Think back to when you were a child. What did you like? Dislike? Who were your friends? What did you play? I remember when I was little, I usually had some close friends my own gender, and we always used to love playing “house,” acting as if we were part of a family with our own joys, problems, and overall family love. But was this how my little brother acted when he came home with his friends of his own gender? Quite the contrary. I would see them hitting each other with toy lightsabers, pretending to shoot guns, and being quite aggressive. He never wanted to join in to the fun I was having with my friends (nor did I really want him to), and I never wanted to join in the fun he was having with his (again, I think that feeling was mutual). But why were we so different in what we chose to do with our friends? Obviously playing “house” or with dress ups were a very “girl” thing to do while lightsaber fights and sports were the boy thing for my brother to do. But does that mean that my parents brought us up, cramming our genders down our throat? Shouldn’t we have received the option to choose what we liked, whether it was a boy or girl thing to do?
Well, luckily, my parents were very understanding of what each of us children wanted to do and helped foster a love of many things. I grew up mowing the lawn, and my brother started learning to cook from a very young age. However, we both naturally wanted different things.
There is a huge debate going on whether parents are truly letting their children choose what they wanted to do, or just what was socially acceptable in the eyes of the parents. Why else would all of the dolls be pink, and the power rangers be blue in the store? However, after careful study, researchers have actually found that there are innate differences in genders from the very beginning. After studying babies just a few days old, they began seeing gender differences.
In The Family: A Proclamation to the World, it states, “Gender is an essential characteristic of individual premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose.” From the very beginning, female babies start watching their mother’s mouths and mouthing along to their mother’s words to practice words and verbal cues. This isn’t true with the male babies. As they grow older, studies have found that when girls get frustrated, they have more of an emotional response. Boys tend to have more of an aggressive response. Girls also don’t usually react quite as startled as boys to do sudden response. When children grow to their teens, this gender difference starts to show itself in how women and men understand directions. Men are more prone to direction while women are more prone to use landmarks. This happened just the other day with my boyfriend and me. We were both trying to tell a friend where to park, and right away I told him the closest building on campus, while my boyfriends mentioned the exact direction and street.
So what do these differences mean? It is proven that women and men have different brain structures. Women’s brains tend to be interconnected to everything else, while a man’s brain is sectioned off to each individual topic that may come about. This is a video that might help illustrate this difference.
Women and men do tend to think differently. It is not because our genders were crammed down our throats at a young age, but because gender truly is an essential characteristic.
Now, to be clear. There may be many of you out there feeling like you think so differently than your specified gender. Please know that you are not alone! This is not to say that unless you have a very specific way of thinking, you were born in the wrong body. Quite the contrary! In fact, science has studied that phenomena as well. But because that goes into a completely new topic, this is what I will say. Your sex is God-given. What you like to do and how you view the world is not so black and white. There are many different factors that will lead you to be who you are—environment, family situations, other biological makeup, etc. However, what I have come to know through studying gender differences is that we are all connected as human beings. Male and female, we are all children of God. And we can be unified in that knowledge.
Comments