The differences between boys and girls....

[Givemecaffeine21]

I've got one of each aged 26 months and 15 months and am finding out all sorts of things about how diffrrent the sexes really are. I'd be interested to hear other people's views but so far I've found:

1.My son cries, has cried, and continues to cry a lot more than my daughter. He is a full on Drama King and my friends sons are the same they tell me. He can trip and land gently on his padded bottom and you'd think the world was ending. And the whining.....oh the whining.....

1. My son is more affectionate than my daughter and loves cuddles. He wants to me on me, with me, all the time. When it isn't irritating (trying to cook dinner etc), it's downright adorable and I love our snuggles.

1. My daughter is much more easily distracted and more compliant in general - no to her means no, and always has. No to DS means 'mmm hmm, just once more then' / 'can't hear you'.

1. DD is a heavy sleeper, DS is a light sleeper.

1. They play very differently. DS has surprised us with his thoughtful play approach. Everything is carefully examined to find it's purpose and he likes to create rather than bash, whack and throw ....which can often be DD's approach even though she's the older child, and a girl.

What have you found?

What makes you think that these differences are down to gender and not each of your children having a different personality/temperament?

Yep, way more likely to be personality than what's between their legs.

I could write a list like yours;
Dc1 is very physical, can't concentrate, won't watch tv or self entertain. Doesn't like imaginary play or dressing up.

Dc2 will play for hours with trains, loves films, dollies, dressing up, playing make believe with friends.

Dc1 is a good sleeper. Dc2 has never napped, can stay up late, and frequently gets up in the night.

Dc2 is very cuddly, dc1 not so much.

Dc2 likes to around people, dc1 prefers alone time.

They are both the same sex.

The first 4 points I agree with - not the last though. My DS (the older DC) was never a particularly boisterous boy, but liked bashing, although would spend hours building lego or playing with Playmobil (he's nearly 13 now so those days are virtually gone ). DD has always been very creative, loved drawing, making stuff etc. Has a much longer concentration span and was always quite happy to be on her own for ages, whereas DS had to play with someone (even if we weren't actually allowed to touch the lego )
As far as I am aware, I didn't treat them any differently initially. Obviously as their personalities/characters develop I found I responded differently to each child. They've always had the same boundaries though.

With 2 x DS and 1 x DD I have seen the sorts of character differences between them you describe. But not sex-linked.

I don't agree with lots of the "boys and girls aren't different!" theories that come out on MN a lot... But I have two boys and you've just described them. I put it down to an older/younger difference. DS1 is less affectionate than DS2, for example. But then I was a crap, miserable, PND-suffering wreck when DS1 was born. :( with DS2, I felt amazing and was much more cuddly and confident with him right from the start.

Bizarre that you would attribute their differences to sex, and not personality.

Surely they are different because they are different people? Nothing to do with gender! I have four boys and a girl, they are all very different.

Why are you ascribing their differences to their gender?

Agree that its differences in personality and nothing more.

I have 4 DC.

DC1 was a fantastic sleeper, very cuddly but ridiculously active, loves nothing more than running/climbing/bouncing etc. little interest in toys or role play.

DC2, very quiet, calm, passive, studious. Very cuddly, zero interest in sport, probably wouldn't leave the house if I didn't force the issue.

DC3 is a drama queen, loves role play, dolls, dressing up. Can a right diva on occassion with their epic strops. Doesn't sit still but not sporty at all. Was a rubbish sleeper as a baby.

DC4, worst sleeper in history, is only 1 but already has a massive love of cars & balls and pretty much nothing else.

All boys.

both my boys are mummy's boys but do enjoy daddy time, they just cuddle up to me but both DDs are daddys girls and cuddle up to him, both DDs are full of backchat and bite, hairpull and scratch when they fight. DSs will punch and kick when they fight but don't tend to have actual fights as much as the girls but playfight more. My boys take a telling - usually just the once with minimal whinging whereas the girls don't and push their luck. The girls are more independent though, eldest DD was making cups of tea and toast at 5 and just gets on with daily things but DSs are like "mummy can you open this, mummy can I do this, mummy wheres my taggy" etc

I guess it's because everything I say 'DS does XYZ / DD does XYZ' I get told by other mums and dads 'that's girls for you or that's boys for you'. Since I've been a mum almost everybody in my 'real life' circle attributes it to gender so I don't think it's that 'bizarre' to note that some things are gender based. Obviously I appreciate they have different personalities.

I was simply asking others opinions and experiences with raising different sexes, not expecting veiled accusations of sexism (rolls eyes).

