"Boys are a handful"

I assumed the OP was talking about behavioural/psychological differences rather than physical differences.

In your opinion, is there no relationship between the two?

Any inborn differences are definitely exaggerated by society. This is what feminists have called ‘male socialisation’ and ‘female socialisation’.

I tend to return to ‘is this behaviour demonstrated in our nearest mammalian relatives? Ie the other Great Apes?’ when trying to figure out what is nature and what is nuture.

Boys being more into rough and tumble play (due to being stronger than girls and thus less afraid of injury/less need for self protection?) is something that occurs cross species, whereas as stuff like clothing differences (girls in pink with less sturdy shoes!) obviously does not, and in humans it often begins before the child is old enough to display any interest, so it’s an adult projection onto the child…

But then I tend to think of extremely gendered dressing as something that has arisen as part of human-mate attraction/sexual signalling - hence Saturday night nightclubs being all
high heels, short skirts and false eyelashes for the women and tight v neck t shirts designed for maximum-muscle-display and fake tan for the chaps.
Whereas at home on Sunday morning both sexes are probably wearing near-identical baggy sweatpants and hoodies!

(and gender nonconformity within same sex attracted groups can function similarly, although perhaps in a more complex, more nuanced, distinctively subcultural way).

If we were more like other mammals we could discard all the weird gendered dressing and just sniff each other’s bottoms 🙀 but as we are the only species that routinely conceals our primary sex characteristics (genitals) we’ve evolved (?) to have some noticeable secondary sex characteristics (female breasts and hips/thighs, male facial + body hair, male deep voices, significant height differences etc) and then we further exaggerate those secondary characteristics for mate-attraction (and date night with our existing partners).

look at traditional weddings for the most obvious example - bet your average bride and groom both wear jeans on a normal Saturday, but she’s now wearing a white gown and him a dark suit!

(obvs same sex couples disrupt this a bit and there is no expectation for a bride-bride couple to both wear dresses, but most groom-groom couples do wear suits, often with more colour/texture variation than grooms marrying brides).

All just idle thoughts, really.

My main takeaway from it all as a parent is that we should try our best not to project onto small children and encourage them to develop their own interests and tastes, whilst being aware enough of the bell curve averages to use it to our advantage (a heads up on what might be to come) without using it to limit our children or freak ourselves out when our own children are outliers.

Statistics and averages are for societal forward planning (what services is this population likely to need in future?) rather than a parenting manual.

I assumed the OP was talking about behavioural/psychological differences rather than physical differences.

Even if there is an evidenced ‘bigger picture’ average difference between girls and boys, this kind of generalised sexist nonsense applied to individual children just exacerbates and enforces a stereotype.

Which becomes self perpetuating.

What research please? I'd like to read it

I'll add I thibk boys are challenging, whilst girls are far 'easier' and I know many and have worked with many, so this is my general opinion

Our boy was much more easy going than our girl, so easier to get along with and raise.

I believe they are fundamentally different, in many ways. I too also have both.

I saw quite an eye-opening experiment being done on one of those recent TV shows featuring a group of very young children and a panel of child psychologists etc.

My girls are like tazmanian devils and musky son was my trick child that made me think it was easy

But even this assumption can widen differences. Mothers' expectations of children's abilities inform what they encourage their child to do way before 1 or 2 years old.
(Gender Bias in Mothers’ Expectations about Infant Crawling :Gender Bias in Mothers' Expectations about Infant Crawling)

It's hard to know what comes first, the chicken or the egg. Boys are socialised differently from birth - there is research showing that caregivers are more responsive and have more interactions with girl babies, but will encourage boy babies to be more active and (later on) to take more risks. Since it is these early interactions which 'wire' children's brains, it's perhaps unsurprising that often quite young boys appear to be wired differently from girls.

Two different biological models, but gender and expression is so very difficult to make any clear judgements on. So much as a pp says in what is projected onto children from birth, the expectations, what's encouraged and discouraged even subconsciously, how actions and responses are interpreted.

Have you taught a range of ages? Because if you compare girls in nursery and reception to any older age you will see a big difference in assertiveness and confidence. So much of it is learnt behaviour.

Whenever I get those kinds of comments, I tend to reply with a simple "Are they? What makes you say that?" and then offer counter examples to whatever they come up with.

Differences exist, they are initially small and then can be exacerbated by socialisation. The degree to which any child is affected by socialisation depends on how "gendered" their environment is. It's impossible in our current society to have genuinely "neutral" parenting and teaching environments.

I have two boys. They are both well behaved, considerate, complex, polite, able to empathise, sympathise, emote, capable of sitting still and concentrating, don't engage in rough and tumble when it's not reciprocated or appropriate etc etc. It pisses me off beyond belief when other people excuse children's bad behaviour as acceptable because of their sex.

Something like "loving pink" I think is clearly totally different than things like intellectual or physical development, right? I've never heard anyone talk about the former as an innate difference, idiotic ideas about gender notwithstanding.

It's pretty well known that many issues present very differently in boys and girls.

