Recognizing differences between boys, girls

A LESSON in the difference between boys and girls:

On the day that soccer practice began for high school students, my 17-year-old son left the house as if he'd been shot out of a cannon, and I pitied the boys who would take the field with him.

I read in the set of his jaw this message: "Let's have a 10-hour full-speed practice. Whoever is left standing makes the team."

Anyone who tries to run with him will end up vomiting in a garbage can, I thought.

That same morning, my 15-year-old daughter rose from her bed sleepily and put in a call to one of her friends. After a brief discussion, they settled on what to wear to the first soccer practice.

She phoned me later that morning and gushed with delight at being reunited with her teammates after a summer apart. "And I LOVE my coach," she said happily.

Barring one of those dreadful nursery mix-ups, I cannot explain the enormous difference between two children raised by the same parents except to say that one is a boy and the other is a girl.

I know I didn't do any sexual stereotyping. They came this way. And in the face of this persuasive evidence of my own irrelevance, I can't seem to find my place in the junior gender wars now raging.

Since the release of an American Association of University Women study in 1992 on gender inequities in education and the publication of Reviving Ophelia by Mary Pipher in 1995 that illustrated the devastating impact of media images on the self-esteem of young girls, worried parents have been paying a lot of attention to how they raise their daughters.

Some banned pink, others signed their daughters up for sports teams and still others insisted that Sarah rebuild carburetors with Dad. All in the name of confidence and greater career choice.

The pendulum has swung back the other way with the publication of a half-dozen books pointing to the neglect that boys suffered during this period of girl-child reparations: The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism is Harming our Young Men; Real Boys: Rescuing Our Boys from the Myths of Boyhood and Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys, to name a few. The titles tell the story.

Now every parenting magazine is full of advice on how to manage the differences between boys and girls.

This is no doubt prompted by the epidemic of eating disorders among ever-younger girls obsessed with body image, and the rash of school shootings, all by boys or young men, blamed on their mismanaged aggression.

It is hard to know whether we should be treating our children as if they were without any gender at all, or dressing our boys in pink and our girls in camouflage. Are boys and girls inherently different, or is that difference the result of generations of sexual stereotyping?

The answer is almost certainly yes to both: Children arrive with sexual identities and, for years parents have done little more than overlay the obvious with social conventions.

But the stakes are higher these days than they have ever been.

Eight-year-old girls under the sway of Britney Spears are feeling enormous sexual pressures that they cannot articulate and with which they cannot begin to cope. When these girls agree to oral sex games at middle-school parties or join the no-lunch table in the cafeteria, we are all shocked.

Rambunctious school boys are being packed off to pediatricians for medications that will suppress their energy and their impulses while professional football replaces church as the most common Sunday worship service. When these same boys grow up and explode into violence against their classmates or their girlfriends, we are all shocked.

One answer often suggested to parents is to introduce boys and girls to a variety of role models and give them a variety of messages so that they can see there is an array of choices in life, and all of them are open to children of both sexes.

But more choices never help children decide, as any mother trying to persuade a pre-schooler to get dressed can confirm. Our children need one or two people they can talk to, lean on, trust or hang out with. They don't need a casting call.

It can either be their moms, their dads, or someone else's mom or dad. It can be an older friend. Someone they can talk to, or someone who doesn't mind the long silences. They need an adult or an older friend who is available to them. Someone who is around in case they want to talk.

The problem is not the messages we give our boy and girl children, or the fact that these messages might be sexist or limiting. The problem, for our children, is that too often no one is around to listen to what they have to say.

Likewise, we don't need to introduce our children to women race car drivers or male nurses in order to demonstrate opportunity. What we should do instead is recognize what our children love, what they are curious about, and explore it with them.

It is not that we should make dance lessons available to our sons and sports camps to our daughters. Rather, we have to be available and listen if we are to know that one of our children has a passion for dance and another a passion for soccer. Only when we know their dreams can we help make them come true.