The Times Section 2 today article about boys

[edgarcat]

Message withdrawn

I quite like Steve Biddulph although I disagree with him about childcare before the age of 3 and I can't remember the bit about boys seeing their mothers naked but it sounds bonkers to me. It's a while since I read either of them but I've got Raising Boys and The Secret of Happy Children and seem to remember preferring the latter. I haven't read the article being discussed (so actually, I should shut up but never mind!) but I'm a feminist who used to believe in nurture over nature too. Having had one ds and observed lots of other children I now think nature dominates and boys and girls are very different. I wouldn't necessarily say that girls are more manipulative though, agree with Bells about how political men are able to be at work. Mind you, I've seen some capable women on that front too.

miriramw, I agree about the Thomas stories - I read one of them to ds tonight, hate them. Did Rev Awdry teach prep school boys or am I making that up?

I think Steve Biddulph is on This morning tomorrow.
Doormat, too true about all children being manipulative.

Monkey, seems the perfect end to a Barbie dol to me

There's some good evidence for certain aspects of severe PND being more harmful to boys in terms of the effects being more pronounced. I think it may be limited to showing babies a blank, disinterested face when they are trying to communicate with you, but that won't do babies of either sex any good. I was certainly mindful of that when I had my first bout of PND. I forced myself to keep my expression cheerful, or at least, expressive, and to interact with him no matter how I felt.

monkey, IKWYM about people thinking you'll be disappointed with 2/3 boys. I find it quite amusing.

miriamw,
my dd1 loved Thomas the Tank Engine when she was little and my niece who is three is the same.
I have two dds and one ds and all I can say about the differences between boys and girls is that my two daughters are as different to one another as they are to their brother, in other words, they are all individuals like all children.

Interesting thread ... I have 'Raising Boys' and remember reading about mothers with PND making boys sad ... I think that is when I switched off as the guilt was too much for me. I also can't be doing with the fact he says boys shouldn't go into childcare until 3 ... again too much guilt for those mums who have to/need to/want to work.
I remember being told at Uni, when I was training to be a teacher about gender stereotypes ... that it was all about Nurture, not nature ... Well, I disagree ... totally. I have done nothing SPECIFIC to turn my son into a 'lad' but he is ALL boy ... my SIL did everything in her power to stop her dd being pink and girly and she is the most fairy like, pink, girly 6 year old you have ever met!
On the other hand ... They are showing one of Professor Winston's programmes in NZ at the moment ... you probably all saw it ages ago ... about Human Instinct. One particular bit showed that they dressed a baby in blue and watched how people played with it and how they talked to it ... then they dressed the same baby in pink ... and watched how people played with the baby. It was very interesting ... nearly all the people told the 'boy' baby that he was big and strong ... they bounced him up and down and told him he would probably be a policeman/fireman etc. Nearly everyone cradled the 'girl' baby ... sang to her softly ... told her how pretty she was ... and that she was going to break hearts one day!!!
So .... even if we wanted to avoid gender stereotyping totally ... can we really do so????????

I was brought up in the seventies by a truly feminist boiler-suited mother who swallowed the whole guilt-trip inducing nurture-over-nature argument that mothers alone are responsible for the conditioning (and so underperformance/failures/whatever) of their offspring. As a result, my sister and I were denied dolls, dolls-houses or ANYTHING remotely pink. We were never allowed to wear skirts or dresses - Oh no, dungarees and trousers all the way for us in our brave new, self-determining, non-sexist world!

It wasn't so bad for me, since I was a bit of a 'tomboy' anyway, and actively wanted Meccano, Lego etc. My sister really suffered, though. She was a truly 'pink tutu' dolly sort of girl.

Well, until DS was born, I went along with my mum's way of thinking, but could see from day one of son's birth that it just DIDN'T apply. In my view they come out with personalities pretty well-formed, and DS was different from the girls and similar to most other boys. Now at 2.4 - predictably - he loves Thomas etc, and I do think that the sexes are characterised in different ways, but that it's a bit of a continuum and that generalisations can only be made with the huge reservation that individuals differ widely.

Also I don't like the whole 'tricksy girlies' angle. In general, girls have much stronger communication skills (a physiological strength I'm sure I've read - firmly proven) at an earlier age, and I think that they just operate on a deeper emotional level from the very start. I'd hate to think that this was seen as undesirable...

Haven't had a chance to read all of this long thread, so hope I haven't repeated others.

ghosty,

I haven't got my copy at hand, but I don't think he means that they shouldn't have any childcare under 3, he is just commenting on the type and sugesting "institutional childcare" isn't the right type (ie nursery). I thought his point was that there should be a consistent and loving relationship with one or two key adults eg childminder, nanny, grandparent.

I agree that nature has a lot to do with it, and indeed that hormones play a large role (as Biddulph suggests). I've certainly found this personally as I suffer from a hormonal disorder which leaves me with very high levels of testosterone, and all the competitive instinct that goes with it. What really brought it home was when I had to do a Myers-Briggs test whilst pregnant - my results were totally different to previous scores (all fairly similar). So yes, we are all individual, but there will be traits that will show up based on the scale of gender, nad if as Biddulph suggests, the gender differences are hormonal, then we're not dealing with absolutes, but with a range.

Oh wow, how strange to hear those words "Myers-Briggs" again. I did a full questionnaire when I lived in a community, as it's meant to be good for people living together - to see why they might act in a certain way or get cross at certain types of behaviour in others. I found it utterly, utterly fascinating and would love to do it again. I lived with a lot of "INFPs" - all blokes, all gay, two of them ex-monks! - but I was the opposite. I talked a lot about Myers Briggs to the people at my previous job, who completely poo-pooed the idea that psychological profiling can reveal anything of use, but I found it fantastic.

i AM enfJ