Boys vs. Girls, Part ???

Objects my son has used as a gun in the past week:

·        Legos

·        Stuffed animals

·        A stick

·        A wooden spoon

·        A fork

·        A camera

·        Matchbox cars

·        Toy fire engines

·        Playing cards

·        Lego guys

·        Crayons

Objects my daughter has either kissed or talked to in the past week:

·        Legos

·        Stuffed animals

·        A stick

·        A wooden spoon

·        A fork

·        A camera

·        Matchbox cars

·        Toy fire engines

·        Playing cards

·        Lego guys

·        Crayons

 Maybe my children aren’t typical. But given the same exact toys, they play with them very differently. Sit them on the floor and drop a laundry basket on top of their heads and my son will either announce that he’s a bad guy in jail or roar like a lion, while my daughter will merely giggle and announce, “Peekaboo!” Give them a doll in one hand and a truck in the other and my daughter will carefully wedge the doll into the driver’s seat of the truck (after carefully kissing them both and then making them kiss each other, of course), while my son will run the doll over with the truck.

 There are times when they’ll play together with the same toys. They’ll each choose a racecar and make vroom-vroom noises together. They’ll each pick a stuffed animal and march around the room making the appropriate animal noises at each other. They’ll sit in front of the Elmo’s Potty Time video giggling together at the Dirty Diaper Blues song and clapping when Elmo rides his tricycle. They’ll take turns kicking and rolling a ball back and forth. They’ll alternate between hugging each other and chasing each other around the room at top speed while screaming at the top of their lungs.

If they can be so completely different and yet still be so devoted to each other, it gives me hope for the rest of the world.

Toys: Boys vs. Girls (The Second Child Edition)

Back in July 2010, I wrote a blog entry about the difference between how boys play with toys and how girls play with toys: http://sandysmotherhoodblog.blogspot.com/2010/07/toys-boys-vs-girls.html Revisiting that entry now that I have a child of each gender only serves to reinforce my belief that boys and girls play differently. It’s certainly true in my family, at least.

My son has been obsessed with cars and trucks ever since he was small. Even before he could walk, he would crawl over to anything with wheels and attempt to spin them – a grocery cart, a stroller, a skateboard. I always made sure to keep a matchbox car or small truck in my purse to keep him entertained. And since his obsession continues, my daughter (who is almost 2 years younger than her brother) has grown up surrounded by cars and trucks. And when she was tiny, she was also content to zoom them across the table and to watch their wheels spin in fascination. But now that she is old enough to be interested in what toys are or represent, rather than just their physical size and feel, she is much less interested in cars.

Her toys of choice are generally soft items like stuffed animals and dolls. She loves to hug them and coo to them and make them kiss each other. For her, I keep several small plastic animals in my purse. Giraffe and tiger often make an appearance at a restaurant, hiding behind cups and salt shakers and playing peek-a-boo with her, and just generally allowing themselves to be kissed and pawed and snuggled and loved. If on occasion I have forgotten to put a car in my purse and I give my son the same toy animals to play with, instead of kissing each other and playing nicely, they will roar ferociously and attempt to eat each other.

There are also huge differences in how they choose to play with the same non-specific toys. Give them both a box of Legos and my son will alternate between building and knocking down towers and designing some kind of gun or cannon, whereas my daughter will stick a single Lego on the index finger of each hand and click them together with fascination, and then pick out all the flowers and animals that are part of the Lego set.

If you let them choose from the same group of toys, they rarely choose the same things. At a local play area, my son runs directly to the train table where he immediately starts redesigning the track while my daughter makes a beeline for the play house and begins to “chat” on the phone.

 

Of course, there are often similarities in their play, especially when it comes to imagination games. They both love to run, and squeal, and be tickled, and play hide-and-seek. They both love to dig in the sand and splash in the water and scribble with crayons and chalk. They both love to strum the guitar and pound on the piano keys and bang on anything that bears a passing resemblance to a drum. They love to make an old paper towel tube into a trumpet. They are both fascinated by sticking stickers on things.

But when it comes right down to it, their play is fundamentally different, because THEY are fundamentally different. And although I would never tell my daughter that she can’t be a construction worker or an engineer simply because she’s a girl, and I would never tell my son that he can’t be a nurse or a teacher because he’s a boy, I do believe that their future interests are going to be very divergent from each other just due to their natures, which are in part due to their gender. Because they’re different. And viva la difference!

 

Snips and Snails

Everyone knows at least some version of the old nursery rhyme about boys and girls:
Snips and snails and puppy dog tails,
That’s what little boys are made of.
Sugar and spice and everything nice,
That’s what little girls are made of.

Even at only a few months of age, there are very distinct differences between boys and girls. No-one has mistaken Ryan for a girl since he was only a few weeks old, which is a bit surprising if you look at his gorgeous long, thick, dark, curly eyelashes or his clear blue eyes.

But every other bit of him is completely male, from his “little boy” hair to his solid, athletic build, to his way of studying and analyzing everything within his reach. And, as of recently, his fascination with cars.

I’m not sure if it’s the combination of movement and noise or what, but suddenly Ryan can’t get enough of cars. When we go for walks, he’s completely indifferent to passing dogs and cats (and even turkeys, as I discovered yesterday, but that’s another story for another day), but his eyes eagerly follow every car that passes.

Now that the weather is nice most days, we’ve been spending lots of time outside, both walking with the stroller and just exploring the yard and the neighborhood. At first, I called his attention to the flowers and the leaves and the trees, encouraging him to look and touch and smell everything. But now I find that he much prefers to walk to the end of our road and watch the cars driving by on the main street. Large trucks and loud motorcycles are of special interest. He turns and watches them pass by with an incredulous look on his face. Right now, I tell him the color of each one as it goes by, sometimes adding whether it’s a truck or a motorcycle or a convertible or something else obvious and notable. No doubt it won’t be long before I’m telling him the body style and the make and model. But anything more than that and he’ll have to wait for Daddy to get home to explore the world of cars. After all, that’s totally a guy thing.