22 mar 2005
The Differences Between Boys and Girls
as
reported by Nanci Olesen
The other day,
I asked a few kids some questions about
the differences between girls and boys,
men and women.
“Private body parts!” exclaimed
a 4 year old girl. "That’s
the difference between girls and boys!"
Her
five year old friend, who is a boy, said
he didn’t know WHAT the differences were, but sort of nodded when
the girl started shouting about body part
differences.
Then they both came to the
conclusion that girls have long hair and
boys have short hair.
What MAKES boys and
girls different? "HOW THEY’RE
MADE!" maintained
the 4 year old. I asked for details. “What do you mean?” I asked...
"THAT!!! HOW THEY ARE MADE!"
I asked the boy if he likes being a boy.
YES! he does! Very much! he doesn’t know WHAT he likes about it. The four year old girl likes being
a girl. What do you like about being a girl? She shouted, "BECAUSE
THAT IS WHAT I AM!"
We talked a little more about women and
men, and they explained to me that girls
grow up to be women and boys grow up to
be men. I asked them if this was ALWAYS
true... do boys always grow up to be men?
"Yes." Then they looked at
each other and looked at me.
"Sometimes, boys have long hair..."
said the boy... "BUT," said
the girl, "if boys have long hair, then they can’t PUT
things in their hair like barrettes and ribbons."
Two nine year old boys talked about the
hair thing again. Women have long hair
and men have short hair.
One of the boys
said “It’s their faces. The
FACE of a woman is different than the FACE
of a man... like the woman’s face
is more pointy and more soft.
The other
nine year old boy said that women and men
have different parts. Oh, and women can
have babies. But in the animal world, his
friend said, it’s pretty hard to
tell females from males until one of them
has
babies.
These nine year old boys like being
boys. One said it was because he IS a boy...
but he would be happy being either a boy
or a girl. The other boy said that being
a boy is just what he likes to be. They
both were sure that boys and girls can
do the same things.
When asked if a boy
becomes a man and a girl becomes a woman,
one of the boys said, "Not always,
because sometimes they can be atom boys
or I don’tknow what the word is for
boys. Like atoms...”
His friend said “You mean Tomboys!"
"Yeah yeah, that’s
right, Tomboys, that’s girls who do boy things like all the
time...and something for girls... when boys like being girls I don’t
know what the word is but they just totally like girl stuff. and
that is because they’re doing what
they want to be doing. They like that. It’s just fine."
A nine
year old girl told me that there were NO differences between boys
and girls. I asked her if she could think of any differences at
all. Nope, none. When I asked her about
PHYSICAL differences she said that boys
have short hair and girls have long hair.
Except
when they don’t. When they don’t
what? Except when girls are the ones with
short hair and boys are the ones with long
hair. But you can ALWAYS tell the difference
between a boy and a girl or a man and a
woman by THE LOOKS of THEM. "You
know," she
said, "the way they
LOOK!"
I asked this girl if she likes being a
girl. “YES!!” she
replied, “But
there is NOTHING different about it. Except that boys are a bit
more, I think, PROGRESSIVE in playing.” I asked her if she might mean aggressive...." No, she meant "progressive."
She likes being a girl because she
likes every single thing about it, AND that means that she can have children.
She thinks she will have children.
Then I asked if people could change from being
a man to being a woman.
"Yes," she said, "and that is so fine with me." I
asked her if she knew anyone that had... and she said she didn’t
think she did, but she couldn’t
be sure... but she HAD seen it on TV, and she knows it’s
just fine because that’s what they needed to do.
—Nanci Olesen
producer and host, MOMbo: 1990-2007 |
