Among certain parents, it is an article of faith not
only that they should treat their sons and daughters alike, but also that they
do. If Jack gets videos games, and joins the soccer team and the math club, so
does Jane. 1 In one,
scientists dressed newborns in gender-neutral clothes and misled adults about
their sex. The adults described the "boys" (actually girls) as angry
or distressed more often than did adults who thought they were observing girls,
and described the "girls" (actually boys) as happy and socially
engaged more than adults who knew the babies were boys.
2 In another study, mothers estimated how
steep a slope their 11-month-olds could crawl down. Moms of boys got it right to
within one degree; morns of girls underestimated what their daughters could do
by nine degrees, even though there are no differences in the motor skills of
infant boys and girls. 3 . How we
perceive children-sociable or remote, physically bold or quiet-shapes how we
treat them and therefore what experiences we give them. Since life leaves
footprints on the very structure and function of the brain, these various
experiences produce sex differences in adult behavior and brains-the result not
of innate and inborn nature but of nurture. Yet there are
differences in adults’ brains, and here Eliot is at her most original and
persuasive: explaining how they arise from tiny sex differences in infancy. For
instance, baby boys are more irritable than girls. 4
. By 4 months of age, boys and girls differ in how much eye
contact they make, and differences in sociability, emotional expressivity, and
verbal ability-all of which depend on interactions with parents-grow throughout
childhood. 5 You often
see the claim that toy preferences-trucks or dolls-appear so early, they must be
innate. But as Eliot points out, 6 and 12-month-olds of both sexes prefer dolls
to trucks, according to a host of studies. Children settle into sex-based play
preferences only around age 1, which is when they grasp which sex they are,
identify strongly with it, and conform to how they see other, usually older,
boys or girls behaving. "Preschoolers are already aware of what’s acceptable to
their peers and what’s not," writes Eliot. Those play preferences then snowball,
producing brains with different talents. The belief in blue
brains and pink brains has real-world consequences, which is why Eliot goes
after them with such vigor (and rigor). It encourages parents to treat
children in ways that make the claims come true, denying boys and girls their
full potential. "Kids rise or fall according to what we believe about
them," she notes. And the belief fuels the drive for single-sex schools, which
is based in part on the false claim that boy brains and girl brains process
sensory information and think differently. A. That makes
parents likely to interact less with their "nonsocial" sons, which could
cause the sexes’ developmental pathways to diverge. B. Lise
Eliot, a neuroscientist at Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science,
doesn’t think these parents are lying, exactly. But she would like to bring some
studies to their attention. C. Those differences also arise
from gender conformity. D. Dozens of such disguised-gender
experiments have shown that adults perceive baby boys and girls differently,
seeing identical behavior through a gender-tinted lens. E. For
instance, the idea that the band of fibers connecting the right and left brain
is larger in women, supposedly supporting their more "holistic" thinking,
is based on a single 1982 study of only 14 brains. F. But that
prejudice may cause parents to unconsciously limit their daughter’s physical
activity. G. Eliot’s inescapable conclusion: there is "little
solid evidence of sex differences in children’s brains."