oh, yes, I've read some things about male and female brains...I'd like to look at what you have there when I'm not so tired
just because there are hardwired differences, I don't think that should dictate what or how kids play or what they wear. Like if a boy wants to wear a dress regardless of how he identifies personally - why not?
My understanding is partly that boys mature more slowly than girls do and work in relationships differently..the current structure in many of the schools, especially if more "traditional" or "basic-curriculum-centered" , is that this structure ends up favoring how many girls learn and interact vs. many boys.
I don't think it should dictate how the kids play, but I do think it's fine to have some gender differences in apparel. I know of no culture that doesn't have some clothing that is distinctly one gender or the other. This has been the case forever. I am not quick to suppose that just because moderns have found some bright idea to play with that means we know better than every society that has ever lived.
Gender identity is a sociologically healthy step, not an error committed by every society for thousands of years.
There are so many interesting biological differences between the two sexes. The way this plays out ins chools is about far more than 'boys mature slowly,' It's also interesting to me how our society claims girls are the underdogs, but we use words that are derogatory to boys to describe the differences- we say they mature more slowly than girls, making girls the standard, and making the things girls are good at the standard (it's kind of like audism isn't it?)
Boys and girls have different numbers of rods and cones in the eye. Boys have more of the one that detects movement, and less of the one that detects color- they really are better at depth perception.
In preschool, *most* boys will want to draw actions, verbs- and they don't use a lot of different colored crayons.
Most girls draw nouns, and they do use lots of different colored crayons.
This makes sense when you know about the rods and cones. It's not socially imposed. But what is socially imposed is that the lady teacher walks around the room, coos over the girl's pictures and suggests the boys use some more color. Immediately, the boys notice that the teacher only suggested that they change the way they draw, not the girls. They learn the first week that girls are better at thsi school stuff.
This also transfers over to doing work book pages- something easier for girls because of the way their eyes are designed, and something a little harder for most boys.
Boys learn better standing up. They think more clearly standing up and slouching over their desks, which they aren't allowed to do in school. That's not a maturity issue, that's a physiological difference typically found between males and females. It works to girls' advantage in schools, and to a boy's disadvantage.
A fascinating study done on college students revealed that regardless of sexual preferences- pain caused blood to flow *to* a male's brain, and caused blood to leave a female's brain. It sharpens male thinking, dulls female thinking (hence, we have more than one child).
There's even a difference in optimum temperature preferences for learning. Boys learn better when it's a little colder, girls learn better at temperatures so warm it puts the boys to sleep. But school teachers in the lower grades usually are women, and the class room thermostat is set to their preference.
There are several more- all equally fascinating.
With all these physiological differences between girls and boys, I have to believe that there are far more inborn differences than we were aware of when we tried to do away with them in the seventies.
