There's truth to the method. The things you read, study, or take in form you as a professional or a parent. There's a ton in parenting that is intuitive or that you learned yourself from your parents. But recently, in a quest for self-betterment and understanding kids better... I picked up this book by Dr. Leonard Sax called "Why Gender Matters." In a nutshell, he begins by demonstrating how boys and girls brains are essentially different in their composition and how that influences their choices, education style, and tendencies. Such a great book.
Lately, my friends who have multiple children of the same gender have been asking me if I can see any differences beginning to emerge in how Matthew, now 18mos, acts more "boy." I'm more attentive now to those differences, lemmie tell ya!
When we went to the pumpkin patch, every little pumpkin was a "ball" for Matthew, which he identified as such and then attempted to hurl as far as possible. Sophia just watched him with a teeny bit of girlish distain. "No. They're pun-kins Matt-Matt!"
Fearless, often dangerous behaviour, check. Matthew's favorite indoor action game is to stand on the seat of his wheeled Pooh riding toy and jump off. The most creative Sophia got with that toy was to sit on the seat backwards and ride it that way. She thought that was so novel!!
Color choices, check. One thing Sax talks about is boys tendency to draw "action" over static figures (like people and houses) that a girl might draw. Coupled with this is boys' tendency to pick colors like gray, brown, black and blue. Girls are drawn to bright colors like red, orange, purple, and yellow. This phenomenon, explains Sax, has everything to do with how their eyes are wired to their brains and what cones inside the eyes are most receptive. (I'll admit I tuned out a lot of the technical stuff in this example). So true... Sophia scribbles with vibrant colors while Matthew does opt for the others mentioned.
So cool! So much to learn!
