The difference between boys and girls

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In summary: In fact, she likes more girl things than boys things. My sister has really been shocked by this. Years of Oprah shows and Parent Magazine subscriptions, right down the tubes! My sister has really been shocked by this. Years of Oprah shows and Parent Magazine subscriptions, right down the tubes!
  • #1
Ivan Seeking
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By way of the popular literature in recent years, my sister has always believed that most socialization and play is learned. So when she had two sons followed by a daughter, she thought that her daughter would learn to like what her brothers liked. Well, it turns out that she likes the classical girl things like dolls, and pretty dresses, and colorful bunny toys, and has no interest in the toys that her brothers played with, which were classical boy toys. My sister has really been shocked by this. Years of Oprah shows and Parent Magazine subscriptions, right down the tubes! :biggrin:
 
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  • #2
How isolated from her environment was your sister's daughter? Was she prohibited from television and other media? Did she visit other "normal" people?. Those circumstances would bias her conclusion that behavior is not learned. Perhaps children are influenced as much by other people as well as the parents.

Its difficult to maintain control in social sciences. Unlike insects and animals humans are difficult to isolate and do experiments on, particularly since there are grave ethical issues in doing so.

Edited: first sentence of 2nd paragraph. Thats what happens when you stay up all night :-)
 
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  • #3
so-crates said:
Its difficul to maintain control the social socials. Unlike insects and animals humans are difficult to isolate and do experiments on, particularly since there are grave ethical issues in doing so.

Ethical issues suck
:cry:

While we have the chance, we should be experimenting on all those unwanted children in the world! :rofl:
 
  • #4
Neither of my girls would play with dolls, not even barbie. They did like stuffed animals. No homemaking toys or other girl toys. I bought all the cool stuff I liked as a child and they weren't interested. :frown:

The older one is a born artist, so all she did was draw and sculpt, then discovered computers.
 
  • #5
I have an 8 year old daughter, and a 5 year old son. My girl doesn't have much to do with dolls or "traditional" girl play things, but likes arts and crafts (takes after me a lot in that respect). My son loves his cars and trucks however, and is very typical when it comes to boy toys. I think some play and socialization skills are learned, but children are individuals and have preferences from the get go. I bought my daughter all kinds of dolls as a younger child, but she never had an interest in them. If she saw me sewing or with a glue gun in my hand, she wanted involvement. My son has no interest in the art stuff.

Give them both a snowboarding video game on the Playstation-they are entertained and seem to stop fighting. Can't figure it out.
 
  • #6
so-crates said:
How isolated from her environment was your sister's daughter? Was she prohibited from television and other media? Did she visit other "normal" people?. Those circumstances would bias her conclusion that behavior is not learned. Perhaps children are influenced as much by other people as well as the parents.

Its difficult to maintain control in social sciences. Unlike insects and animals humans are difficult to isolate and do experiments on, particularly since there are grave ethical issues in doing so.

Edited: first sentence of 2nd paragraph. Thats what happens when you stay up all night :-)

First off, humans are animals. Secondly, so are insects.

But I agree, the girl wasn't isolated from society, therefore there's no reason to assume she didn't pick up that behaviour from society. If the mother's watching Oprah constantly, then there you go...
 
  • #7
It appears that there are inherent differences between the sexes. Men are better at playing chess than women. Among the top 100 players in the world there might be one woman. It seems though that women are better at picking out the differences between two similar pictures.
 
  • #8
In general, women are better at multi-tasking, men are better at concentrating.
 
  • #9
I think we can all agree that typical girl toys suck. Typical boy toys are so much better. Who would rather play with a barbie than a gun?
 
  • #10
gravenewworld said:
I think we can all agree that typical girl toys suck. Typical boy toys are so much better. Who would rather play with a barbie than a gun?
My barbies all had guns.
 
  • #11
The short answer to the question of exposure is that her [my nieces's] two brothers were and are by far the biggest influence. Kelly is still very young - just shy of four years old. This is why my sister was so surprised. Kelly is very tough, tougher than both of her older brothers combined, but she is still very much a little girl who likes the classically little girl things in life.

