B1 and B2 have always been different in their behavior. In their earliest months I didn’t think much about whether their gender had anything to do with it. I just thought that they were two different people and therefore would obviously have differing personalities.
My observations back then included things like B1 being much more placid than B2. She was a lot shyer and would take a while to warm up to people. Whether it was us entering a new place or if people came to our home. Even people she knew and loved like Nanna and Poppy. After ten minutes or so she would come out of her shell and become the lively, happy girl we knew and loved. She is still like this at 20 months.
As they got older, B2 was becoming a lot more aggressive than B1. He was rougher while playing and began the terrible tantrum throwing way before B1.
When they got to the stage where they started becoming more independent and initiating play and activities themselves, the differences in their likes and dislikes became much more obvious. For the first time, I began to think about how much gender had to do with personality, behavior and preferences for many different areas in life. I began to ponder over the ‘Nurture vs Nature’ debate. A debate I had heard discussed in the past but had not thought about in too much depth before.
We have always made all the toys we own readily available to both children.
With no prompting from either myself or my husband, my daughter began to take a big interest in dolls. B2, my son, also plays with a doll occasionally but really isn’t to fussed about them. B1 on the other hand, has become obsessed.
She loves to carry her doll around, pretend to dress her or feed her and even put her down for a sleep and cover her with a blanket. B1 also loves putting on her sunglasses, carrying her bags around over her shoulder and wearing her own, mine or my husbands shoes around the house. And she also loves to wear my cooking apron around.
B2 has taken a rather gigantic interest in trucks. He is attached to them like a third arm. He will sit and play with them forever, rolling them along the lounge and over the table tops. He just has to bring all his trucks to his highchair and they all have to be in front of him, on his highchair tray before he will happily eat, (and no, they don’t all fit at once without falling off, causing plenty of blow ups and tears but that’s a story for another day). B1 will play with a truck but she would never pick one first out of all of their toys.
B1 also loves to dance. She began dancing one day while watching one TV show or another, all by herself with no coercing or encouragement from me. Occasionally now I will say ‘Show me your dancing, show me how you dance’, and she will happily twirl and jump around, waving her arms about in the air with a great big smile on her face. B2 will do two little knee bends and a swagger before he is over it and off to find one of his cars.
My darling daughter has also become a very nurturing, caring, helpful girl. One day she started trying to help me clean her brother while I was changing his nappy. She would grab some baby wipes and try to wipe him. I found this very funny. Especially one day when he took off before I could get his clean nappy on and B1 took off after him with a baby wipe, chasing him around the room trying to clean his bottom. B2 thought it was pretty funny too, as he ran around trying to escape her. She began ‘pretending’ to feed us with a spoon, also trying to feed her dolls and on a few occasions, if she managed to get a hold of some baby wipes, she has gone around wiping clean the tables and cabinets.
They both have such totally different natures, although they have been bought up in exactly the same way and treated equally in every way.
So as I started to observe their differences more and more, I decided to dig a little deeper and see what I could find. I searched my good friend Mr Google, and came across a plethora of articles, research studies and reports, both for and against this idea.
The dictionary defines nature as:
‘the complex of emotional and intellectual attributes that determine a person’s characteristic actions and reactions’.
And defines nurture as:
‘the properties acquired as a consequence of the way you were treated as a child’.
So just how much does genetic predisposition play a part in our behaviour? And how much of us behaves in a certain way because we were taught to do, be or act that way?
For anyone who is interested, you can read some of the articles I found here, here and here.
From the reading I have done, it seems this is a very heated debate.
What are your thoughts on this? Do you lean one way or another?
