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!

 

Toys: Boys Vs. Girls

Boys play with trucks. Girls play with dolls. For many years, this was just how it was. Then came the 1970s, and all bets were off. Boys were encouraged to play house and dress-up. Girls were encouraged to play cops and robbers and trucks. But in my personal experience, girls and boys just play differently naturally. And there’s nothing wrong with that! There’s a reason that gender roles have evolved, and it’s because boys and girls are fundamentally different.


If I’d ever doubted that, I’d have had to change my tune after watching Ryan this morning. He discovered the Barbie stuff that’s been stashed away in the corner of the den since his sister was a little girl. A few months ago a friend of mine was visiting with her three daughters, and they discovered the same stuff. In an instant, Barbie’s house was set up for a party: food on the dining table, chairs set up in the living room, Barbie herself with primped hair, high heels, and a party dress. Her Jeep was parked sedately out of the way behind the house. When Ryan got at Barbie, however, she was completely ignored, her house was a mere backdrop, and the true star of the show was the Jeep. He pushed it back and forth, flipped it over to spin the wheels, and fiddled with the seatbelt straps. He eventually noticed Barbie again, but instead of fussing with her hair he used it as a handle to smack her against the Jeep, and instead of putting high heels on her dainty feet, he tried to chew on them.

Granted, some of this behavior is simply because he is younger than the girls. But I’m convinced that the majority of it is because he’s a boy. He likes using his strength to explore, by hitting and chewing and stepping on things. He has the manual dexterity to handle small objects but he’s much more interested in using that dexterity to figure out how things work, or to make noise with them. Simply put, he plays like a boy.

And Herb and I naturally play with him like a boy. We roughhouse with him, tossing him in the air, playfully (but gently) knocking him over, wrestling with him until he dissolves into helpless giggles. I’m sure if he were a girl we (or I, anyway) would be much more sedate in how we play. We’d still toss “her” in the air, but we’d be more gentle about it. Instead of making his stuffed animals growl and tickle him, I’d teach “her” to gently pat them. No doubt we’d spend less time taking things out of “her” hands so she wouldn’t hurt herself.

And I don’t think it’s a bad thing to treat girls and boys differently. I don’t think it’s a bad thing to treat two boys differently if they have different personalities and different likes and dislikes, so why would you treat a boy and a girl the same if they have different personalities and different likes and dislikes? I’m sure there are plenty of parents out there who disagree with me, and who will give their daughters trucks and their sons dolls. And that’s fine. But I won’t do that, because I know what my son does with dolls. He uses them to whack trucks.

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.

The Difference Between Mommies and Daddies

Ryan was having kind of a rough morning this morning. He’d been up for a while and had already had breakfast and some playtime in the exersaucer when I came downstairs. He grinned at me for a bit while he played, but then he started in on that heartbreaking sad/tired/something hurts cry. I took him out of the saucer and bounced him for a few minutes, then took him into the bathroom to watch himself in the mirror, then finally carried him into the study to let him relax on my shoulder as he calmed himself down. He was flopped against my neck like a rag doll, with one hand twined in my hair and the other in his mouth, his cheek squashed against mine, heavy eyes looking past me as I leaned way back in my chair so he was nearly lying flat. Herb looked at him and asked, a bit ruefully, “How come you never do that with me?”

It got me thinking. It’s true, Ryan doesn’t do his ragdoll imitation with Daddy like he does with me. But that’s not surprising, because Herb and I have very different ways of comforting him when he’s upset or fussy. I’m more likely to snuggle him, sing to him, or rock him, whereas Herb will tickle him, roughhouse with him, or look him right in the eye and make funny growling noises. With me, Ryan plays by snuggling his face into my shoulder then peeking at me and giggling. With Daddy, he plays by launching himself backwards out of Daddy’s arms and then laughing when Daddy catches him. Herb and I admitted to each other after Ryan was born that we would always play the same good cop/bad cop roles – I would always be the good cop and he would always be the bad cop. It’s a natural choice, given our temperaments. But even aside from our temperaments, there’s just a basic difference between how mommies and daddies interact with their babies. Mommies are the comforters, and daddies are the toughies (in a good way).

Herb laughs at me because I am constantly babbling at Ryan. I talk to him all the time about what I’m doing, what he’s looking at, asking him questions, repeating words. My mom admits she did the same thing with me and my sister. Every walk is accompanied by a full narration. Strangers in the grocery store often turn around to look at me because I’m having a one-sided conversation. But when Herb spends the day with Ryan, he can go for hours without saying a word. Of course, they can also spend hours imitating each others’ facial expressions, so it’s not like they’re not interacting. But they do it in a completely different way than Ryan and I do. Even at the tender age of five months, Ryan is learning (at some level) that men and women are different.

And viva la difference!