You’re finally getting to know the new neighbors. They moved in a week ago, but you’ve had no chance to chat, which is surely why you didn’t notice sooner that the woman is pregnant. Very pregnant, by the looks of it.
“How wonderful!” you croon over your common fence. “Do you know if you’re having a boy or a girl?”
Why is this always the first question we ask when learning about a new baby? The answer is simple: because sex is a big deal. Not just the act of it, but the fact of it. Of all the characteristics a child brings into the world, being male or female still has the greatest impact—on future relationships, personality, skills, career, hobbies, health, and even the kind of parent the child is likely to become. That’s why 68 percent of expectant parents learn the sex of their child before birth, and why you know your neighbor is naïve to answer, “We really don’t care, as long as the baby is healthy!”
Most American parents hope to have at least one child of each sex. We enjoy the differences between them, even as we worry about their consequences. Will this little boy, now so active and exuberantly affectionate, settle down enough to being school? Will he form meaningful relationships with his friends and teachers? Will he still express his feelings or, for that matter, communicate with us at all when he grows up?
For parents of girls, the fears run in the opposite direction. Here she is, so confident and full of life. Will she still dig for worms and wonder about the planets when she’s in middle school? Will she be assertive enough when she lands her first job out of college? Will it be any easier for her generation to juggle career and family when she grows up?
Boys and girls are different. This fact, obvious to every previous generation, comes as a bewildering revelation to many parents today. Raised in an era of equal rights, we assume—or at least hope—that differences between the sexes are made, not inborn. We mingle comfortably with members of the opposite sex, harangue as easily about sports as cooking and cheerfully compete in the workplace—all the while pretending the two sexes are more or less the same.
Until we have kids of our own, at which point the differences are impossible to ignore.
Excerpted from Pink Brain, Blue Brain by Lise Eliot, copyright 2009. Reproduced courtesy of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. All rights reserved.
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