About That Whole Gender-Differences-in-Children Thing
Just in time (given a recent headline), the Scientific American’s latest issue is all about the research concerning the potentially innate differences between males and females. (Hint: they don’t start out so different after all.)
From their “The Truth about Boys and Girls” cover article:
If there is a neurological disparity between the genders, it could explain important behavioral differences. But surprisingly, researchers have found very few large-scale differences between boys and girls in brain structure or function. Yes, boys have larger brains (and heads) than girls—from birth through old age. And girls’ brains finish growing earlier than boys’. But neither of these findings explains why boys are more active and girls more verbal or reveals a plausible basis for the consistent gaps in their reading, writing and science test scores that have parents and teachers up in arms.
They go on to illuminate how experience – or nurture, if you feel compelled to put it in terms of that age-old argument – plays a much more important role in establishing gender: “Most sex differences start out small—as mere biases in temperament and play style—but are amplified as children’s pink- or blue-tinted brains meet our gender-infused culture.”
I’ll chime in to say it’s important to remember that children’s brains are quite malleable, especially in early childhood. In practical terms, this means that our own cultural ideas and subtle gender-based biases present within our interactions with boys and girls actually impact and help shape our children’s physical brains – with the potential to magnify the originally small sex-based neurological differences that a child may start out with. As much as there may be real neurological differences between older boys and girls, those neurological differences, to a large degree, have been a result of the brain’s own self-shaping responses to culturally informed experiences.
This has been perhaps one of the largest faults present in past scientific research about children and gender: much of the research simply never acknowledged that there is no fixed, neurological standard in brain development, or that the brain itself grows and shapes itself based on experiences. In effect, studying the neurological roots of gender is like trying to pin down a fast-moving target, and then trying to tell others how to do the same thing with other fast-moving targets. It just can’t be done.