"Boys are a handful"

[Pregnantabroad]

I get this comment a lot, casually, from parents of boys. Equally I hear things like "girls are complicated" or "girls are difficult".
My personal experience (I have both boys and a girl) is that they are pretty similar.
I also believe that there is no fundamental difference between girls and boys other than how they are shaped by society. Assuming you agree - and am happy to hear those who don't agree too obv - what kind of response would you make to those throwaway comments to gently challenge the idea that girls and boys are fundamentally different?

Im from a family of all girls and have 2 boys now, my mum constantly tells me that my 2 boys are more exhausting than all her girls 😬 she said we would somewhat quietly play with pens, dolls, imaginary etc but my boys just want to run around daft/be entertained all the time.

I've pointed out she was in her late 20s with us and now in her 60s if she watches her grandchildren so that could be the difference! Also reminded her that all her girls were enrolled in amateur swimming from a young age to 'tire us out'! Think it's just peoples personal views!

Yanbu that it's all about individual temperament.

My son never went through terrible twos and threenager stage and my teen dd gets angry and slams her bedroom door like twice a year.

I have two girls. They have completely different personalities.

When my eldest was little I had a friend constantly commenting how much tiring out her same age boy needed. Meanwhile my non sleeping toddler had been to nursery for 3hrs, walking the 15mins there and back, gone to the park for an hour, enjoyed her favourite dance DVD and was now running around the garden. We nicknamed her Duracell...

I probably would’ve taken the same position as you at one stage but now (over 20 years of parenting experience, 1 son, 2 daughters, 3 sets of parent-friends - one for each kid - all of whose other children, male and female I have witnessed growing up) I do believe there are tangible differences between the sexes almost from birth.

we are mammals, after all, and sexual dimorphism is a thing.

However, it’s a bell curve thingy and so there is a lot of overlap, and all children are unique so there is absolutely no reason to confine individuals to pink or blue boxes painted with the broad brush of sex stereotypes.

Sex differences exist but that doesn’t mean boys are better than girls.

The idea that boys and girls were exactly the same and it’s all just nurture/socialisation was an important concept for achieving work based rights for women but it’s also had the unfortunate side effect of ‘girls would be just as strong/fast as boys if they had better training/more money invested in their sports divisions’ and that’s just not true.

As an example, the reasoning behind ‘men should not hit women’ isn’t benevolent sexism, it’s because on average men are bigger and stronger and more likely to inflict serious damage on a female body than if the same man were to hit a male body with exactly the same force (see all the stats re women being injured in car crashes as an illustrator).

The reason we need single sex spaces and services and sex based rights in the workplace is because we are a sexually dimorphic species and that isn’t going to change.

I'm not sure....

I'd like to think young girls and boys are inherently the same, and the only differences are the socialised ones. You know the ones I mean, dressing girls in delicate glitter dresses and telling them to be kind/nice all the time, let's play nurses and play cooking, where boys are dressed appropriately for outdoor activity, encouraged to play Lego and shooting games etc etc.
All that 100% will shape a child's behaviour, personality and understanding of their world.

But since I've become a mum and teacher, I think I'm having to admit to myself that from a very young age girls and boys do seem to have inherent differences that come through despite their "neutral" parenting and teaching environments.

The differences I find are that boys do seem more assertive and confident and not as sensitive compared to girls.

This is purely anecdotal, but I was at a child's birthday party at the weekend, myself and another mum were impressed with how well behaved the children were. She said "yeah look, it's mostly girls isn't it" and I realised out of about 25 only 5 were boys. I'd never been to a party with that balance before normally it's 50/50 or in the case of my boy children it'd be mostly boys and total chaos.

It's interesting anyway, the nature Vs nurture discussion.

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

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.

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'.

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?

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.

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.

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

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?

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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

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

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

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