| You should not be. I had both. They do work differently, and there is a lot of overlap. Legos though. Common ground! Almost everyone will get after a pile of legos. The thing I disliked the most was watching the girls lose interest in some things as social pressure increased on them. Girlie norms. Good for girls, not for boys, kinds of things were in play. Rubbed me the wrong way. Thing is, some boys are girly, and some girls are boyish. That's OK. Has to be, or we require people to live lies. I sure don't want to do that. How can I require others to do it? What if it were me? You? We gotta shake that stuff all off, learn new ideas, new ways for people to better self identify and be good with who they are. We do that so they too can be good with who they are. As a parent, it was hard to compete with the norms. Was mostly successful, but not to the degree I now feel makes sense. I had help from my kids peers who saw I was open, seeking, just wanting to bring out who I saw developing. BTW: watching their peers showed me those brain differences aren't just gender driven. Boys and girls, in a general sense, can make these things easy to see. And people get stuck on all that too. Like they stop right there, when the truth is they should be continuing! The reality is the kids brains will work differently. A boy who likes to craft and sew happens more often than many understand, just as does the girl who likes to build, take it apart, or race. We tend to celebrate the latter, when we should just celebrate new people, our future. That's where we need to get to, if you ask me. Let the kids present as who they are, and we can then seek to understand with them and maximize that with and for them. Many young people today get this cold. A whole lot of norms we struggle with today are going to change for the better. It's a good thing, but will likely continue to be kind of rough for a while yet. All, FWIW, just observations from the school of hard knocks. :D |