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AIBU?

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Original poster

To pray that smug mothers of little girls are ...

300 replies

ReallyTired · 28/07/2013 23:22

....sent a beautiful bouncing baby boy torando as their second child.

Those of us with two children realise that nature has a huge affect on a child's personality and ablity to behave.

I have two children and both of them are lovely now. However my son was permamently on the move as a two year old and we used to call him captain chaos. He was the sort of kid who would be into every cupboard, had the wooden spoon in the baby olympics or baby ivory league. (ie he had no desire to read Pride and Prejudice at the age of 2)

My daughter has a very different temperment. She is far more compliant, loves drawing jigsaws and isn't a muck magnet. I am sure that if she had been my first I would have been unbearably smug.

Boys take longer to grow up and my son at the age of eleven is lovely most of the time. He is still a muck magnet, but he has plenty of friends and doing well at school.

OP posts:
Rufus43 · 30/07/2013 10:09

Why am I so fucking slow at typing? How do you all do it!

SoupDragon · 30/07/2013 10:10

They seek confirmation of what they want to see when they observe their children

I suspect that may be more to do with pack mentality. Far more interesting to put a couple of boys in a roomful of girls (and vice versa) and see what happens.

DD (and me actually) could be more boylike because her primary influence at home is two older brothers. It is certainly not all down to gender.

elinorbellowed · 30/07/2013 10:12

I have never met a smug mother of girls and only heard about them on MN.
What I notice about mine is despite my best attempts to avoid gender stereotyping DS loves cars and guns and DD loves pink and babies. They are both physical and outdoorsy sometimes and both telly addicts sometimes. They both love stories about all different things.
DS was 'harder' as a baby, didn't sleep, very hungry, very clingy. He is more emotionally sensitive. DD slept more, was easier to BF, less clingy.
Nowadays DS is much more biddable than DD, much more eager to please, much more upset when told off, whereas DD is frankly a disobedient horror.

mrsjay · 30/07/2013 10:14

I was forced to be a girly girl when i was younger i was bloody miserable i was bought teasets and dolls which i wrote on with pen told i couldnt play with my boy cousins car because that was for boys granted that was decades ago
, but I think we are allowing our girls and boys to develop their own personalities nowadays well i know I did my dd is 20 and if she wanted a car she got one same with dd2 she liked barbies so she played with those saying girls are this and boys are that is still putting them into boxes of course male and female biology is different, but personality is a different thing imo, and I do think this boys will be boys thing is a load of bollocks ,

SoupDragon · 30/07/2013 10:17

Wrong quote in my previous post - not sure what happened. Was meant to be the bit about toddler parties.

googlyeyes · 30/07/2013 14:38

Just wondering though, if it's all down to social and familial conditioning, why was I about as far from a girly girl as you could get? My sister was the typical pink princess (still is, but that's another story) so how could that be?

And why does my ds2 display very strong 'feminine' traits? Have we treated him so differently to his siblings that he's not on message? Just like all the tomboyish girls described above

How can conditioning only apply to some children and not others if it's so powerful?

I know Cordelia Fine is always trotted out at this point (not sure if she's a lone voice as you only ever hear about her) but it seems pretty strange that the sexes are so different physically and yet in every other way we are supposed to start off pretty much neutral. We have very different hormones coursing around our bodies for a start...

AmandaPandtheTantrumofDoom · 30/07/2013 14:59

Cordelia Fine is not a lone voice. She gets recommended a lot because her book is written for a popular (not academic) audience, is easy to read and a good introduction.

Social and familial conditioning is one aspect of personality. It's not the only aspect. Of course you can still have a 'tomboy' (hate that word, but can't think of a better shorthand) and a 'girly girl' (ditto) in the same family.

And certainly personally, I don't believe that we start off neutral (though the hormone differences pre-puberty are far less than people make out). I believe that we can't know whether there is a biological basis because the masses of social conditioning make a fair test impossible. So how about we work a bit on the gendered nature of society and see what happens?

BigBoobiedBertha · 30/07/2013 16:14

I think there is potentially a significant statistical bias going on here that I don't think anybody has mentioned - we are, by a very large majority, women. I suspect that if you had a group of fathers having this conversation, the discussion might well turn out different. I do think that my view of my boys is going to be different from DH's view of them. For example, I get the cuddles and the chats about shoes (with DS2) He gets to go to footie matches and talk sport. For me he is shows his feminine side and isn't a typical boy but for his father he is most definitely masculine. It makes a bit of a mockery of stereotypes really. People are rarely that simple.

Just as an aside, I haven't read the Cordelia Fine book but have read a lot of reviews and on-going correspondence between her and Simon Baron Cohen in The Psychologists a year or two ago. She got criticised for apparently considering biology and nature to have little or no effect. Baron Cohen got criticised for not considering all the variables in testing gender differences in newborns. Dodgy variables aside, I have to say that the discussion put me off reading her book - I think that anybody who considers gender differences to be completely a social construct and nothing to do with our nature is a bit potty - just because it is difficult to pick out the effect of nature from all the other influences on personality, doesn't mean that nature is irrelevant, just that people are complex and objective analysis difficult. As I say though, I haven't read her book so maybe the view I have taken of what she seemed to be saying, both in the book and in the discussion is wrong.

