Before I had children I thought that boys and girls would  be the same to raise.  That if I treated them the same that the stereotypical gender differences would not be apparent.  My boys would play with dolls, my girls would play with trucks, and we would be gender neutral in all that we did.   I bought gender neutral toys.  I has dolls AND trucks.  I had kitchen sets AND workbenches.  They played with both.  Yet, the gender differences were still there.  Why?

What happened is that I gave birth to actual live children who had minds of their own.  And surprisingly, or not surprisingly according to  this article at CNN, they behaved in stereotypical ways.  And I don’t mean about the toys that they chose to play with, or their level of energy, or their propensity for destruction, it was the ways in which they interact with the world that drew my atttention. 

My daughter likes to talk, about things like her feelings.  She talks about how her friends feel. She also loves the written word and can spend hours just writing notes to people.   This isn’t to say that my sons don’t do these things also, they do.  It is just that  they aren’t done with the same intensity. 

They may sit for hours and draw or color, but usually the words that they chose to write are their names and descriptions of their drawings.  Bubbles coming out of the mouths of their drawings are very popular, especially if they say things like “BURP”  I am not sure that my daughter has ever drawn a picture of something with a noxious cloud coming out of it’s mouth (or butt).

Last summer we were at our local beach and my kids had found other kids to play with.  The boys were digging and splashing and being loud.   The girls were too for a time.  Then one little girl said to my daughter, “Let’s go lay down on our towels and TALK!”  and all the girls were so excited over this idea.  “Yes!  Talk!”

In all my years of parenting I can honestly say that I have never seen boys say to another boy, “Let’s talk!”