A revised and updated edition (with more than 70% new material) of the evergreen classic about the innate differences between boys and girls and how best to parent and teach girls and boys successfully, with completely new chapters on sexual orientation and on transgender and intersex kids. Eleven years ago, Why Gender Matters broke ground in illuminating the differences between boys and girls--how they perceive the world differently, how they learn differently, how they process emotions and take risks differently. Dr. Sax argued that in failing to recognize these hardwired differences between boys and girls, we ended up reinforcing damaging stereotypes, medicalizing normal behavior (see: the rising rates of ADHD diagnosis), and failing to support kids to reach their full potential. In the intervening decade, the world has changed drastically, with an avalanche of new research which supports, deepens, and expands Dr. Sax's work. This revised and updated edition includes new findings about how boys and girls interact differently with social media and video games; a completely new discussion of research on gender non-conforming, LGB, and transgender kids, new findings about how girls and boys see differently, hear differently, and even smell differently; and new material about the medicalization of bad behavior.

Autorentext

Leonard Sax MD PhD graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) at the age of 19, and then went on to the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned both a PhD in psychology, and an MD. He completed a 3-year residency in family practice in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. For 19 years, Dr. Sax was a practicing family physician in Maryland, just outside Washington DC. He now sees patients in West Chester, Pennsylvania (west of Philadelphia). In 2005, Doubleday published his first book Why Gender Matters; an updated edition will be published by Harmony in 2017. His second book, Boys Adrift, was published in 2007. His third book Girls on the Edge was published in 2010. His most recent book The Collapse of Parenting was published by Basic Books in December 2015 and became a New York Times bestseller.

Dr. Sax has spoken on issues of child and adolescent development not only in the United States but also in Australia, Bermuda, Canada, England, Germany, Italy, Mexico, New Zealand, Scotland, Spain, and Switzerland. He has visited more than 400 schools since 2001. He has appeared on the TODAY Show, CNN, National Public Radio, Fox News, PBS, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the British Broadcasting Corporation, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, New Zealand Television, and many other national and international media. 

Find him online at leonardsax.com

Leseprobe

Chapter 1

Differences

Jason is sixteen. His sister Sonya is fourteen. They come from a stable home with two loving parents. Mom and Dad are concerned about Jason, their son: He’s not working hard at school and his grades are sliding. He spends most of his free time playing video games like Grand Theft Auto or Call of Duty, or surfing the Web for pictures of girls.

Both parents are actually quite proud of Sonya. She is a straight-A student and an athlete, and she has many friends. But when I meet with Sonya, she tells me that she isn’t sleeping well. She wakes up in the middle of the night, feeling guilty about having eaten one whole slice of pizza at supper. She often has palpitations and shortness of breath. And she has just started to cut herself with a razor blade, secretly, on her upper inner thigh so her parents won’t see. She hasn’t told her parents any of this. On the surface she is the golden girl. Inside she feels that she is falling apart.

Her brother Jason, on the other hand, is happy as a clam. He can eat a whole pizza without the slightest remorse. He has no difficulty sleeping: in fact, his parents had to kick him out of bed at noon on a Saturday. He likes to spend his free time hanging with his two buddies who are just like him, playing video games and looking at pictures of girls online.

Matthew turned five years old in August, just before kindergarten started. He was looking forward to it. From what he had heard, kindergarten sounded like one long playdate 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, then drag him writhing and thrashing into the car, force him into the car seat, and then pull him out of the car and into the school.

Cindy 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 3:00 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 stories share a common element. In each case problems arose because the parents did not understand some differences between girls and boys. In each case trouble might have been averted if the parents had known enough about boy/girl 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 each 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. That’s okay. Later on we’ll hear more about Justin and Sonya, Matthew, and Caitlyn. Armed with some knowledge about boy/girl differences, you will be able to recognize where the parents made the wrong decision or failed to act, and you will see how the stories 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 way back 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 computer anytime soon. Nobody I knew had ever heard of 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. We teach 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.&r…