THAT'S MEN:New US research throws more light on the varying emotional development of boys compared with girls – with some interesting facts, writes PADRAIG O'MORAIN
WHEN YOU meet a boy on the road you should give him a good kick up the backside because he’s either on the way to doing something wrong or on the way back from doing something wrong. That was the advice my father recalled a man in his neighbourhood dispensing to anybody who wanted to listen when my father himself was a boy and therefore in danger of being a target of such a policy.
I am glad to say that he thoroughly disapproved of that gentleman’s attitude. I don’t know if the gentleman himself had been sufficiently kicked in his youth and I’m afraid I hope he was, though it doesn’t appear to have done him much good.
That, I suppose, shows that boys have been getting a bad press for a very long time. Yet, parents of boys and girls will tell you that boys are a fairly straightforward lot compared with their sisters.
Having only daughters I am not in a position to say from experience whether this is true though it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if it was.
But sweeping statements are never the whole story. A study of boys and girls from almost 200 mostly white, middle class families in the US, published in Child Development, throws some light on the varying emotional development of boys compared with girls. It comes up with much that we already know but it also has some interesting findings.
As you might expect, girls in early adolescence are more likely to display such traits as sensitivity and warmth and are more likely to be interested in pursuits such as reading. I suspect that most of the teens who have read the entire Twilighttrilogy in a weekend are girls.
The boys are more likely to display independence, adventurousness, a preference for sports and so on. Boys’ sensitivity seems to decline in middle childhood but the good news is that it increases later on.
The researchers found that your average 19-year-old boy – or man to be politically correct about it – is as sensitive and warm as girls of the same age. So I suppose you could say boys get more like girls as they grow older, at least in that regard.
A particularly interesting finding, I thought, was that boys who spend time with friends who are girls tend to develop greater independence and adventurousness. I have absolutely no idea why this should be so.
Perhaps to be friends with girls they have to learn to stand out from the crowd. By “the crowd” I don’t just mean other boys – no doubt they have to be able to handle a certain amount of slagging from the girl’s girlfriends as well.
To make things even more complicated, the researchers also looked at these issues in relation to first born children compared with second children. Second children are likely to grow in adventurousness and in independence throughout their adolescence, they found, but this is not so true of the eldest child.
So the second child is far more likely to be a bit of a rebel than the first who, generally speaking, is more of a conformist.
How much of what the researchers found is cultural and how much is genetic? There is no doubt that many of our behaviours are genetic – we are born with them. For instance, whether a child is shy or outgoing can owe much to their genetic make-up.
There is also no doubt that the way in which these traits develop has a lot to do with our experiences growing up and indeed with experiences and attitudes transmitted over the generations. So it’s impossible to say if “boys will be boys” at all times and in all places.
But what of the gentleman who wanted boys kicked on the way to and from doing wrong? At the very least, he would appear to have missed out on the development of sensitivity and warmth which appears to be characteristic of most boys by late adolescence. So perhaps, as is so often the case, he was really talking about himself.
- Padraig O'Morain is a counsellor accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. His book, That's Men, the best of the That's Men columnfrom The Irish Times, is published by Veritas