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Why Do Boys Like Trucks?
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My three-year-old likes trucks, trains, and Lego towers he can build up and knock down. He is a boy.
His cousins dress up as princesses. They wheel dolls around in doll-sized strollers and
wear fuchsia-colored
fingernail polish.
They are girls.
What makes a boy watch Bob the Builder, and a girl watch Cinderella? Have we parents subconsciously nudged our children into society’s gender roles, just by encouraging them to play with gender-appropriate toys? Maybe. But these stark and long-lasting differences cannot all be traced back to whether parents paint the nursery pink or blue.
Research shows that boys’ brains are actually wired differently than girls’ brains. (See sources below.) Male fetuses are exposed to a lot of testosterone before birth. That isn’t shocking. What is shocking is that girls whose mothers produced a lot of testosterone during pregnancy often prefer trucks to dolls.
Scientists and psychologists now observe that boys are generally better at spacial and mechanical functioning (like how the wheels on a truck move). They frequently get a kick out of danger (like racing out of control on a tricycle). They have less serotonin and oxytocin than girls, which makes them rather impulsive (like kicking down Lego towers). This isn’t something parents teach; it is innate.
Girls, on the other hand, have stronger neural connectors, which allow them to appreciate sensory details like fuchsia-colored nail polish. They have more serotonin than boys, making them less impulsive and daring. On average, they have stronger verbal and emotional skills, steering them more to dolls and stuffed animals and other toys with faces.
Of course, we probably reinforce these pre-wired tendencies by buying train sets for boys and Barbies for girls. But it turns out this is not entirely our fault. Boys really are made of “snakes and snails and puppy dogs’ tails.”
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