1 DIFFERENCES We''re entering a new period in science, in which the rewards will come less from the breakthrough investigations of individual scientists than from fitting together the pieces of research to see what it all means . Social and biological insights are leaping together, part of a large and complex jigsaw puzzle to which the contributions of many sciences are essential. --Shelley Taylor, professor of psychology, UCLA, 20021 Matthew turned five years old the summer before kindergarten started. He was looking forward to it. From what he had heard, kindergarten sounded like just one long play date with friends. He could hardly wait. So his mother, Cindy, was surprised when, in October, Matthew started refusing to go to school, refusing even to get dressed in the morning. More than once, Cindy had to dress him, carry him writhing and thrashing into the car, and then drag him from the car into the school.
She decided to investigate. She sat in on his kindergarten class. She spoke with the teacher. Everything seemed fine. The teacher--gentle, soft-spoken, and well-educated--reassured Mom that there was no cause for alarm. But Cindy remained concerned, and rightly so, because major problems were just around the corner. Caitlyn was a shy child and just the slightest bit overweight all through elementary school. In middle school, she underwent a metamorphosis from chubby wallflower to outgoing socialite.
She lost weight so quickly that her mother, Jill, worried she might be anorexic. For the next four years, though, everything seemed great--in a frantic and crazy sort of way. Caitlyn was juggling a heavy academic load, had lots of friends, and maintained a full schedule of after-school activities, staying up until midnight or later doing homework. But she seemed happy enough: often frenzied and frazzled, sure, but still happy. Or at least that''s what everybody thought until the phone rang at 3 a.m. that awful, unforgettable November night. A nurse told Jill that Caitlyn was in the emergency room, unconscious, having tried to commit suicide with an overdose of Vicodin and Xanax.
These true stories(2) share a grim common element: each kid started out okay, then took a turn in the wrong direction. There is another element in common as well. In both cases the problem arose because the parents did not understand some basic differences between girls and boys. In each case, trouble might have been averted if the parents had known enough about gender differences to recognize what was really happening in their child''s life. In each case, the parents could have taken specific action that might have prevented or solved the problem. We will come back to both of these kids later in this book. Right now it may not be obvious to you how each of these stories illustrates a failure to understand sex differences in child development. That''s okay.
Later on, we''ll hear more about Matthew and Caitlyn. Armed with some basic knowledge about hardwired gender differences, you''ll be able to recognize where the parents made the wrong decision or failed to act, and you''ll see how the story might have ended differently. The Dubious Virtue of Gender-Neutral Child-Rearing I enrolled in the Ph.D. program in psychology at the University of Pennsylvania in September 1980. Governor Ronald Reagan was challenging President Jimmy Carter for the Presidency. The original Apple computer had recently come on the market. "My typewriter is working fine," was the answer the department secretary gave me when I asked her whether she would be getting a word processor anytime soon.
Nobody I knew had ever heard of Bill Gates, e-mail, or the Internet. The invention of the World Wide Web still lay ten years in the future. Among the courses I took that fall was a graduate seminar in developmental psychology. "Why do girls and boys behave differently?" my professor, Justin Aronfreed, asked rhetorically. "Because we expect them to. Imagine a world in which we raised girls to play with tanks and trucks, in which we encouraged boys to play with dolls. Imagine a world in which we played rough-and-tumble games with girls while we cuddled and hugged the boys. In such a world, many of the differences we see in how girls and boys behave--maybe even all the differences--would vanish.
" In another seminar my fellow graduate students and I learned about the extraordinary work of Professor John Money at Johns Hopkins. Professor Money had been consulted by the parents of an unfortunate little boy whose penis had literally been sizzled off during a botched circumcision. At Dr. Money''s recommendation, the boy had been raised as a girl, with excellent results (according to Dr. Money). The child loved to play dress-up, enjoyed helping Mom in the kitchen, and disdained "boy toys" such as guns or trucks. "Dr. Money''s work provides further evidence that most of the differences we observe between girls and boys are socially constructed," professor Henry Gleitman told us.
"We reward children who follow the sex roles we create for them while we penalize or at least fail to reward children who don''t conform. Parents create and reinforce the differences we observe between girls and boys." We nodded sagely. In clinical rotations we often encountered parents who still clung to the quaint notion that girls and boys were different from birth. But we knew better. Or so we thought. When I left Philadelphia to begin my residency in family practice, I threw out most of the papers I had accumulated during my six years at the University of Pennsylvania. Stacks of photocopied scientific papers had to go out in the trash.
But there was one manila folder I didn''t throw out, a folder containing a series of studies done by Professor John Corso at Penn State during the 1950s and 1960s, demonstrating that females hear better than males.(3) Four years later, after I finished my residency, my wife and I established a family practice in Montgomery County, Maryland, just outside of Washington, D.C. Years passed. I wasn''t thinking much about gender differences. Then in the mid-1990s, I began to notice a parade of second- and third-grade boys marching into my office, their parents clutching a note from the school. The notes read: "We''re concerned that Justin [or Juan or Michael or Tyrone] may have attention deficit disorder. Please evaluate.
" In some of these cases I found that what these boys needed wasn''t drugs for ADD, but rather a teacher who understood the hardwired differences in how girls and boys learn. Upon further inquiry, I found that nobody at the school was aware of gender differences in the ability to hear. I reread Professor Corso''s papers, which documented that boys don''t hear as well as girls. In the next chapter we''ll look more closely at evidence for gender differences in hearing. Think about the typical second-grade classroom. Imagine Justin, six years old, sitting at the back of the class. The teacher, a woman, is speaking in a tone of voice that seems about right to her. Justin barely hears her.
Instead, he''s staring out the window, or watching a fly crawl across the ceiling. The teacher notices that Justin isn''t paying attention. Justin is demonstrating a deficit of attention. The teacher may reasonably wonder whether Justin perhaps has attention deficit disorder. The teacher is absolutely right about Justin showing a deficit of attention. But his attention deficit isn''t due to "attention deficit disorder," it''s due to the fact that Justin can barely hear the soft-spoken teacher. The teacher is talking in a tone of voice that is comfortable to her and to the girls in the class, but some of the boys are practically falling asleep. In some cases we might be able to fix the problem simply by putting the boy in the front row.
Once, after I had done such an evaluation and made my recommendations, the parents told me that the school had advised them to seek a second opinion. "It''s not that we don''t trust you, Dr. Sax," Mom said. "It''s just that the school really thinks we should get an opinion from an expert." I soon learned that the only doctors that this particular school considered to be "experts" were doctors who always prescribed medication. Curious to know whether my experience was unique, I obtained funding from the American Academy of Family Physicians to survey all the doctors in the Washington area. Our survey basically asked one simple question: Who first suggests the diagnosis of ADD? The results: in the majority of cases the diagnosis of ADD is made by the teacher. Not by the parents, nor the neighbors, nor the doctor.
(4) There would be nothing wrong with teachers diagnosing their students as long as they had the training--and the resources, and adequate time --to distinguish the boy with ADD from the boy who just doesn''t hear as well as most girls do. But after talking to dozens of teachers in our county, I didn''t find one who was aware of the studies showing that girls hear better than boys. "You should write a book, Dr. Sax," one of these parents told me. "Write a book so that teachers know about the differences in how girls and boys hear." I allowed myself a patronizing smile. "I''m sure that there must already be dozens of such books for teachers, and for parents," I said. "There aren''t," she said.
"I''ll find some for you," I said. That conversation took place about seven years ago. Since then I''ve read lots of popular books about differences between girls and boys. And guess what. That mom was right. Not only do most of the books currently in print about g.