I recently attended a talk by Dr. Michael Thompson about his book, “Raising Cain: Protecting the emotional life of boys”. Although during his talk, he focussed mainly on boys, it did help me to understand better about what to or not to expect from my daughter. After years of research, he feels that the boys are not on the same emotional trajectory as the girls. In addition, both nature and nurture make boys have “boy brains” by the age of 8 years. What does this “boy brain” contain that is different from girls? He quoted several research studies that say that in general boys are more physically active and less emotionally mature than girls. Also, the concept of one-on-one dominance is prominent in boys by eight years of age, which could mean that the concept of bullying (both physical and mental) may be more common among boys. These differences between the “boy-brain” and “girl-brain” have led people to wrongly diagnose many boys as having attention deficit disorders and other such disorders, not to mention the day to day struggles that many other boys go through in their classrooms everyday because their teacher is not able to devise effective strategies to teach them. In his book, Dr. Thompson gives several recommendations to both schools and parents, to nurture the emotional life of boys, one of the foremost being to “recognize and accept the high activity level of boys and give them safe boy places to express it”. This book is a must-read for all parents of boys.
Before I went to the talk, I was not really sure how it would help me, a parent of a girl. But I found the talk to be very interesting and helpful because of the following reasons:
As I mentioned earlier, I do find my daughter to be different from a typical girl in several ways. For example, she is physically very active. I see that at home very often and also, her teacher has mentioned to me about how she likes those activities which involve movement of the body much more than other activities. Dr. Thompson’s talk made me understand the importance of rigorous physical activity for my daughter. She is the kind of person who needs a platform regularly to release her unexpended energy. I’ve now started to research some of the indoor play-spaces and gym classes to prepare for the chilly winter ahead.
Dr. Thompson’s words about how the children themselves initiate gender separation struck a deep chord in me. This could potentially mean that as children grow up, even if they can learn several positive things from a peer who of the other gender, they may not do it due to peer pressure to enforce gender separation. This is unacceptable for me. I’ve already seen my daughter surrender to this pressure. When she was three years old, she used to come back from school and talk about “how she didn’t want to do something because that’s what only boys do”. I’ve been thinking about what I can do as a parent to help my daughter develop a open-mind to the gender differences – more play dates with boys, encouraging more and more physical activity and so on.
On the whole, it is quite a set of challenges as a parent these days 
