A Field Guide to Boys and Girls: Differences, Similarities; Cutting-Edge Information Every Parent Needs to Know

by Susan Gilbert

A Field Guide to Boys and Girls is the only book to answer these common questions and many others, addressing the special needs of boys and girls all in one volume. Susan Gilbert offers a fresh examination, based on the latest research, of the topic of gender development, showing that there are in fact natural differences between boys and girls -- and how parents can use this information to raise their children the best way possible (a "Suggestions for Parents" section ends each chapter). Looking at the stages boys and girls go through from fetal development to adolescence, Susan Gilbert tells parents things about their children they might never have known -- for example, that boys cry more frequently, and that girls make more eye contact, eliciting more conversation from parents, a fact that allows girls to speak earlier than boys. Outlining the differences simply and clearly, Susan Gilbert shows parents how to nurture the areas in boys and girls that may be slower to develop, such as math skills in girls and language skills in boys, and how to deal with the challenges they face as their children grow up. As pioneering gender researcher Carol Nagy Jackson, Ph.D., says in her foreword, "Scientists have not always been able to translate their findings into usable information for the general public.... This 'field guide' provides a missing link." In talking to a variety of educators, psychologists, and behavioral pediatricians, Susan Gilbert has amassed all the most important current thinking and practices on gender, translating the findings into easy-to-use advice. A Field Guide to Boys and Girls is a vital tool that no parent can afford not to read.

Genres: Nonfiction, Parenting

272 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2000

Reviews

[Nathaniel · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is full of interesting developmental information about what makes boys boys and what makes girls girls. It seeks to give context to various conventional-wisdom ideas about gender differences and to address them scientifically. The book is structured from pre-birth through the early grades over roughly the first six years of a child's life (the main cognitive development period).

Let me start with a critique: I find it really unfortunate that someone decided to put the words "cutting edge" into the title of a work of scientific nonfiction. That just looks worse with every day that goes by since the book was released way back in 2000, and calls attention to the fact that some of the material it contains is dated. With that said, the information in this book has aged unevenly. The stuff about cognitive and gender development in babies, especially the first chapter covering the pre-birth stage, is fascinating. Once you get into school age, the questions of how boys and girls learn differently and especially how they deal with stereotyping has now entered the academic mainstream and is better addressed by (much) newer works such as Whistling Vivaldi by Claude M. Steele (2014), which deals with how people who are victims of negative stereotypes because of social "labels" are affected by those "labels" in terms of academic performance; the main takeaway here is that people were writing about these issues at least 15 years before they entered the mainstream and nobody was paying attention. As that later work also shows, by the time kids reach that stage of development it's also a lot harder to separate other variables such as race and social class, and in that respect this book kind of seems to be in denial by trying to do a "pure" analysis of one variable (gender) that is strongly and complexly linked to those other factors in real life.

I would still recommend the first few chapters of this book if your interest is how boys and girls develop as babies. That stuff was fascinating, and the highlight of the book for me. I just wouldn't blame you if you stopped after the first few chapters, because the second half of the book, while not terrible, is flawed in its execution and has been superseded by more current research.

[Lori · Rating 4 out of 5]

My favorite child-