Here’s a couple of books that might be interesting to you:

www.amazon.co.uk/Invisible-Women-Exposing-World-Designed/dp/1784706280/ref=asc_df_1784706280/

www.waterstones.com/book/testosterone/carole-hooven/rachel-perry/9781788402934

obviously the sex differences between boys and girls become more pronounced at puberty (both physically and behaviourally) but we use different growth charts for height and weight from birth (and I have been told by a midwife friend that there are differences in pregnancy too) and if physical differences exist from birth (or prior to birth) it would be weird to assume that behaviourally differences only exist later on - they are generally noticeable once you get the kids into a more or less M/F 50/50 group of 20 or more, eg infant school!)

For the record, I was one of those Duracell bunny girls myself, we definitely exist and are not erased by the acknowledgment of different averages. I have a massive soft spot for the energetic, full-on kids of either sex (and especially the girls due to personal bias ❤️)
There are always naturally occurring outliers and there is absolutely nothing wrong with any of us who don’t fit in with the expected ‘norms’.

Obviously our individual genes play a massive role too.

(the next bit is just an expansion on my thoughts, it’s absolutely not said in relevance to the personal stories on this thread, I am just a rando on the internet and I absolutely do not want to make anyone worried or upset! It’s purely general conversation)

Calculating average behaviours in childhood is additionally complicated by things like physical disability, SEN, traumatic birth, gestational age at birth etc (which is why an older kid/teenager referred to CAMHS will have their full medical history taken, including mum’s health in pregnancy and pre pregnancy).

Boys are more likely to be diagnosed with ASD/ADHD (especially at primary school age) but the actual occurrence of such neurodifferences might be a lot more equal than the diagnostic figures suggest (but that’s partly because of sex differences in average presentations, with girls less likely to be ADHD and more likely to be ADD and girls being better at ‘masking’ ASD, especially in the prepubertal years).

Yeah, I can't really agree. As someone said above, obviously there is overlap, but taken in larger numbers there are some clear trends. One of them being that their developmental trajectory is different when young.

I do think boys are more likely to be very active youngsters. Though I find girls more difficult teenagers, with these very complicated social hierarchies that cause a lot of angst.

I know, for example with reading, there is a theory that boys nervous system develops in a different way which accounts for them being later readers, on average. Something to do with myelination? IIRC.

I'd be interested to know why you would think there were no differences?

Of course individuals are different. Not everyone fits into a mould. But overall yes there are fundamental differences between boys and girls .

I think there are differences, not for all, but as general rules of thumb. Before they have a chance to even be remotely affected by society, so I'm talking 1 or 2 years old, the boys are, generally, more rough and tumble, the girls more cautious. Not all, of course, but generally.
It's society definitely though that widens this gap from there on, unfortunately.

Totally agree.

I saw quite an eye-opening experiment being done on one of those recent TV shows featuring a group of very young children and a panel of child psychologists etc.

I am slightly hazy on the details, but basically two groups of adults were each asked to play with a very young kid in a room. The child was young enough that you couldn't tell their sex. The same array of toys was given to both groups, but one was told the child was a boy and the other that they were a girl. Maybe the child was dressed as a stereotypical boy on the first occasion and a girl on the other.
The adults behaved very differently depending on what sex they thought the child was. Those who thought they were a boy tended to encourage them to play with cars, build things etc, and those who thought they were a girl chose and offered dolls, games involving dressing and hair-brushing etc.

I don't think these adults knew, or even thought, they were behaving differently. It's so drummed into us, in a really subliminal way, that we don't notice we're doing it.

Also remember that any genuine differences in sex and behaviour - once you account for socialisation, which you can't really do - are going to be so slight and/or overlapping (in children) as to be meaningless. We had a discussion on another thread about this - if we measured 'empathy' and found that 65% of girls are 15% more empathetic than boys - what does that actually tell us? How would you use that information?

I think people project way more than they realise onto the behaviour/sex link of their child.

A good thought experiment if you have more than one child is to imagine one or both is the other sex and what attributes you might then say were due to them being a boy or girl. For example, if you have two girls and one is more energetic than the other, you might just see that as personality differences, but if that one was a boy you would then have 'reason' to say 'my boy is more energetic than my girl, therefore there is evidence for boys being more energetic than girls in general'. Whereas once you can see them as just different people you don't think about whether they're male/female so much.

I know boys that are 'typical boys' because they're rough and tumble or 'typical boys' because they are sciencey and into computers. But I know the same boys also love pink or dressing up etc but it's never 'typical boy who loves pink'.

Agree with thecloglady and also with OP!

I think (but am incapable of remembering where I've read stuff) that girl's brains mature slightly quicker in infancy. If you combine that with gendered socialisation (which is devastatingly still going on - I have 2 kids in school and also work in schools) which does nurture stuff with girls and tough stuff with boys, you're going to see differences. Add to that the insanely toxic "boys don't cry" message and I believe you can see the roots of a lot of the world's troubles.

And that's before you factor in the influence of the adults in these children's lives.

I'd really really love to disrupt socialisation and stereotyping but fear we're currently going backwards.

Obviously once children hit puberty their biological differences sky rocket, adult men and women are totally different.