns better if you mix it up a bit, include multiple senses, and try to engage as much of the brain as possible.

Yet there is a persistent belief among elementary teachers that it’s a lot harder to have a class that is heavy on the boys.  That class will automatically be presumed to be more active and contain more behavior problems.  The class that is heavy on the girls is sighed over with relief.  This makes me profoundly sad, for all of us.

But it’s hard – as a parent or as a teacher – to deny that there seem to be differences between the boys as a group and the girls as a group.  So I’ve often wondered what caused it.  Are we just born with differences, or are they socialized?  The centrist in me wants to just nod at the middle ground and say that it’s surely a combination.  That’s probably still my official position.

Then I became a parent, and it’s been a whole new perspective for me on the gender debate.  We let the sex of our first child be a surprise, and it was incredible to me how hard it was to find neutral items – clothes, gear, etc. – to put on our registry.  I don’t have any particular love for yellow and green, but we were showered with quite a lot of those colors.  I think people were probably relieved when Sebastian was born and they could just go the easy route of getting “boy stuff.”  Even I found that I loved dressing him in the new “boy” clothes because they were a change from the pastel neutrals, and blue is my favorite color anyway.

I’m thinking, though, that clothes and nursery decorations don’t make much difference.  It’s really our behavior toward our kids and our reactions to the little people they already are that contributes to the nurture side of this gender story.  It’s the research that showed that people treated the same baby differently depending on what s/he was wearing.  They jiggled and bounced the “boy” more, talked to and cooed over the “girl” more.  The same exact baby!  So you can’t say that it was some innate thing about the child him or herself that caused the adults to act in a certain way.

Now there is more research coming out that contradicts our notions of innate traits.  Girls talk sooner?  Turns out that mothers talk significantly more to girls than to boys, and we already know that the more you talk to and with a child, the better his or her language skills will be.  Boys are more active and less verbal?  That’s a lot like saying that girls aren’t as good at math, and anyone who knows me knows what I think of that drivel.

So how does that come back around to me as a parent?  Well, I’m finding it hard lately not to be frustrated at how difficult it is to find traditionally girl toys for my son that don’t look girly.  It took my family a long time to find doll accessories (bed, high chair, stroller) that were not pink.  Play kitchens and dollhouses that are gender-neutral are typically the wooden ones that cost way more (though I love wooden toys, and like to tell myself that I’d be buying those even if I had a girl first).  It irks me, but I’m not willing to be deterred or to fill up my house with toy vehicles.

Lo and behold, my son was cooking pancakes and strawberries the other day.  {No, I don’t cook strawberries, but he loves them right now, so if you ask what he’s cooking, that’s usually his first answer.}  He spent ten minutes giving a baby a bottle of milk at a friend’s house the other day.

And here he is, helping his little dollhouse people go “up, up the steps, sit down, and go wheeee down the swing.”

I’ve decided that if I give him a fire truck for his birthday AND stuff for his baby doll and just let him play with each as he chooses (and encourage both), that’s the best I can do right now.

I have a feeling I’ll be revisiting this, as the questions get harder than just which toys to buy or how to decorate the new nursery…

Meanwhile, here’s a question to ask yourself:  When you read the title of this post, what did you think it would be about?