What makes boys so very different from girls? It’s much more than DNA, it’s due to the wiring in their brains.
Talking with your friends at a playgroup, you watch one girl make a beeline for the dolls while a boy races around burning off energy.
We’ve all heard the cliché about girls being different than boys, but is it true? Are they hardwired differently from birth, or do we make them different by how we treat them? It’s the age-old nature vs nurture debate.
It’s clear that boys’ and girls’ brains are biologically different. Hormones play a large part in this when, at around week six of pregnancy, the baby’s sex is fixed.
Boys receive a huge dose of male hormones—mostly testosterone—which affects their developing brain. Girls continue to develop without this hormonal boost, and although they will produce female hormones (estrogen and progesterone) these seem to have little influence on how the brain develops.
Boys’ brains tend to grow larger in general (about 12–20 percent), whereas some researchers have revealed that the region of the brain that controls language and emotion tends to be larger in girls.
From birth, baby girls are more sensitive to touch than baby boys and are more comforted by soothing words and singing. At just a few hours old, girls are more interested in people’s faces than boys who are likely to be equally drawn to interesting objects.
Baby girls tend to coo and gurgle at people. Most baby boys are equally chatty but are as likely to babble at a favorite toy as at a person.
However, a study by the Institute of Psychiatry in London shows that only 3 percent of the variation in boys’ and girls’ speech development is due to their gender. Even before understanding language, girls seem better at recognizing emotions in speech.
One study of babies two to four days old showed that girls spent twice as long as boys keeping eye contact with a silent adult and also looked longer when the adult was talking. Boys’ attention span, however, was the same whether the adult was talking or silent.
A baby boy has just as much testosterone as a 12-year-old boy. These levels drop a few months after birth, with a surge again at four years old.
As toddlers, girls usually display better fine motor skills, for example, holding crayons and pulling up zippers. Boy toddlers tend to like more rough and tumble play and they have 30 percent more muscle mass than girls, which might link to a need to run around.
They can be more adventurous and are more likely to explore beyond the comfort zone of their parents. Boys can demonstrate a better spatial ability than girls, which means they’re more attracted to 3D toys, such as footballs and building blocks, as well as moving objects, such as toy cars.
But how many of these apparent differences are actually related to biology and how many relate to how we as a society treat children?
Some research argues that differences in boys’ and girls’ brains are soft- rather than hard-wired and that we’re dressing up stereotypes—caused by how we treat children—as science. Are boys more attracted to building blocks because they are encouraged to play with them? Gender stereotypes can be reinforced by parents, often unconsciously.
For example, boys are more likely to be praised for being “brave” and girls for being “kind,” so it can be easy for a parent to reinforce feminine or masculine stereotypes without making an active decision to do so. If you notice yourself doing this, try varying your approach.
If your son loves climbing, great, but also nurture his quiet, focused side by sitting down and drawing with him or creating clay shapes. If your girl toddler loves books, remember to play ball games with her and praise her prowess on the jungle gym, too.
When dressing a baby it is hard to avoid the commercialization of gender stereotypes—little pink and blue outfits adorn the shelves of baby shops. Pink for girls and blue for boys seems ingrained in some cultures, yet for centuries both sexes wore the same clothes.
When colored clothing came into fashion, pink was first associated with boys, and blue was favored for girls because it was the color associated with the Virgin Mary and femininity.
This color coding switched over in the 1940s in Western Europe, so is actually a very recent fashion. Gender stereotyping happens worldwide, but there are some historical and cultural exceptions.
Girls in North American Indian tribes chop and carry wood just as much as the boys do and the women hunt buffalo alongside the men.
Cultural differences can exist within a country too: African-American parents in the US, for instance, are less likely to stick to typical gender roles for their children whereas Mexican-American families are more likely to conform to traditional roles. In Sweden there is an active movement to discourage typical gender stereotypes, starting in kindergarten.
In Sweden, some kindergartens call children “friends” rather than “boys” and “girls” in an effort to break down gender stereotypes.
By treating your child as an individual, rather than defined by sex, you will help open up his or her world. Perhaps the reversion to type will happen anyway, but at least you can offer them the scope to choose. If you provide a stimulating environment full of opportunities, who knows what path they will take in life. It will be fun to watch.