Raising boys or raising girls: which is harder? Is it different? Aside from the obvious, how fundamentally different are boys and girls? How does that affect our parenting?
These are truly loaded, complex questions without easy answers. On one hand, most of us know that a lot of our ideas about gender are culturally constructed. We learn about gender from movies and TV, from advertising, from the ideas of our friends and families. We learn about gender from the toys that are marketed for boys and for girls and from the clothes that are available in the department stores. Someone has apparently decided, for instance, that girls like and should have pink, and that boys like and should have blue.
Most of us also suspect, however, that there are some real differences between boys and girls that go beyond cultural influences. What are those differences, and how do they shape our roles as parents?
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