Why Gender Matters, Second Edition: What Parents and Teachers Need to Know About

The Nile on eBay   Why Gender Matters, Second Edition by Leonard Sax

A revised and updated edition (with more than 70% new material) of the evergreen classic about the innate differences between boys and girls and how best to parent and teach girls and boys successfully, with completely new chapters on sexual orientation and on transgender and intersex kids.Eleven years ago, Why Gender Matters broke ground in illuminating the differences between boys and girls--how they perceive the world differently, how they learn differently, how they process emotions and take risks differently. Dr. Sax argued that in failing to recognize these hardwired differences between boys and girls, we ended up reinforcing damaging stereotypes, medicalizing normal behavior (see: the rising rates of ADHD diagnosis), and failing to support kids to reach their full potential. In the intervening decade, the world has changed drastically, with an avalanche of new research which supports, deepens, and expands Dr. Sax's work. This revised and updated edition includes new findings about how boys and girls interact differently with social media and video games; a completely new discussion of research on gender non-conforming, LGB, and transgender kids, new findings about how girls and boys see differently, hear differently, and even smell differently; and new material about the medicalization of bad behavior.

FORMATPaperback LANGUAGEEnglish CONDITIONBrand New Author Biography

Leonard Sax MD PhD graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) at the age of 19, and then went on to the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned both a PhD in psychology, and an MD. He completed a 3-year residency in family practice in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. For 19 years, Dr. Sax was a practicing family physician in Maryland, just outside Washington DC. He now sees patients in West Chester, Pennsylvania (west of Philadelphia). In 2005, Doubleday published his first book Why Gender Matters; an updated edition will be published by Harmony in 2017. His second book, Boys Adrift, was published in 2007. His third book Girls on the Edge was published in 2010. His most recent book The Collapse of Parenting was published by Basic Books in December 2015 and became a New York Times bestseller.Dr. Sax has spoken on issues of child and adolescent development not only in the United States but also in Australia, Bermuda, Canada, England, Germany, Italy, Mexico, New Zealand, Scotland, Spain, and Switzerland. He has visited more than 400 schools since 2001. He has appeared on the TODAY Show, CNN, National Public Radio, Fox News, PBS, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the British Broadcasting Corporation, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, New Zealand Television, and many other national and international media. Find him online at leonardsax.com