Loa · 30/07/2013 16:20

Ha Ha- a lot of the behaviour labelled as 'boyish' in DS are visible and actually more pronounced in DD2.

DD2 is also up for pretty party dresses and playing with dolls.

everlong · 30/07/2013 16:20

This reply has been deleted

Message withdrawn at poster's request.

AmandaPandtheTantrumofDoom · 30/07/2013 16:30

That wasn't the view I got from her book Bertha - although admittedly I last read it about 18 months ago. The view from her book is more that all those studies that claim to 'prove' nature are deeply flawed and don't prove what they claim to prove. It's more a deconstruction of the claimed science around brain difference than an endorsement that it must therefore all be nurture.

hothereinnit · 30/07/2013 16:35

I am genuinely mystified as to why it is always mums of girls that get labelled 'smug' if they (apparently) have quieter, calmer children.

has the OP really never come across a quiet boy? one who is into reading, lego, computers etc? (or, dare I say it, fashion, music, etc?)

I come from a family of 'quiet' boys. My grandfather, uncles and brothers are all quiet, studious types. My dh is too. My stepson is another quiet boy.

And yet, when I had ds, loads of people were at great pains to point out that I would have my work cut out now (erm, what about dd1? the most hyper, constantly moving, loud child who ever breathed). Despite knwing most of the above family members.

Quite why they were sure ds would be such a loud, boisterous child, considering his genetics, I have no idea. So far he is 'just' being a baby. Loud sometimes (usually int he middle of the night Hmm), cuddly sometimes, inquisitive always.

AmandaPandtheTantrumofDoom · 30/07/2013 16:37

I just had a quick google for the correspondence. What Cordelia Fine says fits with what I thought she did in the book: The thesis of my book (no veils required) is that while social effects on sex differences are well-established, spurious results, poor methodologies and untested assumptions mean we don?t yet know whether, on average, males and females are born differently predisposed to systemizing versus empathising."

ubik · 30/07/2013 18:31

People arecomplex. We are born with different temperaments - but our environment impacts on our development inside the womb so it is impossible to seiedste nature/nurture.

What the many women on thus thread are keen to emphasise is that the individual differences between their children go far, far deeper than any perceived cookie-cutter gender traits.

intheshed · 30/07/2013 18:35

everlong, the only reason mums of girls say things like that is to counteract the people who say things like 'ooh, I bet you want a boy this time'.

So when DD2 was born people asked the inane question 'are you glad it's another girl?' to which, of course, my response was yes! If it had been the other way round my response would have been the same.

I have heard plenty of mums of boys say things like 'I could never have girls, I couldn't be doing with brushing all that hair every morning' or 'the thing with boys is they really love their mums' .

butterflyexperience · 30/07/2013 18:45

You what op???

I have 2 dd's and bet they'll run your boy ragged!!

What a pathetic stereotype to have of children

AmandaPandtheTantrumofDoom · 30/07/2013 18:46

Everlong - I heard a mum of boy/girl twins (under a year) congratulate a mum who'd just had a boy by saying "oh, that's wonderful. Boys are so much more cuddly". Also mums of boys who've said things to me (have two girls) like "boys are so much more straightforward. Girls are really devious". It's very sad, but the idiocy comes from both sides.

Bowlersarm · 30/07/2013 18:53

Ah hem.

Can I just direct you all to a concurrent thread about whether to have a second child.

Post number four-ish something like 'if my first child had been a boy I might have had a second. As it was I got my girl'

Is that not the perfect 'smug mum of a girl' comment? To all of you who say smug mums of girls don't exist?

(Sorry if bad form to quote thread on a thread, but couldn't let it go)

everlong · 30/07/2013 18:53

This reply has been deleted

Message withdrawn at poster's request.

AmandaPandtheTantrumofDoom · 30/07/2013 19:00

Everlong - I'm not denying that some women favour girls. I'm saying that there's a fair number out there that favour boys too. I've heard a woman say she'd had two and they were both boys so she wasn't having any more because she didn't want all that 'girly bitchiness' in the teenage years. I was pretty [shocked].

intheshed · 30/07/2013 19:02

Sounds like she is just a twat then. Don't tar us all with the same brush. Some of my best friends are mothers of boys, honest!

JerseySpud · 30/07/2013 19:04

You need to meet my 2 year old DD.

Whirlwind? Thats nothing on her.

everlong · 30/07/2013 19:06

This reply has been deleted

Message withdrawn at poster's request.

leonardofquirm · 30/07/2013 20:36

I have 2 DSs, the oldest it's fairly quiet and chilled and the youngest is a climbing running maniac and he's only 1. He also likes to cuddle dolls Grin

Plomino · 30/07/2013 21:47

I have 4 boys and one girl . Guess which one of all of them has been the most demanding , argumentative , destructive force of nature of the lot ? Yes , you guessed it . The one with hair down to her bum , wearing the Cinderella dress with the Return of the Jedi cloak , Darth Vader mask and spangly Wellies , running amok with the Nerf gun . In between baking and colouring nicely of course .

I am hoping that the qualities that sometimes make her a royal PITA now, ( persistence, constant energy and a need to know about EVERYTHING) are those that are going to stand her in good stead later on .