A Field Guide to Boys and Girls: Differences, Similarities: Cutting-Edge Information Every Parent Needs to Know – A Research-Based Resource for Natural Child Development and Nurturing Skills

by Susan Gilbert

In A Field Guide to Boys and Girls, Susan Gilbert pulls together all the latest research on gender development into a resource for parents of children from birth to adolescence. In talking to a variety of educators, psychologists, and behavioral pediatricians, Gilbert concludes that there are natural differences between boys and girls. If parents nurture the areas that may be slower to develop, such as math skills in girls and language skills in boys, they will help their children deal with gender challenges as they grow up. By combining groundbreaking inquiry with easy-to-use advice, A Field Guide to Boys and Girls helps parents bring out the best in each child.

Genres: Nonfiction, Parenting

262 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

Reviews

[Nathaniel]

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]

My favorite child-