Re: feelings/affect/middle childhood
gkcunn01 who-is-at ulkyvm.louisville.edu
Thu, 26 Feb 1998 23:43:34 -0500
At 09:26 AM 2/26/98 -0800, you wrote:
>Mike asked the ever-critical "cultural" question, which i think might be
>interesting to tease with a bit -
>
>one of the reasons why I've always found infant studies fascinating is
>because of what would perhaps be minimal cultural effects on behaviours
>(and of course this I have argued with many who claim that these is no such
>thing as "minimal" cultural effect...)
>
>but, say with boys & girls, the effects of the ways babies are handled by
their
>primary care-givers has been shown to be gender-specific: boys are tossed,
>rough-housed, played with in aggressive and exciting ways; girls are
>coddled, pampered, soothed, cooed at...
>
>primary caegivers tend to talk more with girls, and play more with boys -
>
>so, their bodies/"ears"/rhythms are being encultrued into different kinds
>of spatial-awarenessspatial participation, with the boys being "stimulated"
>with exposure to complex space and girls being protected from open
>spaces...
>
>so girls seek comfort in doll houses, tiny doll-games, secrets, diaries,
>whispers, perhaps trying not to ever take up too much space;
>
>and boys seek comfort in open-field contact sports, aggressive games,
>wrestling, and dominating space.
>
>I'm generalizing here, but there are gender-distinction in concepts of
>space: there are studies on this, too, with women and men, although I am
>not sure such studies have been tried with children.
>
>but if this were possible, spatial-differentiations which are
>culturally-organized,
By now it has been pretty well established that sex differences in spatial
abilities are innate and controlled by the level of testosterone at various
developmental stages.
There are developmental anomalies in hormonal development that cause some
girls to get too much testosterone and some boys to not get enough. Their
level of spatial ability reflects these differences.