According to an article I read on Slate last week, research has shown women tend to be more anxious than men. There are various facets to the evidence of this claim but I found one particularly interesting that concerns parenting. The article suggests the way we deal with boys and girls is different and can have implications later in their lives."Whether parents intend to or not, they usually treat the emotional outbursts of girls far differently than those of boys. From a socialization angle, there's quite a lot of evidence that little girls who exhibit shyness or anxiety are reinforced for it, whereas little boys who exhibit that behavior might even be punished for it".
UCLA anxiety expert Michelle Craske has written a book called Nerve, in which she gives the example of a parent's response to their child falling over and crying. With a boy, you're likely to brush it off and tell them to be tough, no need to cry. If you have a daughter, you're more likely to give them comforting hugs and kisses.
She goes on to say that," on top of this, cultural biases about boys being more capable than girls also lead parents to push sons to show courage and confront their fears, while daughters are far more likely to be sheltered from life's challenges". The consequences are that boys grow up with a capacity to cope with challenges and address problems that cross their path, whereas women can become anxious in the same situations, often lament of them to others and generally avoid dealing with them directly.
It made me think about my own parenting. As a mother of a boy, I can relate to the attitude of trying to toughen him up and encourage him to be a fighter. I can see that a gentler more nurturing approach might seem more natural with a daughter. What do you think? How do you treat your son or daughter in the example given above of when they fall over and cry? Let's not forget that the parenting aspect is just one of many mentioned in the article I read and is not solely responsible for creating women who worry. I'm not suggesting we take this too seriously but it's something that caught my attention and I'd be interested to hear your thoughts.
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. It's ok and the short simple story is reassuring to children I think but it wasn't quite what I was looking for.
A couple of months ago a friend and I were at London zoo with our two boys and got to talking about how we both used to be anti-zoo people before having children. We didn't like the idea of animals being kept in captivity, the small spaces they lived in compared to what they would experience in the wild nor the invasion on their lifestyle and privacy by having hoards of people staring at them day after day.