Caroline Deacon
Journalist and author based in Scotland, UK

Boys will be boys – or will they?

Is your baby destined to become a boisterous boy or a simpering girl whatever you do, or does it depend on the way you bring them up? Caroline Deacon looks at some of the evidence.

When you became a parent, the first question everyone asked was whether you had a boy or girl so they could inundate you with cards and flowers of the “correct” colour - pink or blue. Whether you desperately longed for a particular sex, or whether you felt it really didn’t matter, there’s no escaping the fact that as far as the rest of the world is concerned, your baby’s sex is the most important aspect of his character and personality.

Sometimes it seems we are almost too keen to spot boyish or girlish traits in tiny babies, when really there is little to tell them apart except for the obvious genital difference. They do have slightly different growth patterns; the average boy at birth is slightly longer and heavier than the average girl, while the average girl is usually born with a bit more fat.  In the beginning your baby will grow faster if he’s a boy, but at seven months, girls speed up, growing faster than boys until about four years of age. Things are pretty even from then until puberty, when once again girls race ahead for a few years. These differences are only statistical however, and individual boys and girls vary enormously.

What’s far more interesting is how babies see themselves. It’s incredible but true that even before your baby learns to talk, let alone play with dollies, she knows what sex she is. Psychologists use “gaze preference” to discover what babies can identify with and understand, and have found that babies as young as ten months spend more time looking at pictures of babies of the same sex as themselves. They can also spot a same sex baby by the way she moves, regardless of hairstyles or clothing. 

Are girls chatterboxes?

We all believe, don’t we, that women talk more than men; just think about the number of cartoons and jokes which depend on that idea! It’s true to say that even at birth, girls are more interested in talking than their brothers. We’ve recently discovered that the left hand side of the brain, which is responsible for language, starts smaller and develops more slowly in boys. New-born baby girls enjoy listening to voices almost more than being cuddled, whereas new-born baby boys would definitely chose a cuddle every time. Baby girls also smile and maintain eye contact with adults twice as long as boys do, and these non-verbal skills are important for keeping conversations going.

However, it could be that parents exaggerate and encourage these language skill differences. For instance, although baby girls start babbling earlier than baby boys, we don’t know whether this would happen naturally, or whether it is because we encourage baby girls to speak more. Mothers talk to their baby girls more often, but pick him up and play roughly with baby boys.

Do boys rule the world?

Is your tiny baby boy inevitably going to grow up to be a noisy and aggressive thug? Unfortunately research would tend to suggest that this is likely to happen. In almost every culture that has been studied, from toddlerhood boys are more aggressive than girls, not only physically, but also verbally - they use more taunts and insults. It used to be thought that boys learn to be aggressive through being given toy guns and soldiers to play with while girls had their natural aggression suppressed. However, if this were true, we would expect girls to express this suppressed aggression in safe, fantasy games, but this doesn’t happen. Parents discourage aggression in both sexes, even coming down harder on this sort of behaviour in boys, so we are not subtly teaching boys that aggression is OK.

Parents do however teach “boys to be boys” by stimulating them to be active and outgoing, even discouraging many of their attempts at communication, while at the same time encouraging daughters to chatter.  By twelve months, boys are already more independent, more interested in exploration, and prefer play that involves banging and running about.  One study, which observed thirteen-month-old children playing, noticed that girls were more reluctant to move far from their mothers, and kept returning to them for reassurance. When a gate prevented the babies from reaching their mothers, the girls stood and cried helplessly. The boys, although they cried too, made vigorous attempts to break down the barrier.

Looking ahead to school days, boys tend to take up more space, often dominating the centre of the playground with physical games, while girls huddle round the edges. Interestingly, it used to be the case that girls performed better in single-sex schools while boys did better in mixed schools, but now girls are outperforming boys generally. Perhaps being a boy is problematic in our modern society where physical attributes are no longer valued, but where girls are moving into areas that were traditionally reserved for men.

Are you teaching your children sex-role stereotypes?

