Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Susan Gilbert,a regular contributor to the New York Times science section, is a journalist who writes extensively on children's health and development. Her work has appeared in publications ranging from Redbook to Parenting to the Harvard Health Publications. She lives in New York.

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• Are boys more active and aggressive?

• Do girls talk earlier?

• Do boys have a harder time separating from their mothers?

• Do girls have the edge in learning to read and write?

• Why do boys and girls like different toys?

In A Field Guide to Boys and Girls, Susan Gilbert pulls together all the latest research on gender development into a resource for parents of children from birth to adolescence. In talking to a variety of educators, psychologists, and behavioral pediatricians, Gilbert concludes that there are natural differences between boys and girls.

If parents nurture the areas that may be slower to develop, such as math skills in girls and language skills in boys, they will help their children deal with gender challenges as they grow up.

By combining groundbreaking inquiry with easy-to-use advice, A Field Guide to Boys and Girls helps parents bring out the best in each child.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

A Field Guide to Boys and Girls

Quill

Chapter One

In the Beginning

Expectant parents can't help themselves. Long before their baby arrives, they're mentally cloning their child from one germ of information: the sex. If they know the sex of their baby from prenatal testing, their imagination can proceed along a story line that's laced with either pink or blue, barrettes or suspenders, ballet recitals or hockey camp. If they don't know the sex, they can create two story lines and make themselves giddy by fantasizing about the possibilities. Either way, the baby's "prequel" comes laden with assumptions about boys and girls, like who cries more; who sleeps better; and who's sweeter, more willful, tougher, more vulnerable, more active, easier, and maybe even more interesting.

"Do you know what you're having?" a guest asked Marie, the hostess of the party, who was six months pregnant with her third child and the mother of a 6-year-old girl and a 4-year-old boy.

"A girl," she beamed. "Thank God."

"Why do you say that?"

"Because girls are so much easier." Marie went on to say that her son was much more demanding than his older sister. He was colicky as an infant, and as a toddler and preschooler, he would vent his anger by hitting, pushing, and yelling. Marie also felt that her son needed more affection. "He was so clingy. He'd be all over me," she said. "I didn't understand him. My daughter wasn't like that."

Sue, the mother of two boys who was expecting her third child, explained why she wanted to know the sex of this baby ahead of time. "I needed to be prepared if I was having another boy," she said. But, she added with a smile, "It's a girl."

Not everyone thinks boys are trouble. When Vanessa was pregnant with her second child, she hoped for another boy because she thought they were easier. She based this impression on her relatively trouble-free experience with her 2-year-old son and, as a counterpoint, her difficult relationship with her mother. "With girls, you have all that mother-daughter stuff," she said. Another reason she didn't want a girl is that she didn't want to have to deal with the Barbies, frilly dresses, and other accessories that she considered trappings of prefeminist times but assumed most girls still wanted.

Everyone has an opinion on the differences between boys and girls. People may not agree on what those differences are, but they do agree on one thing-that boys and girls behave differently from the time they're babies. For years, scientists debunked that idea on the ground that infants were too young, too sexless, too clean a slate to show gender-specific traits. The only differences between boy and girl babies, they argued, were the ways that parents and other adults treated them.

Scientists had several "Baby X" studies to support the view that the difference between babies is in the eye of the beholder. These were studies in which adults were asked to describe or play with a baby that they thought was a boy but was really a girl, and vice versa. In some cases, the baby was dressed in girl's clothing for one group of adults and in boy's clothing for another group. in other cases, the baby was dressed in neutral clothing (like a yellow jumpsuit), and some of the adults were told that the baby was a boy, while others were told it was a girl. Regardless of the setup, the result was the same. The adults reacted to the babies differently, depending' on whether they thought the babies were boys or girls. They'd offer the "girls" dolls, for instance, and the "boys" balls. In one study, in which an infant cried when startled by a jackin-the-box, the adults who thought the baby was a boy interpreted the crying as a sign of anger, and the adults who thought the baby was a girl interpreted it as a sign of fear. This finding was proof, scientists said, that adults imagine differences between baby boys and girls on the basis of gender stereotypes.

It's certainly true that many of the ways that adults treat children are colored by stereotypes and that stereotypes can become self-fulfilling prophecies. But lately scientists have come around to the view that babies aren't clean slates after all. Some studies show what parents have assumed all along: that boys and girls behave slightly differently soon after birth. And with the advent of brainimaging technology, scientists have been able to see differences in the brains of babies as young as 6 month old.

This chapter begins with the time and place where sex differences first show up in an embryo. Then it lays out the gender differences in behavior and development from birth until age 2 -- for example, how content or fussy female and male babies are and how quickly they reach key developmental milestones. Some of the scientific observations will no doubt confirm many parents' observations about their own sons and daughters, while others will challenge certain stereotypes about baby boys and girls.

The chapter goes on to discuss how some of the differences in the ways that girls and boys act and develop relate to differences in their brains. At this point, no one knows exactly how gender-based variations in the brain translate into things like -temperament, preferences for toys, and skills as a child grows. But differences in areas of the brain that appear to influence specific behaviors have led scientists to make some plausible, if still tentative, connections.

A biological predisposition is not destiny, however. How you and other caregivers treat your sons and daughters can either amplify or reduce their tendencies to develop in gender-typed ways. There's nothing wrong with boys and...

Excerpted from A Field Guide to Boys and Girlsby Gilbert, Susan Copyright © 2004 by Susan Gilbert. Excerpted by permission.
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