I don't think things like cooking, sewing, or even dolls are really the sort of thing that define feminine favor. But there are very clear social and play differences between my nieces and nephews that seem to go beyond the environment. Of course, I have read that some tendencies can be instilled by the parents even during the first year of life. The claim is made that we project our expectations on our children and that this influences their behavior and even their sexuality, even while the child is still in the crib.
 
  • #13
Ivan Seeking[/quote said:
Of course, I have read that some tendencies can be instilled by the parents even during the first year of life.

The following is an interesting experiment that effectively eliminates all differential environmental influence, at least to the greatest degree possible, by testing boys and girls within 24 hours of birth. Even at this early stage, the experimenters were able to observe different behaviors based on the sex of the babies. (Note that the length of time a baby spends looking at a stimulus is used as an indicator for how much the stimulus interests, or catches the attention of, the baby-- a typical practice in psychology when studying infant behavior.)

One experiment we conducted here in Cambridge was at the local maternity hospital. Essentially we wanted to find out whether sex differences that you observe later in life could be traced back to birth, to see if such differences are present at birth. In this experiment we looked at just over one hundred newborn babies, 24 hours old, which was the youngest we could see them, and we presented each baby with a human face to look at, and then a mechanical mobile suspended above the crib. Each baby got to see both objects.

Obviously these objects are different in interesting ways, because the human face is alive, and it can express emotion, it's a natural object. The mechanical mobile is man-made, it's not alive, and obviously it doesn't have emotions. We tried to make the two objects equivalent in some important ways. One is that they were both the same size; another was that they were a similar colour, in order to try and control features that might be grabbing the child's attention. But effectively what we did was film how long each baby looked at each of these two objects.

We asked the mothers not to tell us the sex of their babies, so that we could remain blind to whether this was a boy or a girl. And for the most part that was possible. Sometimes it was possible to guess that this was a boy or a girl, because there would be cards around the bed saying, "Congratulations, it's a boy." That potentially could have undermined the experiment, although we then gave the videotapes to a panel of judges to simply measure how long the baby looked at the face or the mobile. By the time the judges were looking at these videotapes they didn't have any of these potential clues to the sex of the baby, because all you could see was the eyes of the baby.

The results of the experiment were that we found more boys than girls looked longer at the mechanical mobile. And more girls than boys looked longer at the human face. Given that it was a sex difference that emerged at birth, it means that you can't attribute the difference to experience or culture. Twenty-four hours old. Now you might say, well, they're not exactly new-born, it would have been better to get them at 24 minutes old — or even younger. But obviously we had to respect the wishes of the parents and the doctors to let the baby relax after the trauma of being born. And let the parents get to know their baby. So strictly speaking, it might have been one day of social experience. But nonetheless, this difference is emerging so early that suggests it's at least partly biological.

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/baron-cohen05/baron-cohen05_index.html
 
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What are the biological differences between boys and girls?

Boys and girls have different sex chromosomes, with boys having XY and girls having XX. Boys also have higher levels of testosterone, which leads to physical differences such as deeper voices and more body hair. Girls have higher levels of estrogen, which contributes to differences in body shape and reproductive organs.

Do boys and girls have different brain structures?

Recent research suggests that boys and girls do have some differences in brain structure, including the size and shape of certain areas. However, these differences are not absolute and do not determine behavior or cognitive abilities.

How do boys and girls differ in terms of behavior and development?

Although there are some general differences in behavior between boys and girls, such as boys being more physically active and girls being more verbal, these differences are largely influenced by societal expectations and upbringing. Overall, there is more variation within each gender than between genders.

Are there any differences in the way boys and girls learn?

There is no scientific evidence to suggest that boys and girls have fundamentally different ways of learning. However, individual learning styles and preferences may vary regardless of gender.

Do boys and girls have different emotional and social needs?

Again, there is no clear evidence to support the idea that boys and girls have inherently different emotional and social needs. However, societal expectations and stereotypes may lead to different treatment and expectations for boys and girls, which can impact their emotional and social development.

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