Should i parent a boy or a girl

Or do parents just raise them that way? A survey conducted by Newsweek in found that 61 percent of parents believe that the differences in boys and girls come from the way they are raised rather than genetics. But the truth is that arguments can be made for both sides. Read on to learn the many facets of parenting boys versus girls. The Nature Debate Studies have found several profound differences between boys and girls, and the way they respond to their world, beginning at birth.

Newborn girls, for example, spend more time maintaining eye contact with adults. As a result, at four months, infant girls are better able to recognize faces.

Infant boys, on the other hand, tend to stare just as attentively at a blinking light as at a human face. Most experts believe that girls reach initial developmental milestones earlier than boys, such as talking, developing hand-eye coordination and controlling their emotions. This latter gender difference is the result of hormones. Baby boys have higher levels of testosterone than girls and lower levels of serotonin , which causes them to be more easily stressed and harder to calm down.

Infant girls, on the other hand, show a greater tendency to comfort themselves by sucking their thumbs. At four years of age, girls seem to be better at interpreting emotions and building relationships, while boys have a better understanding of spatial relationships. There are also notable differences between boys and girls when it comes to language. Research shows that girls tend to develop their verbal skills faster than boys.

While girls use words almost exclusively, young boys tend to use words about 60 percent of the time, and substitute noises and sounds the rest of the time such as machine-gun fire, car-engine sounds and animal growls. In school-age children, the difference between the sexes is most evident on the playground.

For boys, play often centers around winning. People tend to think that this gender identity is hard-wired, because most people identify with the gender that matches their sex at birth. When boys and girls are born, their brains are virtually indistinguishable; while boys have slightly bigger brains on average, they also have bigger bodies.

Studies suggest there are some minor observable differences in behavior early on. For instance, baby girls seem slightly better at regulating their impulses and attention than boys, according to a study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Experts say the way parents interact with their children also shapes them from a young age.

For example, parents are more likely to explain numbers to sons and use emotion-based words with daughters, according to The Handbook of Parenting , an authoritative collection of research on parenting. Parents also tend to encourage aggressiveness in boys and emotions in girls, the handbook says. Parents raising their children without designated genders aim to block these biases, allowing kids to explore and determine where they fall in their own time.

John Steever, assistant professor of pediatrics at the Mount Sinai Adolescent Health Center in New York, sees gender-open parenting as a way to show children that they will be accepted no matter their identity. This could be particularly important for transgender children, who have higher rates of depression and suicide attempts, he said.

Using gender-neutral pronouns is not the only option for those looking to protect their kids from potentially harmful gender stereotypes, Brown said. She said parents can also make a point to de-emphasize gender and explain to their children that there is more than one way to be a boy or a girl.

Anecdotally, many children raised this way come to their own conclusion about their gender around age 4, just like their peers. For parents raising their children without gender designation, confrontations with bewildered strangers are as routine as changing diapers.

Levitt, a family nurse practitioner, remembers an incident when he was on an airplane with his husband, also a nurse, and Zo, who was bundled in a pink sweater at the time. Studies show that many gender-nonconforming children face bullying.

A survey from GLSEN , which advocates for safe school environments for LGBTQ children, found that 20 to 25 percent of elementary schoolers reported seeing gender-nonconforming classmates being bullied or called names.

Other research on the topic had used much smaller samples, which could have produced a false positive, said Zietsch. Climate change will affect gender ratio among newborns, scientists say. For example, a study of family trees covering , people going back to the year found that if a man produced more sons than daughters, those sons were likely to have more sons. The study suggested that an as-yet undiscovered gene controlled whether a man's sperm contains more X or more Y chromosomes, which affects the sex of his children.

Boys generally have an X and Y chromosome and girls have two X chromosomes. Other researchers have found that when food is in short supply women are more likely to bear daughters than sons. A study analyzed the Great Leap Forward famine in China, one of the most disastrous in history, and found a sharp dip in the number of boys being born, although the reason for the dip was not clear.

And some scientists think climate change could alter the proportion of male and female newborns, with more boys born in places where temperatures rise. But we can say for sure that the variability of environments that Swedes born after experienced did not affect their having boys or girls," Zietsch said.