NATURE MATTERS
By MYRNA BLYTH
THE controversy about women's capabilities that began with Harvard President
Lawrence Summers' remarks several weeks ago gets a new hearing with the
publication of "Why Gender Matters." In it, psychologist and family physician
Leonard Sax, using 20 years of published research, offers a guide to the
growing mountain of evidence that girls and boys really are different.
Feminists used to argue that girls acted girlishly primarily because they had
been brought up to behave that way. Today, there are now numerous studies that
indicate what most parents instinctively know: There are inborn differences in
how young males and females learn and behave.
What's more, denying or ignoring these differences, Sax convincingly argues,
can be detrimental to a child's development. "The failure to recognize and
respect sex differences in child development has done substantial harm in the
past 30 years," he declares.
"Of course not all girls are alike and not all boys are alike. But girls and
boys do differ from one another in systematic ways that should be understood
and made use of, not covered up or ignored," he writes.
That doesn't mean that one sex is smarter than the other, though Sax did join
in the Harvard controversy with a Los Angeles Times op-ed that acknowledged
Summers was half right. One of the differences between the sexes, Sax wrote, is
discrepancies in the manner and sequence that boys and girls learn certain
subjects, like physics.
But research shows that many other intriguing differences are observable from
birth: Female babies are more attracted to and interested in faces; boy babies
prefer the movements of a mobile hanging above their cribs; little girls, in
general, tend to be shy; little boys are hard-wired to be more aggressive.
Ask a girl in kindergarten to draw a picture and she'll draw three smiling
people and use several crayons to color in their hair, eyes and skin tone. A
boy will use one black crayon to scribble a line that shows, he says, a rocket
crashing into earth.
The differences continue as children grow. Girls hear better than boys; so,
when a teen-age girl complains that her father is always yelling at her, that
may be the way she genuinely perceives his loud voice.
Teen-age boys have much more trouble discussing their feelings. That's because,
experts have learned, the area of the brain that allows us to talk about
emotions develops later in males.
Sax said he became interested in the subject of gender differences because as a
family physician he began to see "a parade of second- and third-grade boys"
being marched into his office by frantic parents, concerned that their sons
suffered from attention-deficit disorder. He felt that the boys generally were
just acting like boys and needed understanding not the medication that their
teachers and often their parents wanted prescribed.
Because boys' normal behavior is often considered problematic, Sax is concerned
that boys these days are increasingly alienated from school. "Today's boy is
much more likely to be struggling with school than his father was," he notes.
"Recent investigations have shown a dramatic drop over the last 20 years in
boys' academic performance." As a result, Sax has become an advocate of
single-sex education, which he thinks would benefit boys � and girls as well.
This extremely readable book also includes shrewd advice on discipline, and on
helping youngsters avoid drugs and early sexual activity. Sax's findings,
insights and provocative point-of-view should be of interest and help to many
parents.
WHY GENDER MATTERS: What Parents and Teachers Need to Know About the Emerging
Science of Sex Differences
By Leonard Sax
Doubleday, 320 pages, $24.95
Myrna Blyth is the author of "Spin Sisters: How the Women of the Media Sell
Unhappiness and Liberalism to the Women of America."
http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/books/42347.htm
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