I think its coincidence that other mums have agreed on the gender split thing. I can see why you would have thought it was gender if others' experiences chime with yours. I have one son and he sounds much more like your daughter than your son, for what it's worth..

To draw any firm conclusions I think you'd have to have about 17 more children.
It could be gender, or position in the family, or personality, or the way you behave with them, or the different experiences they have had or most probably a huge combination of all of these.

I think having two the same sex makes you realise how much is down to personality and birth order rather than sex. I now have DC3 who is a different sex to DC1 and 2 and even at only 15 months people ask me what the differences are! Apart from nappy changing I can't imagine what I'm meant to have noticed.

Numbers 2, 3, 4 and 5 on your list apply very much to my daughter.

You are being sexist (there, that's an unveiled accusation) because you are assuming that the differences between your DC are down to gender and you are also assuming that all girls are like your DD and all boys are like your DS.

As you say, lots of people do the same as you. Doesn't mean they're right!

Ok, I won't veil my accusations of sexism. Your post is utter sexist nonsense, how on earth can you extrapolate from your two children that all boys/girls are like that? And your friends that say those things are sexist too.

If your dd cried more often, was less easily distracted and preferred craft activities to bash, whack and throw, I can guarantee that you'd be saying it was because she was a girl.

My (2 yr old) dd likes to put on dresses and skip round the house, play hairdressers, put her teddies down for a nap after having a tea party with them, sing to her teddies, put clips in her hair, put her dolly to sleep after feeding her a bottle etc.
Do many little boys play like that? No doubt some will, but many compared to girls?

I haven't taught her any of those games or even encouraged them particularly. Dp actively discourages them as he'd prefer to kick a ball around. Dd's nursery is hot on avoiding gender bias (and has more structured activities) so I can only assume its nature not nurture.

I do not deny that there may be innate differences between girls and boys. I certainly don't deny that there are often massive socialised differences.

But the 'boys X, girls Y' stuff is abject rubbish. On one memorable day I was told at length by another mum that my son was so easily distracted during bfing because he's a boy and they are into everything. The woman didn't really have an answer when I pleasantly remarked that his two older sisters were identical at that age.

On your list:

1. My son is only tiny, but he cries less than his sisters did as babies. My middles girl is the dramatic one.

1. My middle girl is more cuddly.

1. Again, my two daughters are completely different in this regard.

1. Yup, again could describe my two daughters.

1. Neither girl whacks, but one is far more likely to make everything into little talking people than the other.

Maybe start questioning why you accept the comments so easily and uncritically?

I personally am not in the slightest gender biased in terms of how children behave or how they should dress or what they should play with, they are all children and there is a significant amount of cross over between the genders in all of these areas...

BUT... I have one of each and with the above said feel I would be ignoring the blatant obvious if I denied there was a fundamental difference between boys and girls. I also know many parents with both and often the gender traits are shown with their children too, and not because we are all suffering from some terribly misguided view of how boys and girls should be, but just because it's the reality. I was genuinely shocked when I had my son at just how hard wired some of these gender stereotypes were with him, and some from a very very young age, compared to how his older sister had been.

There will of course always be exceptions, but I do think stereotypes are often as such for a reason, which is that the majority of boys are a certain way and the majority of girls are a certain way, or at the very least a large core set of behaviours are etc.

I am also slightly baffled as to why anyone would think that gender differences (or belief in them) is such a terrible thing or somehow sexist! That is just bonkers!

Sadly, we live in a highly gendered society. Even those of us who think we parent neutrally don't. That has been shown in various sociological experiments.

And even if, by some miracle, we did manage to do so, the rest of society does not. Our children (particularly if they have older siblings) interact with many different adults on a daily basis.

So whilst I am not ruling out innate differences, the mere fact that we observe differences from an early stage does not mean that they are hard wired. Look at the differences people often observe in oldest and younger children. We surely don't believe that those are the product of anything other than personality and socialisation?

I think that it is particularly tempting to talk about differences if you have one girl and one boy. The mind likes to create a coherent narrative. I could regale you with many differences between my two..... except that the second one is also a girl so her feistiness, affection, sleep, emotions, etc must be down to something other than gender differences. I mean, the idea that whether you are a heavy sleeper or not could be a sex difference is clearly rubbish from a straw poll of adults. If I think about those adults whose sleep habits I know, I'd said it is pretty evenly split. But the OP's mind has seen this as a pattern and labelled it (this is actually a really important life skill trait our brains exhibit, just that it gets a bit overactive at times).

Penguin's post is eminently sensible. We can't gain any accurate perception of any actual differences while socialisation is so gendered.

