Think-Thank-Thunk

Like many, when I was younger I thought the world was my oyster—probably because it was something my teachers or parents told me. Today I understand that the world is nothing like a slimy mollusk. In academic circles we call this type of thing an “idiom.”

Still, we all want our children to have confidence. So, as a member of civilized society, I think convincing kids that the world is an oyster is good practice. Nothing bolsters the courage of developing children as much as confusing them with obscure idioms. Plus it’s fun to do with a grand sweep of the arm. Like this:

Civilized Parent: (sweeping arms dramatically), “Kid, the world is your oyster.”
Child: “My oyster?”
Civilized Parent: “Yep.”
Child: “Don’t you eat oysters?”
Civilized Parent: “Um . . . sometimes.”

Hint to Parents: At this point I’ve found that if you keep flailing your arms in an enthusiastically encouraging manner, kids will normally just take your word for it and move away—especially when with playmates. Which brings me to my next point.

Parent competition, or My kid is smarter than your kid

When my youngest daughter, Nora, who is five, gets together with her cousins, they always have a good time. But as an unbiased-impartial-civilized-parent-observer, I’m often struck by how different the kids are. Though very close in age, one of them seems strikingly more intelligent. She listens better to instruction, speaks more clearly and has a much greater vocabulary.

And since (again from totally unbiased perspective) the smarter kid belongs to me, I am drawn to this logical conclusion: I am obviously the better parent.

Recent scientific research, however, suggests that all this has much less to do with my parenting skills (and use of oyster idioms) than I thought. Nora and her cousins are the same age, but what I failed to realize is that in order to make a fair comparison, they also must be the of same species, and since Nora’s cousins are from Mars, obviously, they are not.

Nora’s cousins are boys.

Sure their anatomies are different, but their brains? C’mon.

The science (and thus teaching and parenting) of brain based gender differences is a very new field of study, but the research is piling up. Obviously, we all know that boys and girls are different, but we have only recently begun to discover just how very different they are. For years, schools (and parents) have been teaching boys and girls the same things in the same way, partially because we fear that to do otherwise would give one an unfair advantage in the battle of the sexes. We’ve been fooling ourselves.

Study after study has shown now, beyond a doubt, that boys’ and girls’ brains are very different. They use different areas for different tasks (language is just one example). They receive and interpret sensory input differently (girls hear certain tones a staggering 10 times better than boys). They develop and mature at different rates (brain scans of 5-year-old-boys look similar to those of 3.5-year-old girls). Their brains float (as it were) in different hormonal and chemical soups.

For 16 years Dr. Jay Geidd has been using advanced MRI imaging processes to map the development of kids brains.

“In general,” Geidd says, “we think the girls’ brains are maturing a bit faster than the boys’ brains.”

But not in all areas.

“Certain parts of the brain involved in mechanical skills or projectile estimations actually mature somewhat faster in boys,” Geidd says.

But What does this mean?

Dr. Leonard Sax, a psychologist and author of several books on the topic of gender differences agrees.

“Both boys and girls are being shortchanged as a result of the neglect of hard-wired gender differences,” says Sax. “By the age of 12, the geometry area of a girl’s brain looks like an eight-year-old boy’s brain. They’re four years behind. But the language area of a boy’s brain is three-to-four years behind the language areas of a girl’s brain.”

“Girls and boys differ profoundly in how they hear, how they see, how they respond to stress –and those differences are present at birth.”

said the night wind to the little lamb, “do you hear what I hear?”

To illustrate this point, Sax points to a study by Janel Caine at Florida State University that documents the benefits of music therapy for premature babies. What she found was that preemies who were played soft music in their hospital cribs grew faster, had fewer complications, and were allowed to go home sooner than those that were not played music.

But the most interesting part of that study comes to light only after you break the data down by gender. Do this and you find that baby girls who received music therapy in their cribs went home an average of nine and a half days earlier than those that did not. Boy babies, however, left not a single day sooner. Music therapy was great for girls, but did nothing for boys.

Similar studies have confirmed and clarified this information by documenting that for a 1,500 Hz tone (the range of sounds critical for understanding speech), the average baby girl has an acoustic brain response about 80 percent greater than the average boy. It’s no wonder girls seem to learn language skills sooner than boys!

“Patience. you have much yet to learn young grasshopper, er, I mean oyster.”

Yes, yes, I can hear you saying, but what does any of this have to do with oysters or idioms?

The trick for parents and teachers is this: Resist the urge to compare. If we are to have half a chance of convincing our children that the world is their oyster, we have to understand that each child has his or her own unique strengths. These strengths will develop in their own time. Because we love our children and want the best for them, sometimes this schedule may not match up with our developmental expectations. This is often disturbing or irritating. The answer, I think is to remember what oysters do with irritants—they create pearls.