Gender Differences in Child Development

This class has a lot of overlap with a few of my other classes and I always find it very interesting to relate my classes to one another and to analyze how different ideas and topics can be applied to one another. In my Psychology of Gender class we discuss many of the different ways males and females differ and how they are the same. I am curious how this relates to child development and how gender differences affect the way we each develop. I have noticed in almost all of our readings for this class almost none of them look at developmental differences between boys and girls and almost always rely solely on age of the child instead.

In my Psychology of Gender class we often talk about how most of the differences that we observe between girls and boys are socially constructed. We reward children who follow the sex roles we create for them while we penalize or at least fail to reward children who don't conform to these roles. Parents create and reinforce the differences we observe between girls and boys by the way that they treat their child’s actions. There are also many differing explanations for the gender differences between boys and girls.

Leonard Sax wrote a book called “Why Gender Matters: What Parents and Teachers Need to Know about the Emerging Science of Sex Differences.” In this book he talks about how a few years ago most experts believed that differences in how girls and boys behave were mainly due to differences in how they were treated by their parents, teachers, and friends. He said however that it is very hard to hang on to that belief today. An avalanche of research over the past twenty years has shown that sex differences are more significant and profound than anybody guessed. Sex differences are real, biologically programmed, and important to how children are raised, disciplined, and educated according to Dr. Sax. One of the main examples that he shows of this is that girls are born with more sensitive hearing than boys, and those differences increase as they grow up. So when a grown man speaks to a girl in what he thinks is a normal voice, she may hear it as yelling. Conversely, boys who appear to be inattentive in class may just be sitting too far away to hear the teacher-especially if the teacher is female. These male students are then much more likely to be diagnosed with ADD and given drugs to treat this, which is often unnecessary because the boy simple can’t hear his soft spoken female teacher so she thinks that he is just not paying attention to her.

Sax also discusses how the amygdala is the place known for negative emotions to be held in our brains. He says that girls are able to talk about their feelings sooner than boys because they develop the connection between the amygdala and the cerebral cortex much earlier. This however develops much later for boys, thus showing why they find it hard to discuss their feelings articulately. I am interested to see how this will apply to social interactions that we are learning about next week and how males and females differ in their social interaction. Females tend to have strong close relationships that rely on emotions and feelings, while males close relationships rely more on doing things or activities with another person to build a strong relationship. These gender differences in children are very interesting to me in the developmental process.