I only have one child, a two year old boy. However, any time he engages in boisterous behaviour, or I mention something mischievous he's done, people will sagely and say 'Well, boys will be boys!' We regularly go to a play group that is dominated by a posse of tough, boisterous, very rambunctious three year old girls who engage in identical behaviours without anyone appearing to attribute it to their sex.

Similarly, no one attributes my son's affectionate nature/his wily manipulativeness ('Mummy, will you carry me upstairs because you're my very best friend in the whole WIDE WORLD!' And the fact that he's figured out it's easier to get another child/their parent to hand over a disputed toy by hugging them than by hitting them) to his maleness.

As Penguin said, human beings tend to try to make coherent narratives out of disparate or contradictory bits of information. This is as true of 'narratives of gender difference' as it us of the many spooky threads on Mn where someone construes a floorboard creaking, a draught and a blown lightbulb into a haunting.

This has all been very interesting - thank you for your comments.

My intention was not to sound sexist, quite the opposite is true as I do try to parent as neutrally as I can. Wehave two pushchairs (one each), dollies, cars, blocks, an oven, play food .... a total mix of toys and they both play with what they want to play with, which with the exception of dollies as DS simply isn't interested in them but nor was DD until a few months ago, everything else is played with equally.

I suppose my original intention was simply to see if others could parallel gender based differences - there are some it cannot be denied.

Penguin your post was brilliant. Poddling I don't think there's any need to be so personal. Posters such as yourself who pop along to flame other posters give sites like mumsnet a bad name and could stop those who need support from reaching out.

My original post came because since having DS, I really have had nothing but people telling me how different it is to have a son after having a daughter. I'm not exaggerating, I used to get this in the early days with DS a lot and the differences between the genders are frequently brought up in settings with other parents. I simply wondered what others had noticed, and it's quite evident that the vast majority feel any differences are purely based on personality and nothing more, so this has been educational (smile)

Caffeine - What I think is really interesting is that if, like you do, you try and parent neutrally, you are often bombarded with people telling you about the differences. Almost as if it is pointless to try. I think it's really sad if people put babies in boxes (not literally, though that would be sad too!!). I have to be really careful not to label my middle on 'the stroppy one'. There is a danger that that narrative will play out throughout her life. It might anyway, but I don't want to encourage it. How many times can we tell boys that boys are boisterous before they learn to be (even if it wasn't innate, which some of it might be).

It is probably hardest if you have one then the other. I think particularly this can be the case if you have the girl first. Lots of typical 'girl' behaviours are also those you see a lot in older children (self sufficient, more reserved, more sensible). I think if DD2 had been a boy people would have fallen over backwards to tell me what a typical boy she was (albeit one with a pink obsession). I think it's really healthy to think that differences might be gender, might be age, might be birth order, might be personality. Gives our kids the space to be the best version of themselves (if that's not too soppy to say).

Penguin you talk huge amounts of sense and it's a pleasure to read. It's been helpful for me to take your comments on board. I've always been keen to let them be themselves and whenever people ask me about their personalities and say 'who is she / he like' my bog standard response is 'he/she is like themselves'.....not this bit is me or DH, or Great-Uncle George, but just them being them. DD loves climbing and if the love continues we're going to take her to climbing centres when she's old enough. Whoever they are, I will embrace and encourage that.

I don't think it's so much purely that differences are based on individual personality, more that our society has a highly gendered way of allocating qualities as 'male' or 'female', and they tend to 'tidy' ungendered behaviours like energetic, running-around play into a 'typically male' mental box.

In your update, what strikes me is that other people keep telling you how different it is to have girls and boys, when what they're doing is extrapolating general principles from their experiences of having one or two individual children of either sex, and from their own gender expectations.

My two SILs (who have two boys and one girl each, aged from their late teens to 30) are always telling me similar. Obviously, I don't have a daughter, so have no personal experience of bringing up a girl, but it's obvious to me that what they perceive to be innate differences in their sons and daughters are at least in part down to their very different expectations for their girls.

In both families, the girls are the youngest by several years, and both were the result of their mothers' passionate desire for a daughter 'to do girly things with'. It doesn't seem entirely coincidental that both girls are indulged compared to their older brothers, are obsessed with their appearances and clothes, and have done conspicuously badly academically compared to the four boys. I don't think this means that girls are shallower, less ambitious, clever or independent-minded than boys in general, only that these girls are the result of a certain set of parental expectations about what it means to be a girl and a youngest child.

God, that got long.

Thanks Caffeine. I shall steal that response too if I may.

We have a climber. I recommend tumble tots or a gym club so she learns to get down too.