The Complete Parenting Collection. Steve Biddulph
and lots of preschools and schools got quite fanatical about this, working hard to get the boys to play with dolls and the girls into the Lego. It was felt that if we raised all children the same, then gender differences and problems would disappear. But gradually the evidence mounted that there were important and immutable differences that were simply wired in. (Some were blindingly obvious: for instance, in all cultures girls enter puberty two years before boys do, which causes much havoc in the world of schoolyard romance.)
With the advent of brain-scanning technology, this argument was pretty much settled. Today we are focussed on understanding the differences and making sure they aren’t a problem. If a girl’s brain develops more quickly than a boy’s, we can plan accordingly so this can be managed in schools and homes. If a boy has an inbuilt need to be active and use his body a lot, we can work out ways for this to happen that don’t mean he is ‘bad’. We can be sure to read to boys so that they become more verbal and better able to talk to girls! We can have less blame and more understanding.
In the next two chapters we will look at two major differences that are very significant in learning to help our sons grow up well:
1. how hormones (such as testosterone) influence boys’ behaviour, and what to do about it, and
2. how boys’ and girls’ brains grow differently and affect their ways of behaving and thinking.
KNOWING THE DIFFERENCES
Some of the real gender differences are so obvious that it’s amazing they were overlooked. For example, the average boy has 30 percent more muscle bulk than the average girl. Boys are stronger and their bodies are more inclined to action. They even have far more red blood cells (the original red-blooded boy!). It has nothing to do with gender conditioning. We have to give boys plenty of chance to exercise – girls too if they want it. Boys will need extra help to control themselves from hitting both each other and girls. Girls need help to learn not to use their better verbal skills to needle and demean boys. And so on.
This doesn’t mean saying, ‘Every boy must …’ or ‘Every girl must …’. After all, some girls are stronger and more physical than many boys. (Some girls need training in nonviolence. In one Sydney school, some parents removed their sons because the girls kept hitting them.) Gender differences are generalisations that are true enough of the time to be very helpful.
BOYS AND HEARING
Colin is ten. He is in trouble at school because he doesn’t pay attention. He gets bored, starts to mess around, and gets sent to the principal’s office. Is he stupid? Bad? Does he have ADHD or ODD (Oppositional Defiant Disorder) or OCD (Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder) or any of the other Ds? Perhaps, but there’s another possibility. What if he just can’t hear? What if his teacher’s voice is just too soft and he gets bored with its faintness, and at home he misses half of what is being said to him? Many parents joke that their son seems deaf when told to clean up his room. And school nurses have long noted that boys get blocked ears more frequently than girls. But there may be more serious factors at play.
Psychologist Leonard Sax, in his book, Why Gender Matters, makes some amazing claims about boys’ hearing. He presents research to show that boys do not hear as well as girls, and argues that boys need teachers who speak louder. He cites Janel Caine, a postgraduate student in Florida, who studied the effects of music on premature babies. These babies lie in their incubators all day, and Caine felt that perhaps some gentle music might help their growth and development. And boy, was she was right! In her astonishing findings, girl babies receiving music ‘therapy’ were discharged from the hospital on average nine days sooner than those who didn’t have the music. It really perked them up! But here’s the thing: boy babies did not show any such benefit. They either didn’t hear the music, or it didn’t affect them.
It’s actually hard to know what tiny babies hear – we can’t just ask them, ‘Did you hear that?’ But lately, some methods have been discovered that can tell if the brain is receiving the message that goes into the ears. Dr Sax claims that, in studies of ‘acoustic brain response’, girl babies have an 80 percent greater brain response to sounds than baby boys do. And guess what frequency this is in? The frequency of speech.
The difference continues into adolescence and adulthood. This might explain that terrible syndrome – complained about by teenage girls worldwide – that Dad is always yelling at them, when Dad thinks he is using a gentle voice!
In a number of recent commentaries, however, Dr Sax has been accused of exaggerating or misrepresenting the research – making sweeping claims from fairly obscure studies. And it does stand to reason that if a huge gender hearing difference was the norm, audiologists would have told us about it earlier.
Nonetheless, there is no harm in being more hearing-aware around boys. And dads, if your daughters wince when you talk to them, maybe talk a little softer.
It’s also possible that the problem of boys in school is not so much to do with hearing as with understanding. Australian audiologists Jan Pollard and Dr Kathy Rowe found that about a quarter of children aged six have poor auditory processing (separating what they hear into meaningful words). And most of these children (70 percent) turn out to be boys. These children have trouble understanding a sentence if it has more than eight words in it! Because teachers often use much longer sentences when teaching, these kids are stuck trying to understand the first part while the teacher (or parent) is going full-steam ahead with the rest of the message. The researchers recommend that teachers use short sentences, and only go on speaking when they see that ‘lights-on’ effect in children’s eyes. And Dr Sax adds that perhaps boys should sit at the front of the class, not the back.
Janine is pregnant – seven weeks pregnant – and very excited. She doesn’t know it yet, but her baby is going to be a boy. We say ‘going to be’ because a foetus doesn’t start that way. It may surprise you to know that all young creatures start life being female. Boys are mutated girls! The Y chromosome that makes a baby into a boy is an ‘add-on’ chromosome which starts to act in the womb – to give a boy the extra bits he needs to be a boy and to stop other bits growing. A male is a female with optional extras. That’s why everyone has nipples, though not everyone needs them.
The testosterone cycle
In Janine’s baby’s tiny body, at around the eighth week of pregnancy, the Y chromosomes stir in the cells and testosterone starts being made. As a result of this new chemical presence, the baby starts to become more of a boy, growing testicles and a penis, and making other more subtle changes in his brain and body. Once the testicles are formed (by the fifteenth week they are fully developed), they start to make testosterone, too, so he becomes progressively more and more masculine.
If Janine is very stressed, her body may suppress the testosterone in baby Jamie’s body, and he may not fully develop his penis and testicles, so he will be incompletely developed at birth. He will catch up, however, in the first year.