Читать книгу Steve Biddulph’s Raising Girls - Steve Biddulph, Steve Biddulph - Страница 43

Sometimes the limits we put on girls are totally unconscious. Just recently, a remarkable study was carried out into the way we talk to toddlers. It was discovered that without knowing it, parents talk with a different focus, and about different things, depending on the gender of their child.7

If he’s a little boy, they say,

‘Look! There are THREE rabbits in the field over there.’

If she’s a girl, they say,

‘Look at those CUTE rabbits!’

If it’s a boy they say, ‘Wow, you’ve made that tower TEN BLOCKS HIGH!’

If it’s a girl they say, ‘What a BEAUTIFUL tower you’ve made.’

Can you spot the difference? Boys = numbers, girls = feelings. It’s totally unconscious, but it has huge implications. And what else are we changing? Nobody really knows.

Does this matter? Well, it’s long been known that even though girls are equally able at maths, most boys enjoy maths more and go further with this subject at school, and further into those careers that need some maths (which includes a lot of the best-paid jobs). Girls are often quite frightened by maths. (And to be honest, some girls are frightened by scary male maths teachers, of whom there seemed to be a lot, at least when we were kids.)

I am sure that no parent ever sets out to disadvantage their girls around useful number skills, yet we unconsciously start making the boys practical and the girls emotionally focused.

So here’s a suggestion, perhaps we ought to reverse this. Girls are well wired for being emotionally aware; we can encourage that, but we can also spice our chatter to them with lots of number stuff. ‘How many rabbits can you see?’ And our boys are already wired for spatial knowledge, so ‘those rabbits are nervous, look, they’ve stuck their ears up to listen for us’ can get them thinking about feelings. No need to get obsessive about it, I am willing to make a bet that just reading this has already got you thinking about what you say.

Talk to your toddler daughter about numbers, and counting, and praise her for good engineering with her Lego bricks. Don’t ever assume ‘girls don’t …’ anything, because they can, and they will, if we believe and encourage them early on. Sally Ride, the first American woman astronaut, dedicated her life after space to getting girls to study science. It creates more opportunities for them and doubles the talent pool of good scientists, which we definitely need.