Lessons I've Learned From My Children Pt 3

Boys and girls are just made to be different.

Obvious, I know, but I didn’t realize how different they are until I had one of each. It’s amazing to me that even at the tender ages of 2 and 4, the difference between the sexes is apparent. We have a wide variety of toys in our home for the children to play with, but with a few exceptions, they gravitate to typically gender specific toys. My daughter loves Abby Cadabby, Disney Princesses, Barbie and playing dress-up. My son’s idea of a great time is building Legos towers, crashing cars, climbing, and knocking things over. If it’s pretty, my daughter likes it. If it makes noise or can be thrown, my son likes it.

Before I had children, I believed that children are socialized to behave in typically feminine or masculine ways. I thought that, all things being equal, boys might play with dolls and girls might like to race RC cars. I really did think that boys learn to like tractors and superheroes because those are the toys that are given to them by their fathers. By the same token, I thought that girls play dress-up with their Barbies because they see their mothers paying so much attention to their appearance.

While I do like to look nice, I am not particularly fashion conscious. So, Imagine my surprise, when my daughter started insisting that she wear a dress every day. I rarely wear dresses, so I have no idea where she got the idea that if a person wears pants, they must be a boy. For about 4 months last spring and summer, all my daughter would wear was dresses or skirts. The only way I could get her to wear pants was to let her wear a skirt over them. She notices if I do something different with my hair and is overjoyed any time I actually do wear a dress. She loves her princess costumes and frequently runs around the house with her fairy wings on and a pink magic wand in her hand. She is definitely a girly-girl, and she didn’t learn it from me.

My son, on the other hand, likes to build towers just so he can knock them down. His favorite words are animal and car noises. He’d rather grunt and point at what he wants than to actually speak the words necessary to ask for it. He only wants to get hold of that pink magic wand so that he can hit someone or something with it. It’s a recurring problem we have that didn’t occur with my daughter. He just likes to hit people for some reason. He didn’t learn that from me or his father.

Some of the differences I see are partially due to the fact that my daughter was the firstborn and my son had a big sister to keep up with. I can’t help but notice, however, that boys who are firstborn or only children are generally still more active and aggressive even than girls who have older brothers. It’s comforting to me that boys will be boys whether or not they have “manly” toys to play with and girls will be girls even if mom doesn’t play Barbie with them. It’s good to know that there is an order to the universe and there’s not much I can do to mess it up.


God created the man in His image; in the image of God He created him, male and female He created them. And God blessed them.