girls develop language skills faster than boys???

[mrsflux]

just wondering what you thought really.

i generally hang out with the mummies of boys from antenatal and all the ds are roughly at the same stage in their language/ speech development.

we bumped into one of the mums of girls at the park and she gleefully told us how her 16mo can count to ten, say all her nursery rhyme characters! (yes i am a bit )
apparently all of the girls are much further along than our boys.

is this normal? are the girls all just freakishly early developers?

ps i'm not worried abut ds as the chances of him and ALL the other boys having issues in this area is tiny!

no I don't think so. If a girl can count to 10, she was taught to do so. If you don't teach a 16 month old to count to ten, they don't IME

Not my girls! I think they were about three years old before they could recite numbers and nursery rhymes and four years old before they could actually count.

I would be sceptical about what this mother is saying. I probably wouldn't even believe her unless I saw the child myself.

Ah.... you have met a Professional Mummy. Has probably been drilling the 16mo with flash cards since it exited the womb and now that she's got the nursery rhyme characters taped they're moving on to memorising the soliloquy from Hamlet. Avoid such people...

I hate sweeping generalisations... but... females are generally more advanced linguistically than males the same age and males have better spatial awareness e.g. will be able to catch a ball earlier. In onestudy women were found to talk three times more than men (ya don't say)

I was very much against reading, learning to count etc, but if they want to do it you can't stop them. I remember my ds recognising all the numbers on buses before age 2 and reading the labels on my clothes/street signs etc. He started having tantrums if I didn't explain words that he saw. I know I sound a bit defensive, but it used to embarass me because I thought people would accuse me of hothousing. They are all different and have different interests, so I'd give that mum a break. I know plenty of girls who don't talk in sentences until 3 btw. I think it evens out.

good!

ds is a very happy chap and just starting to pick up words like ball, bubble, daddy, hello.
he understands way more than this though - 'give daddy his keys', 'where's monkey/ daddy/ etc'

i'm not worried i just didn't know whether to be amazed at the little girl being a genius/ not believe her mum!

It was the adverb 'gleefully' that gave the game away...... The woman was bragging. Normal parents that happen to have clever kids tend to be more modest.

In my DS' peer group he was the first to properly talk (now 2.6). He was talking in full sentences at 18 months and none of the others were - mixed group of boys and girls.

I think it depends entirely on the child for this one.

According to Pink Brain Blue Brain there's very little difference in actual brain between the genders and more between individuals. Boys can improve their language skills with the right encouragement and girls can improve their spatial skills (both of which improve balanced-brain learning, incidentally).

ive noticed girls tend to be slightly quicker in these things but only slightly, and one of the best talkers i know is a boy so it just depends really. your ds sounds like he is doing fine, the lady sounds a bit of a bragger - quite an annoying trait

Girls in general get more social input than boys. They cotton on faster that smiling and pouting gets people to talk to them. Hence people tend to interact more with girls and they are therefore perceived to pick up language and social skills slightly faster.

Like in all things like this though it evens out with time.

BTW a 16 month old may be able to count to 10 but will not have any concept of what they are actually doing - just repeating something they've learnt by rote.

I have a 3 year old DS with severe speech delays, and I can say that it's a 3 to 1 rate (three boys to one girl) in all the group therapies we have been with speech therapist. He will be going to a special nursery which provides excellent support for children with speech development problems (that is expressive speech - not receptive) and there are 14 children - 10 of which are boys.

In my experience, there are more boys who learn to speak later (2.5 +) than girls.

My best friend has a girl (same age as DS1, who is now 4) and she could say 'helicopter' before my son could say 'dad'. She could say all her basic shapes and colors about 6 months before DS, and her mom was completely laid back about it, never bragged. Sometimes, people just state the facts, and some children have excellent communication skills at a very young age.

Oh yes, as for numbers, that's not always true. DS2 (the one with the speech delay) could identify at all the numbers 1-10 before he was 18 months old. The first thing he pointed at were numbers. Door numbers, number plates, page numbers in books... He now at 3 years old can count up to one hundred and some of his first words were 1-10. He can do basic additions, on his own, without pushing from us. For example, yesterday we were walking down the street and as usual, showed me a door number (let's say, it was 53). He said 53. Next door, he pointed at the number and said 51. So he said: next door, 49? (before he actually saw the number).

Anyway, What I'm trying to say is that some children 'get' numbers from a very very young age, and parents' should be ashamed that their kid is advanced in a specific area. Wether it's language, or anything.

In our NCT group of 7 babies (yes, I know, not even close to being a statistical sample!), three of the four boys were all MUCH faster at language development than all the girls (the other boy was about the same as the girls). There might be a slight tendency overall for girls to develop language more quickly, but there's so much variation that it's not really relevant at the individual level. Probably more risk from creating an expectation that a boy is going to develop more slowly in this area, IMO, in case it affects the way you interact with him.

(Again I completely agree with you and feel your pain . When DS was about two and a half, his favourite game was 'taking in turns counting' up to 120 (why it was always 120 I don't know ). Anyway, it's one of those things that's fine at home, but can be a little embarrassing when he demands to do it at the top of his voice in Boots.)