Dr. Leonard Sax's Why Gender Matters

Words: 1306
Pages: 6

One of the main reasons children these days struggle with mental and emotional problems, is because parents and teachers don’t know how to gauge their teaching and parenting to particular genders. Dr. Leonard Sax wrote Why Gender Matters in order to explain the differences between girls and boys, and how they are to be handled and taught.
Throughout the first two chapters, I learned about the differences in the way boys and girls hear, see, and ultimately use their brains. Janel Caine conducted research over the effects of playing music to newborn babies. She worked with several families and began playing music as soon as they were born. The girl babies who listened to the music went home earlier than normal, but it did not affect the boy babies at all. In my opinion, this shows the difference in boys and girls hearing. The girls
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After a while, I realized some of the methods Dr. Sax mentioned in the book were variations of how my parents brought me up. For example, if I was bad, my parents would tell me “no” then proceed to ask me if I had thought about how this would affect them. Other times, despite being punished, I never had the feeling my parents did not love me. In the book, Dr. Sax said that a main reason kids had disciplinary problems was because punishment was the only parental contact the kids ever got. Some parents would be so uninvolved in their kids’ lives, except when they were being punished, that this pushed the kids to want to be bad in order to get any recognition. Growing up, my parents did punish me, but they spent so much time being involved in my life that I never wanted unnecessary punishment. Dr. Sax emphasizes the “seven-to-one” rule. Separate your “fun time” and “discipline time” into two different groups. “If you spend more time disciplining your child than you’re spending enjoying life with your child, then you need to spend more time having fun with your