You may think that you treat your children the same; however in a recent experiment, mothers were asked to play with a baby they had never seen before, and were told (often untruthfully) that the baby was a girl or boy. The mothers chose a toy hammer for “boys”, and dolls for the “girls”. Interestingly, the mothers interpreted exactly the same behaviour differently according to which sex they believed the baby was. If the baby got restless and wriggly, they believed the “boys” wanted to play, whereas they believed the “girls” were upset and needed soothing.

Children learn how about the world and how to behave in it, by watching what their parents do and imitating them. At barely two months old, your baby will have learnt that men tend to play, women tend to nurture. When he sees his daddy, he gets jerky and excited, holding his body stiffly, expecting to play. By six months, many babies are more worried by hearing a strange male voice than a strange female voice. They have learnt that women usually take care of them.

However, babies will not automatically grow up to become their parents. Studies have shown that boys will become more like their fathers if they are warm and friendly, rather than cold and distant. Sons of bossy father tend to be disliked at playgroups and have behaviour problems later on. Sons of over-protective mothers will grow up to be very compliant; while daughters tend to grow up to be compliant if they suffer from excessive or harsh discipline.
 
Babies are influenced by many people, not just their parents. If this were not the case, then children brought up by one parent would suffer from gender identity problems. Men and women are just as good at handling babies and men raise their voices higher like women to speak to babies.  Single parent fathers, as well as Dads who have the main childcare responsibilities while mum works, will tend to become more “motherly”. In fact our ability to look after children is one area in which there are really few sex differences. Your toddler, whether boy or girl, will enjoy feeding, bathing, and nursing baby dolls. As boys grow older, playing with dolls becomes taboo, yet one researcher got children to listen to a tape of a crying baby and found that, although girls seemed more concerned, the boys’ “concealed responses”  - their blood pressure, heart beat etc., were the same as the girls, so both sexes find a crying baby stressful and want to help.

Did you know? Some wackier ideas about sex differences

• Boys are traditionally dressed in blue because this was seen to be a protective colour - the colour of the heavens - which would ward off evil spirits. In some countries the front door is painted blue for the same reason. No one is sure why girls are dressed in pink; however interior designers claim that pink is a “subduing, tranquillising” colour, while blue is an “energising” colour.
• One sociobiologist suggests that the reason men have pockets comes from their days as hunters when they needed hands free. At that time, women’s job was to gather plants and seeds, so handbags are a hang over from our days as gatherers!
• Why do girls have long hair? According to one writer, we are aquatic apes – evolutionarily similar to dolphins, having returned to the sea at some point in our pre-history. Women would retreat into water for safety more often, and so they have less body hair, but grew their head hair long so their babies could cling to it.

Interesting differences:

• Research suggests that girls are more sensitive to smells, touch and sound and more girls than boys can sing in tune.
• If you have a daughter, measure her height at 21 months, and double it. This will probably be a good guide to her height as a grown up. For your son, you need to wait until he is 24 months for him to be half his adult height.
•  Girls usually gain bladder and bowel control earlier, they tend to read and write sooner, and are slightly better at arithmetic in the early years.
•  Boys tend to have more learning related problems; attention deficient disorder (ADD) and hyperactivity are more common in boys than girls, as is dyslexia, autism and certain language difficulties.
• Boys on the whole have better visual-spatial skills, which includes being able to work out how an object in space would look from different perspectives, aiming at targets and map reading. These skills are useful for applied science and engineering.

Although there are differences between the sexes, there is a great degree of overlap, and girls and boys are far more similar than we would expect, given how differently we raise them. With practice, the advantages or disadvantages in certain areas can shrink or disappear. Baby girl’s visual-spatial skills can be encouraged with shape sorters, stacking and nesting toys and lift out puzzle trays. Progress from here to Duplo and later Lego or Meccano. If your daughter prefers feminine toys, try the Duplo or Lego kits aimed at girls.  Boys need to have their feminine profiles raised, so don’t be afraid to encourage them to chatter, play with dolls, and to demonstrate a caring side to their nature. Getting a good balance between the masculine and feminine attributes for both boys and girls will help them grow into well- rounded adults.

© Caroline Deacon.
article first appeared in Practical Parenting June 2001