"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?

Equal but different.

Biology is amazing.

I’ve worked with many boys and girls and would say they’re equally challenging but in clearly different ways. They all love pink and sparkle, they all have strong feelings and hormone surges, etc. But they have very obvious differences.

Look for example at fine motor skills where reception age boys are usually at least a year behind the level of reception age girls, while the girls at that age are way behind the boys on running and jumping. That isn’t just socialisation, I’ve seen it in my children and their friends too. It’s evolution: our male ancestors did the majority of the fighting and hunting, and our female ancestors did the majority of foraging, grain-sorting, childcare and other fine motor skills.

That said, when parents say boys are challenging they usually mean they haven’t bothered to teach them good behaviour.

The OTs at work mostly work with boys in mainstream. There clearly can be differences in fine motor skills. This is very linked to visual motor skills. Again, not on an individual level but generally.

That obviously has impact on how successful boys feel at school in the early stages. For some I think it's just too soon but we don't take account of that.

Gotna friend withb3 boys who always says how she would love what l have got (1 dd) as my life seems so calm - but kayseri that is more just having the 1 vs 3 kids. Hers are always very full on though.

I think it's really hard to unpick the nature/nurture split.

When I was pregnant with my son (and knew I was having a boy), I got comments from the midwife about "he's very active, you can tell he's a boy" and so on before he'd even been born.

As a silly, anecdotal example: I got a baby gym for my baby to lie on the floor and kick/hit at. So he had a toy that strongly encouraged development of gross motor skills. And it was his favourite thing for weeks. None of the parents of girls that I know did this. But when I'm taking him to baby groups, I sometimes see little girls dressed up in cutesy outfits with bows and ribbons and heavy material that restricts their movements and needs to be constantly adjusted to stay neat.

The kind of socialisation that shapes boys into physical, assertive personalities and girls into quiet, compliant ones starts early.