Are Girls and Boys Really that Different?

When it came to the sex of my first baby, I very much wanted it to be a surprise. Mainly, I wanted that wow moment when the baby comes out and you finally find out what you’re having.

On the flip side of this, not knowing the sex of my baby for nine months was kind of weird. As I didn’t know the sex, I could help but create a persona in my mind of what my baby would look like. I was going to have a girl for sure, and I had my names all ready to go.

So when I was handed my little baby and told it was a boy, I didn’t know how to react. The first thing I said was, are you sure?

Obviously, they were sure, and he was indeed a little boy. I was really quite thrown by this. In my mind my life with a gentle little girl, painting and going shopping had been snatched away, by a future football obsessed, lager lout of a man.

Flash forward to today and I now know how ridiculous this is. I actually think my little boy, Dylan is the kindest most compassionate human I have ever met. His love is unbounding, his care and protection for those that matter to him is staggering, (including telling doctors off for hurting his mama during blood tests etc 😂)

He is nothing like the vision I had in my mind when he came along. Which really made me think, where did I get this bullshit opinion of sexes from?

Well, it comes from a lifetime of gender specific clothes, toys, social conditioning and stereotypes. But it seems, new studies find that girls are boys aren’t that different after all. So what makes us such different creatures in adulthood?

Apparently we just treat girls and boys differently from the day they are born. It’s the ‘boys will be boys’ mentality within us that leads to a more raucous little boy, rather than an actual binary difference in the way their brains are wired.

Examples? We apparently sing to girls more, talk to them about their emotions, ask them how they are doing more. When a girl displays dangerous behaviour and bounds around with reckless abandonment, we warn her to be careful but when a boy does it, it is celebrated, with giggles and mutterings of him being ‘such a boy’.

There’s the obvious pattern of gender specific toys from birth as well, which also make boys more interested in cars and trains and girls more interested in dolls and make up.

Its an interesting concept, and one I’m trying to be aware of all the time, I don’t want anyone to call my little boy champ or the little girl growing in my belly sweetheart, I want them to grow up as equal humans.

The conclusion? There are some differences but they are so subtle and the society differences we have created between men and women are what makes our boys ‘such boys’ and our girls, ‘lovely little things’.

It’s certainly made me think twice about the language I use and the toys I buy my little boy. How to you avoid gender stereo types if you do at all?