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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I think girls wind up dealing with more complex social issues than boys. I don't necessarily think this is innate to girls -- I think they get socialized into it whereas boys are encouraged and modeled very straightforward friendships and social relationships.

This absolutely impacts your experience as a mom. I was surprised when the drama around female friendships started so young with my DD -- there was a "popular" girl in her preschool class and the other girls would compete for this girl's attention. It was hard to navigate and I was surprised by how perceptive the girls were to very minor shifts in these friendships. Like my DD would tell me that the popular girl had chosen a kind of favorite friend and that another girl was envious and so had been playing on her own a lot recently. These girls were FOUR. And this was not some adult drama that was superimposed on these kids by their moms -- this preschool did not have a cohesive parent community and while everyone was friendly at drop-off, pick-up, none of us socialized outside school events and kid birthdays. So this is something that organically emerged in the classroom. I've never encountered boys with that kind of social interaction at that age, or even much older.

As my DD has gotten older, I also think that sometimes schools/teachers treat boys and girls differently and that impacts your experience, too. A good friend of mine has a daughter with ADHD, and the school handles it so much differently than they do boys with the same diagnosis. On the one hand, it tends to present differently, but on the other hand I think often this girl is expected to self-manage her diagnosis in a way the boys are not. Even beyond that situation, I think girls are often expected to self-regulate from an earlier age and there is more school and social reprobation if they are struggling with that. Up to a certain threshold (i.e. hurting people) disruptive behavior or outbursts from boys are viewed as much more developmentally normal into the elementary grades than the same behavior from girls.

It's hard though because this has to do with gendered social expectations, which can emerge at school, at home, from peers, from social media, from other media. But some of it, like that social behavior in my DD's preschool class, can crop up no matter what.
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I have seen similar dynamics among boys -- the popular boy that everyone wants to be around, whose choice of playmate or friend creates jealousy or unhappiness, definitely exists.  And while it might arise a little later, I have absolutely seen those boys realize that they possess that power, and using it intentionally, sometimes in ways that we would call "being a mean girl" if a girl did it.

I do agree that gendered expectations for kids do differ, and as a parent, you have to be aware of that.  Girls are expected to be "nice" and compliant, have more self-control, manage their feelings better, and generally self-regulate better.  Girls with ADHD are more often written off as flaky or spacy, because they tend to be less of a behavioral problem.  People expect girls to suppress anger, but have more tolerance for other emotions, like fear or sadness.  People have more tolerance for boys being disruptive or physical or expressing anger, and less tolerance for boys who express sadness, fear.  [/quote]

Yes to all this (PP here). I am sure you are right about boys having those social dynamics, but I mentioned it because when it happened the parents with girls I spoke to nodded and said "oh yeah, we went through that in kindergarten" or whatever, and the parents of boys I spoke to were like "what? no way, I've never heard of this." So I assumed it was gender difference.

But as with many things, it might just be the way people perceive the gender difference. Maybe adults are more likely to notice the way girls socialize because girls are judged more on how social/popular they are, and maybe parents of boys don't worry about this as much? I don't know as I only have girls.

My bigger point is that the difference between raising boys and girls likely stems not in their innate differences but in the fact that society treats them differently which will require you to parent them differently. My kid is not quite at that age yet, but I remember I worried about my appearance a lot as a teen in a way my brothers did not. It's not that they didn't go through that typical adolescent period of not knowing what to do with your body (and also the awkward hormonal growth stages). But the expectations for them were lower whereas I always felt intense pressure to dress a certain way and for my hair and skin and body to look the way it was "supposed to." So it's not that girls care more about their appearance than boys, but that the stakes are higher for girls because of social expectations. Or at least that was my experience growing up.[/quote]

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