Our current society is so bent on blurring the lines of gender even so much as to equate the two genders to being equal or the same. They are not the same. Let me repeat myself, they are NOT the same. They are definitely equal in value, but that is about the end of the equality.
My first son was surrounded by female playmates. He of course was the third child born to a family that already had two very GIRLY girls. The girls would dress him up (much to dad’s dismay), play house with him and even include him in their Barbie play (we did get him a GI JOE action figure for this purpose). However, he still preferred more aggressive, risk taking play. He preferred to design a tower for Barbie to climb and knock over rather then idly arrange clothing or Barbie furniture. He loved being physical from the time he could move and would climb up a tree and toss things to the ground just to see them fall.
My girls would play quietly for hours, my sons…they will play for hours but there is NOTHING quiet about it. This was once again (as it is daily) evidenced to me yesterday as I took my two youngest boys to a local park. When I was a child I have such fond memories of going to a park with my mother and feeding the ducks. We would take popped corn or breadcrumbs and spend hours feeding the ducks. I loved to look at the colors on the duck’s feathers and see just how close I could get the ducks to come to me. When there were ducklings I always dreamed of getting just close enough to hold one.
Then there are the boys. I took my youngest two to enjoy the same type of experience that I had and as we sat down to start crumbling bread to toss to the ducks I was a bit dismayed that my 3 y/o thought it was much more entertaining to try to “bop” the ducks on the heads with balls of dough rather then gently toss the crumbs to the ducks. And, it was way more fun to him to run at the swarm of ducks to see them fly then to try to entice them to come closer. The worst was that both boys discovered that as a team they could get all the ducks to fly into the water at once by running at them from opposite directions. Ugh. What is a peaceful mother to do? I sat down with my 3 y/o to question him on this behavior and he simply told me that “its fun to see them fly mommy,” “I like to see them skid the water” (3 y/o speak for the way the ducks fly to the safety of the pond and then slip across the surface). Yep, definitely different.
The boys enjoyed feeding the ducks, but definitely not for the same reason I used to. I wound up shaking my head with a bit of a chuckle. They are definitely different. My current favorite read right now? Bringing Up Boys by Dr. James Dobson…if you haven’t read it, please do. The first 4 pages will having you laughing out loud so hard you may likely snort, I did.