In the first year of life, your daughter is just as active as any baby boy. All babies kick their arms and legs, roll around, crawl, and cruise with equal vigor. But after the first birthday, girls tend to calm down while boys ratchet up the action. Of course each child is unique and certainly there are some perfectly healthy girls who never sit still and some boys who prefer quiet play to roughhousing, but there are plenty of studies showing that most often it’s the boys who have a higher activity level. Scientists, who are always curious to know why things like this happen, have conducted studies that point to hormones. Although there’s no doubt that many boys are socialized to be more active by the games their parents and friends play with them, there are some noteworthy studies that say it’s highly likely that many girls are less active due to their hormones. These results first come out of animal studies. Juvenile male rodents as well as monkeys show a high level of rough-and-tumble play or play fighting. This consists of boisterous activity with lots of body contact. Juvenile females normally show very little of this behavior. Alice Sterling Honig, Ph.D., professor emerita of child and family studies in the College of Human Services and Health Professions at Syracuse University, believes that all male mammals who are primates have a higher activity level than females. “Go to the zoo,” she says, “and you will see the male monkeys climbing around faster and more frequently than females. Their activity level is noticeably higher. The same is true for human males, too.”The cause, say many, may be the level of sex hormones a child is exposed to before birth and their effect on the brain. Males and females produce both androgens (the male hormone) and estrogen (the female hormone), but as we’ll see later in this chapter the androgen levels are higher in males than in females. This increase may be the reason for the higher activity levels in males. Scientists who have studied personality in girls agree. They have found that females born with higher than average androgen levels are more “tomboyish” than other girls and are more active in sports involving rough body contact (and oddly enough, prefer trucks over dolls). There is some early evidence that extremely high androgen levels in females may affect gender orientation, but these studies are in the very early stages. It is generally agreed, however, that the slightly higher androgen levels seem to make about 20 percent of females more “masculine” in their actions and thinking processes than other girls, but do not predict homosexual tendencies. This explains why even the act of coloring was a different experience for my daughter than for my sons. My daughter was perfectly happy to sit down and color a picture. My sons would sit, then jump up, then sit down, then kick their legs back and forth, then move to another chair, then change position to kneel on the chair, then drop the crayons and jump off the chair to pick them up, and the climb back onto the chair, and then break the crayons into pieces, and so on until it was time to move on to another activity. After these two wore me down, I was very happy that my youngest was a little girl who, although full of life and energy, could at least sit still until the end of a storybook.
In the first year of life, your daughter is just as active as any baby boy. All babies kick their arms and legs, roll around, crawl, and cruise with equal vigor. But after the first birthday, girls tend to calm down while boys ratchet up the action. Of course each child is unique and certainly there are some perfectly healthy girls who never sit still and some boys who prefer quiet play to roughhousing, but there are plenty of studies showing that most often it’s the boys who have a higher activity level. Scientists, who are always curious to know why things like this happen, have conducted studies that point to hormones. Although there’s no doubt that many boys are socialized to be more active by the games their parents and friends play with them, there are some noteworthy studies that say it’s highly likely that many girls are less active due to their hormones. These results first come out of animal studies. Juvenile male rodents as well as monkeys show a high level of rough-and-tumble play or play fighting. This consists of boisterous activity with lots of body contact. Juvenile females normally show very little of this behavior. Alice Sterling Honig, Ph.D., professor emerita of child and family studies in the College of Human Services and Health Professions at Syracuse University, believes that all male mammals who are primates have a higher activity level than females. “Go to the zoo,” she says, “and you will see the male monkeys climbing around faster and more frequently than females. Their activity level is noticeably higher. The same is true for human males, too.”The cause, say many, may be the level of sex hormones a child is exposed to before birth and their effect on the brain. Males and females produce both androgens (the male hormone) and estrogen (the female hormone), but as we’ll see later in this chapter the androgen levels are higher in males than in females. This increase may be the reason for the higher activity levels in males. Scientists who have studied personality in girls agree. They have found that females born with higher than average androgen levels are more “tomboyish” than other girls and are more active in sports involving rough body contact (and oddly enough, prefer trucks over dolls). There is some early evidence that extremely high androgen levels in females may affect gender orientation, but these studies are in the very early stages. It is generally agreed, however, that the slightly higher androgen levels seem to make about 20 percent of females more “masculine” in their actions and thinking processes than other girls, but do not predict homosexual tendencies. This explains why even the act of coloring was a different experience for my daughter than for my sons. My daughter was perfectly happy to sit down and color a picture. My sons would sit, then jump up, then sit down, then kick their legs back and forth, then move to another chair, then change position to kneel on the chair, then drop the crayons and jump off the chair to pick them up, and the climb back onto the chair, and then break the crayons into pieces, and so on until it was time to move on to another activity. After these two wore me down, I was very happy that my youngest was a little girl who, although full of life and energy, could at least sit still until the end of a storybook.
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