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There is so much content about #boymom or #girlmom — boys love throwing balls, girls love shopping. Are there actual behavioral differences between a male-sex kid and a female-sex kid?
––Banish the binary
Conversations about this question can get very fraught, very fast. I’m going to try to go up the middle to avoid any extreme rhetoric.
There are many domains of behavior and development where there is clear evidence that kids who are born boys and those who are born girls differ. This includes early life outcomes like speech milestones (boys tend to be slower) and differences in how behavioral issues manifest throughout childhood. Boys tend to have more externalizing problems; girls have more internalizing problems. Boys hit puberty later and tend to develop executive function later. You can see differences in brain development at many ages. These things are clear.
There are two reasons this doesn’t fully answer your question, though. First: even in these domains where we see average differences, there is huge overlap in the distributions. Yes, boys talk later on average, but the variation within gender is far larger than the average difference across gender, and there are some boys and some girls at all levels.
Second, developmental differences don’t necessarily mean that (say) girls like shopping more. These behavioral choices are driven enormously by social pressure, and it is extremely difficult to think about the counterfactual — like, what would happen if we treated boys and girls exactly the same? We cannot know. All of the developmental differences probably do suggest we’d see some differences in what kids like and when but, again, with a lot of overlap.
Bottom line: TikTok trends are not known for their nuance, and this one is no exception.
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Reasonable perspective that doesn’t deny basic biology. I had to check to make sure your other advice would be trustworthy. Happy with your pretty moderate answer.