Cinderella Ate My Daughter (7 page)

Listening to Eliot, I began to think that the toy makers might be right in gender coding their wares. This was not just business, it was not just marketers’ manipulation. I mean, if boys will be boys and girls will be girls—even among
monkeys
, for heaven’s sake—there is no point in further discussion, is there? Pop will reveal Popself any day now by becoming obsessed with either Bob the Builder or Barbie (or their Swedish equivalents). And X is fated to remain in the realm of fiction.

That may be where most parents intuitively land, if less ambivalently than I, but it is not the whole story. Toy choice turns out to be one of the largest differences between the sexes over the entire life span, bigger than anything except the preference (among most of us) for the other sex as romantic partners. But its timing and intensity shore up every assumption and stereotype we adults hold: little boys naturally like backhoes, ergo men won’t ask for directions. That blinds us to the larger truth of how deeply those inborn biases are reinforced by a child’s environment.

Eliot’s own research is in something called “neuroplasticity,” the idea that our inborn tendencies and traits, gender-based or otherwise, are shaped by our experience. A child’s brain, she explained, changes on a molecular level when she learns to walk, learns to talk, stores a memory, laughs, cries. Every interaction, every activity, strengthens some neural circuits at the expense of others—and the younger the child, the greater the effect. So though kids may be the most rigid about gender during the princess years, their brains are also at their most malleable, the most open to long-term influence on the abilities and roles that go with their sex. In other words, Eliot said, nurture
becomes
nature. “Think about language. Babies are born ready to absorb the sounds and grammar and intonation of
any
language, but then the brain wires itself up to only perceive and produce a
specific
language. After puberty, it’s possible to learn another language, but it’s far more difficult. I think of gender differences similarly: the ones that exist become amplified by the two different cultures that boys and girls are immersed in from birth. That contributes to the way their emotional and cognitive circuits get wired.”

The environment in which children are raised affects their behaviors as well as their aptitudes. Boys from more egalitarian homes, for example, are more nurturing toward babies than other boys are and more flexible about toy choice. Meanwhile, in a study of more than five thousand three-year-olds, girls with older brothers had stronger spatial skills than both other girls
and
boys with older sisters; boys with older sisters were also less rough in their play than their peers. (The sibling effect worked only one way, incidentally—the younger sibling had no impact whatsoever on the older’s gendered behavior, nor, interestingly, did opposite-sex twins exert such influence on each other.) Similarly—and notably for parents—in 2005, researchers found that mathematically inclined girls whose fathers believed females aren’t “wired” for the subject were less interested in pursuing it. Even the tragic case of David/Brenda—the boy with the botched circumcision who killed himself after being raised as a girl—is no proof that biology trumps culture. David was nearly two when his sex was surgically reassigned as female, old enough, according to Eliot, for his brain to have absorbed a great deal about his gender; he also had an identical twin who remained male, a constant reminder of what might have been. What’s more, a 2005 review of similar cases found that only seventeen of seventy-seven boys whose sex was reassigned chose to revert to male. The other sixty lived out their lives contentedly as women.

Hormones, genes, and chromosomes, then, aren’t quite as powerful as we tend to believe. And that has implications for how we raise and educate our children. “If you believe it’s all immutable, then what is the harm in plunking girls in a pink ghetto or letting boys get by without doing art or singing or all the things they used to like to do before they got associated with girls?” Eliot asked. “But if you believe these disparities in adults are shaped by development and experience…” She paused a moment. “Of course, this assumes you see a value in bringing out the full spectrum of emotional and cognitive abilities in any individual.”

On a blisteringly hot morning in Phoenix, Arizona, I stood behind a one-way mirror, the kind cops on TV use when they’re watching an interrogation. But the “suspects” on the other side of the glass were not criminals: they were just a passel of preschoolers getting ready for “outside time.” A little boy with freckles and a sandy Dennis the Menace cowlick came right up to his reflection, pressed his face against it, and stuck out his tongue. The woman I was with laughed. “They’re used to us coming and watching,” she explained, “so they figure someone is probably back here.”

Released onto the playground, the children dashed around the spongy surface, splitting off from one another like amoebas, forming and re-forming their groups. The pattern in their chaos eventually became clear—girls and boys might alight next to each other but soon whirled away, back to their own kind.

And that’s nothing special, right? Girls play with girls; boys play with boys. You would see it at any preschool anywhere. It was nothing special: yet to the woman I had come here to meet, Carol Martin, a professor of child development at Arizona State University and one of the country’s foremost experts on gender development, it meant everything. Martin and her colleague Richard Fabes co-direct the Sanford Harmony Program, a multimillion-dollar privately funded research initiative, aimed (for now) at preschoolers, kindergarteners, and middle schoolers. Its goal, over time, is to improve how boys and girls think of and treat the other sex in the classroom, on the playground, and beyond: to keep their small behavioral and cognitive differences from turning into unbreachable gaps.

Martin, who has a shock of white hair and preternaturally blue eyes, has spent three decades looking at how kids develop ideas about masculinity and femininity, as well as the long-term implications of those beliefs. In addition to the Sanford program, she has been conducting research on “tomboys.” Among her findings: a third of girls aged seven to eleven that she surveyed identified themselves with the term. Yet in previous studies up to three-quarters of adult women claimed that they had been “tomboys” as kids. That interested me: presumably, most of them were misremembering their past, but why? Why would recalling themselves as less conventionally feminine be so appealing? Maybe because tomboys are resisters; they’re thought of as independent, adventurous, brave—characteristics that women may prize more as adults than they did as girls. Perhaps in hindsight they feel more trapped by the trappings of girlhood than they did at the time, more conflicted about its costs. Or maybe, like me, they’re merely comparing their experience with what they see around them today—the explosion of pink froth—and thinking “Well, I was never like
that
.”