Excerpt from Book

Chapter 1 Differences Jason is sixteen. His sister Sonya is fourteen. They come from a stable home with two loving parents. Mom and Dad are concerned about Jason, their son: He''s not working hard at school and his grades are sliding. He spends most of his free time playing video games like Grand Theft Auto or Call of Duty, or surfing the Web for pictures of girls. Both parents are actually quite proud of Sonya. She is a straight-A student and an athlete, and she has many friends. But when I meet with Sonya, she tells me that she isn''t sleeping well. She wakes up in the middle of the night, feeling guilty about having eaten one whole slice of pizza at supper. She often has palpitations and shortness of breath. And she has just started to cut herself with a razor blade, secretly, on her upper inner thigh so her parents won''t see. She hasn''t told her parents any of this. On the surface she is the golden girl. Inside she feels that she is falling apart. Her brother Jason, on the other hand, is happy as a clam. He can eat a whole pizza without the slightest remorse. He has no difficulty sleeping: in fact, his parents had to kick him out of bed at noon on a Saturday. He likes to spend his free time hanging with his two buddies who are just like him, playing video games and looking at pictures of girls online. Matthew turned five years old in August, just before kindergarten started. He was looking forward to it. From what he had heard, kindergarten sounded like one long playdate with friends. He could hardly wait. So his mother, Cindy, was surprised when, in October, Matthew started refusing to go to school, refusing even to get dressed in the morning. More than once Cindy had to dress him, then drag him writhing and thrashing into the car, force him into the car seat, and then pull him out of the car and into the school. Cindy decided to investigate. She sat in on his kindergarten class. She spoke with the teacher. Everything seemed fine. The teacher--gentle, soft-spoken, and well educated--reassured Mom that there was no cause for alarm. But Cindy remained concerned, and rightly so, because major problems were just around the corner. Caitlyn was a shy child and just the slightest bit overweight all through elementary school. In middle school she underwent a metamorphosis from chubby wallflower to outgoing socialite. She lost weight so quickly that her mother, Jill, worried she might be anorexic. For the next four years, though, everything seemed great--in a frantic and crazy sort of way. Caitlyn was juggling a heavy academic load, had lots of friends, and maintained a full schedule of after-school activities, staying up until midnight or later doing homework. But she seemed happy enough--often frenzied and frazzled, sure, but still happy. Or at least that''s what everybody thought until the phone rang at 3:00 a.m. that awful, unforgettable November night. A nurse told Jill that Caitlyn was in the emergency room, unconscious, having tried to commit suicide with an overdose of Vicodin and Xanax. These stories share a common element. In each case problems arose because the parents did not understand some differences between girls and boys. In each case trouble might have been averted if the parents had known enough about boy/girl differences to recognize what was really happening in their child''s life. In each case the parents could have taken specific action that might have prevented or solved the problem. We will come back to each of these kids later in this book. Right now it may not be obvious to you how each of these stories illustrates a failure to understand sex differences. That''s okay. Later on we''ll hear more about Justin and Sonya, Matthew, and Caitlyn. Armed with some knowledge about boy/girl differences, you will be able to recognize where the parents made the wrong decision or failed to act, and you will see how the stories might have ended differently. The Dubious Virtue of Gender-Neutral Child Rearing I enrolled in the Ph.D. program in psychology at the University of Pennsylvania way back in September 1980. Governor Ronald Reagan was challenging President Jimmy Carter for the presidency. The original Apple computer had recently come on the market. "My typewriter is working fine" was the answer the department secretary gave me when I asked her whether she would be getting a computer anytime soon. Nobody I knew had ever heard of e-mail or the Internet. The invention of the World Wide Web still lay ten years in the future. Among the courses I took that fall was a graduate seminar in developmental psychology. "Why do girls and boys behave differently?" my professor, Justin Aronfreed, asked rhetorically. "Because we expect them to. We teach them to. Imagine a world in which we raised girls to play with tanks and trucks, in which we encouraged boys to play with dolls. Imagine a world in which we played rough-and-tumble games with girls while we cuddled and hugged the boys. In such a world, many of the differences we see in how girls and boys behave--maybe even all the differences--would vanish." In another seminar my fellow graduate students and I learned about the extraordinary work of Professor John Money at Johns Hopkins. Professor Money had been consulted by the parents of an unfortunate little boy whose penis had literally been sizzled off during a botched circumcision. At Dr. Money''s recommendation, the boy had been raised as a girl, with excellent results (according to Dr. Money). The child loved to play dress-up, enjoyed helping Mom in the kitchen, and disdained "boy toys" such as guns or trucks. "Dr. Money''s work provides further evidence that most of the differences we observe between girls and boys are socially constructed," Professor Henry Gleitman told us. "We reward children who follow the sex roles we create for them while we penalize or at least fail to reward children who don''t conform. Parents create and reinforce differences between girls and boys." We nodded sagely. In clinical rotations we often encountered parents who still clung to the quaint notion that girls and boys were different from birth. But we knew better. Or so we thought. I graduated with my Ph.D. in psychology, as well as my M.D., in 1986. When I left Philadelphia to begin my residency in family practice, I got rid of most of the papers I had accumulated during my six years at the University of Pennsylvania. But there was one folder I didn''t throw out: a folder of papers about sex differences in hearing, showing that girls and boys hear differently. Four years later, after I finished my residency in family medicine, my wife and I established a family practice in Montgomery County, Maryland, just outside of Washington, DC. Several years passed. I wasn''t thinking much about gender differences. Then, in the mid-1990s, I began to notice a parade of second- and third-grade boys marching into my office, their parents clutching a note from the school. The notes read: "We''re concerned that Justin [or Carlos or Tyrone] may have attention deficit disorder. Please evaluate." In some of these cases I found that what these boys needed wasn''t drugs for ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) but rather a teacher who understood the differences in how girls and boys learn. Upon further inquiry, I found that nobody at the school was aware of girl/boy differences in the ability to hear. I reread the papers in that manila folder, documenting hardwired differences in the ability to hear, showing that the average boy has hearing that is less sensitive than the average girl. In the next chapter we will look more closely at evidence for sex differences in hearing. Think about the typical second-grade classroom. Imagine Justin, six years old, sitting at the back of the class. The teacher, a woman, is speaking in a tone of voice that seems about right to her. Justin barely hears her. Instead, he''s staring out the window or watching a fly crawl across the ceiling. The teacher notices that Justin isn''t paying attention. Justin is demonstrating a deficit of attention. The teacher may reasonably wonder whether Justin perhaps has attention deficit disorder. The teacher is absolutely right about Justin showing a deficit of attention. But his attention deficit isn''t due to attention deficit disorder, it''s due to the fact that Justin isn''t hearing the soft-spoken teacher very well. And very few six-year-old boys will raise their hands and say, "Excuse me, Ms. Gentlevoice, I do hear you, but not very well. Could you please speak more loudly?" The teacher is talking in a tone of voice that seems comfortable to her, but some of the boys are zoning out. In some cases we might be able to fix the problem simply by putting the boy in the front row. "You should write a book, Dr. Sax," one parent told me. "Write a book so that more teachers know about the differences in how girls and boys hear." I allowed myself a patronizing smile. "I''m sure that there must already be such books for teachers, and for parents," I said. "There aren''t," she said. "I''ll find some for you," I said. That conversation took place nearly twenty years ago. Since then I''ve read lots of popular books about differences between girls and boys. And guess what. That mom was right. Not only do most of the books currently in print about girls and boys fail to state the basic facts about innate differences between the sexes, but many of them promote a bizarre form of political correctness, suggesting that it is somehow chauvinistic even to hint that any innate differences exist between female and male. A tenured professor at Brown University published a book in which she claims that the division of the human race into two sexes, female and male, is an artificial invention of ou

Details ISBN0451497775 Pages 400 Language English Year 2017 ISBN-10 0451497775 ISBN-13 9780451497772 Format Paperback DEWEY 305.3 Country of Publication United States AU Release Date 2017-08-29 NZ Release Date 2017-08-29 US Release Date 2017-08-29 UK Release Date 2017-08-29 Illustrations 11 CHARTS Author Leonard Sax Publisher Potter/Ten Speed/Harmony/Rodale Publication Date 2017-08-29 Imprint Harmony Books Subtitle What Parents and Teachers Need to Know About the Emerging Science of Sex Differences Replaces 9780767916257 Audience General We've got this

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