Gender Roles

    This week in my family relations course we talked about the characteristics of a female and male. How they are different and how they are alike. I really enjoy learning about what makes boys and girls different because, for some reason that I don't understand, the relationship between the two work together so well.

    Today in class we talked about gender roles and how it effects the dynamics of a family. I would be lying if I said I wasn't a little worried at the beginning of the lesson because I was prepared to hear someone say that a man can't have feminine traits and a female can't have male traits and that they SHOULDN'T. Good news! That's not how the discussion went! It was actually the opposite. We talked about this study that had been done on little kids around the age of 4 or 5. I mention how old these kids were because they are at an age where they haven't been influenced by outside forces, telling them to act a certain way because they're either a boy or girl. This study looked at their behaviors and how they differ and how they're alike. It showed that at an earlier age the girls were more social than the boys. Whether that was playing with the other kids or having their toys play with each other. This makes sense. I feel like it is pretty common knowledge that girls typically start talking earlier than boys making them more social. They saw something different in the little boys though. They noticed that the boys were playing it was more physical. Meaning that, unlike girls, to play they can just play and don't need to chat about what they are doing or how they are doing it with the others. What I thought was really important to remember from this study is that this isn't always the case. It's not 100% accurate. Many times, a boy will be more social, or a girl could be more physical. But from multiple studies, the majority of them show boys to be more physical and girls more social.

    Another thing that I thought was interesting was the difference in how boys and girls give directions. Boys are spatially oriented, meaning when they are explaining where something is they will often give you a road name or say it's in a specific direction. With girls, we give directions in relation to other things we know. If I were to give you directions to Walmart, I would tell you to it's by Panda Express not necessary the name of the highway it's off of. I had never thought about that, but I can see this in my parents and others who I have driven with. Sometimes I will be sitting in the back seat, and someone is giving directions for the other and one will get frustrated because their directions don't make sense to them. 

    There is so many other things I could tell you about what makes boys and girls different and how we are similar but there is one last thing that I think is important to recognize. A lot of the time, especially in today's society, there is tearing down of the opposite gender. Although boys and girls are different. We have different strengths, weaknesses, we think differently, react differently, there is not one that is better than another. When we talked about this in class, someone said, "Boys don't have to be bad for girls to be good and girls don't have to be bad for boys to be good". I think as simple as that sounds, we might forget it. It's not a competition. We are supposed to work together.