Martin and I left the preschool, which was on the Arizona State campus, and strolled over to the social science building to join Fabes, several other faculty members, and a group of graduate students in a conference room. This team had spent hours watching preschoolers in action, painstakingly tagging their behaviors: solo play, parallel play, same-sex play, cross-sex play (that is, one boy and one girl), mixed-sex play. Fabes flipped open a laptop and, as an example, began projecting a video clip against the wall. The classroom I had just left came into view, but with different kids. A group of boys huddled around a table talking and playing (it was unclear exactly with what), while a gaggle of girls worked together to build a fort of blocks. Fade to black. In a second clip, a boy and a girl stood next to each other, watering plants.

“That’s a missed opportunity,” Fabes commented, pointing at the screen. “I don’t understand why teachers don’t see this.”

I looked at him blankly. It seemed like a good thing to me: a boy and a girl playing happily together. What was the problem? “They’re not playing together,” he corrected. “They’re playing
next
to each other. That’s not the same thing. People see girls and boys playing side by side and consider that interaction, but it’s not.”

Typically, it is girls who initiate the church-and-state separation of childhood, pulling away at around age two and a half from boys who are too rough or rowdy. Shortly after that, the boys reciprocate, avoiding girls even more scrupulously than the girls did them. By the end of the first year of preschool, children spend most of their time, when they can choose, playing with others of their sex. When they do have cross-sex friendships, they tend not to cop to them in public—the relationships go underground. As much as the story of X would like us to think otherwise, that self-segregation, like toy choice, is universal, crossing all cultures—it appears, Martin said, to be innate. The threat of cooties continues, with boys and girls inhabiting their own worlds, through elementary school until middle school, when children realize there might be something to this opposite-sex business after all.

Every cliché I have staunchly refuted plays out in childhood single-sex groups: girls cluster in pairs or trios, chat with one another more than boys do, are more intimate and cooperative in their play, and are more likely to promote group harmony. They play closer to teachers and are more likely than boys to choose toys and activities structured by adults. Boys, on the other hand, play in packs. Their games are more active, rougher, more competitive, and more hierarchical than girls’. They try to play as far as possible from adults’ peering eyes.

Martin and Fabes make clear that they are not pushing for 1970s X-style neutrality. They do not want to discourage or even necessarily diminish segregated play. “We just want to offset its limitations,” Martin explained. “A little girl who only plays with girls and learns the gender behavior and interaction of little girls… well, what they do together is limited. Same with little boys.” Single-sex peer groups reinforce kids’ biases, and over time, as Lise Eliot pointed out, that changes their brains, potentially defining both their abilities and possibilities. By age four, girls—who have a small inherent advantage in verbal and social skills—have outstripped boys in those areas. Around the same time, boys, who have a slight natural edge in spatial skills, begin pulling ahead on that front.

This separation of cultures, as anyone who was ever a child will recall, also contributes to an us-versus-them mentality between males and females. That not only provides endless material for third-rate stand-up comics but, Fabes and Martin believe, undermines our intimate relationships. Years of same-sex play leave kids less able to relate to the other sex—and can set the stage for hostile attitudes and interactions in adolescence and adulthood. “This is a public health issue,” Fabes proclaimed. “It becomes detrimental to relationships, to psychological health and well-being, when boys and girls don’t learn how to talk to one another. That divergence of behavior and communication skills in childhood becomes the building blocks for later issues. Part of the reason we have the divorce rates we do, domestic violence, dating violence, stalking behaviors, sexual harassment, is lack of ability to communicate between men and women.”

Eliminating divorce or domestic violence may be an ambitious mandate for a preschool curriculum, but it’s not without basis: young children who have friends of the other sex have a more positive transition into dating as teenagers and sustain their romantic relationships better. But how does one go about changing behavior that is not merely entrenched but, apparently, inborn? Sometimes, Martin explained, it is easier than one might imagine. Take the case of the boy and girl watering the plants: an alert teacher just needs to mention how the kids are helping each other. “When teachers comment on mixed-sex or crossed-sex play, the likelihood it will happen increases. When they stop commenting, it stops happening. So they need to reinforce it.” Although the curriculum is still in its earliest phases of development, Martin said, it will focus on creating “a higher sense of unity” as a classroom rather than as girls and boys—by choosing a group mascot together, for example. Teachers will be advised not to divide children by gender when lining them up to go outside; there might be “buddy days” or other cooperative learning opportunities during which boys and girls work together. Teachers can integrate discussions of similarities into classroom activities (“Lots of kids like pizza: some are girls and some are boys”). There will also be a series of lessons about exclusion and inclusion involving “Z,” a genderless cartoon alien who is trying to figure out our world. Kids may still largely stick with their own sex, Martin acknowledged, and that’s fine, but maybe they will play more together as well.

Consciously encouraging cross-sex play clearly runs counter to toy marketers’ goals. It also defies a hot trend in education reform: using brain research to justify single-sex classrooms in public schools. Proponents such as Leonard Sax, the author of
Why Gender Matters
and president of the National Association for Single Sex Public Education, claim that the differences between boys and girls are so profound, so determinative, so immutable that coeducation actually does kids a disservice. Among the assertions: boys hear less well than girls (and thus need louder teachers), see action better, and are most alert when taught while standing up in a chilly room. Girls, by contrast, like it hot—their classrooms should be around 75 degrees and decorated in warm hues—prefer sitting in a circle, and excel at seeing colors and nuances. Even if all that were true (a dubious assumption: multiple studies have, for instance, shown that sex-based hearing and vision differences are so negligible as to be irrelevant), presumably, segregation would only deepen those divides, increasing the distance between boys and girls and making them strangers to each other.