Little girls are not like little boys, says author
Daughters need to know they're loved
By Rebecca Ray
For seven years, family therapist Michael Gurian has tried to help parents understand their sons. He has written several books on the subject, including The Wonder of Boys, A Fine Young Man and What Stories Does My Son Need? Now Gurian, the father of two girls, is also trying to help parents understand their daughters.
On Jan. 16, the author from Spokane, Wash., talked, answered questions and signed books at the Los Gatos Neighborhood Center as part of the tour for his new book, The Wonder of Girls. (Pocket Books, a Division of Simon and Schuster Inc., 2002)
The Los Gatos Parent Education Coordinating Council of the Los Gatos Union School District, as well as Lunardi's, Los Gatos Coffee Roasting Company and psychotherapist and Los Gatos High School parent Sue Amende-Plep, sponsored the event .
At the talk, Gurian said his new book advocates "nature-based parenting," which means intuitively fostering a child's nature, instead of listening to an expert who doesn't know the child. He said that the thrust of his book is that men and women, in general, behave differently and have different needs, not because of socialization, but because their brain chemistry and the way their hormones interact with their brains are different.
"While we all have noted the flaws in patriarchy, it has come time now in human history when we have to look at this one flaw in feminism," Gurian said. "Feminism as an ideology won't talk much about biology."
One way a person can see how biology determines men's and women's behaviors, Gurian said, is by looking at scans of blood flow in men's and women's brains. When examining these scans, he said, one sees that female brains, in general, are more active than male brains. In fact, he pointed out, there are times when males' brains actually shut down. The fact that 15 percent more blood flows through females' brains, Gurian said, is one reason why females experience more and remember experiences better.
Females also have better memories of how experiences feel, Gurian said, because they spend more time processing "emotional material" in the limbic system.
But that's not to say that females have all the advantages. Because males' brain hemispheres communicate with each other less, and males think about fewer things at a time, Gurian said, life, for them, is simpler.
While the male hormone, testosterone, affects aggression, he said, the female hormones, estrogen and progesterone, are more involved in mood regulation. Females have "up" and "down" days, he said, depending on how much estrogen and progesterone their brains release. Males' moods, he said, are more regulated by outward performance.
Gurian discussed how females have an incredible need to connect and attach, which he calls the "intimacy imperative." For instance, before playing a sport, females on a team bond by chatting with each other, he said, while males bond by playing the game.
"Quite often, we pretend to solve a girl's problem by trying to bolster her self-esteem," and this isn't enough, he said. "What we need to do is look at how much she's loved."
Gurian said that when working with female clients, he and his wife, who is also a therapist, look more at the client's relationships. Gurian and his wife look at the client's attachments with what he calls her three "family systems"--nuclear family, extended family and institutional/communal family--and try to build and repair them.
Females, Gurian said, attach more to babies, because when they see babies, their level of a chemical called oxytocin jumps much higher than men's. This, he said, explains why moms are more attuned to babies' cries than dads.
Gurian discussed how when a woman has a baby, her biology changes dramatically, and she forms a stronger attachment with the baby than the father. This explains why some males leave their female partners to care for their babies alone, Gurian said
"[Women's] nature is drawing them to attach fully to these babies, and we need to speak to them," Gurian said. "That's a natural reality that every one of us lives, no matter what culture we come from, no matter what ideological base we come from."
What societies should do, Gurian said, is protect women's need to be with their children by instituting corporate daycare. In addition to allowing women to breast-feed in public, he said, society should address the high turnover rate at daycare centers, because it doesn't facilitate good bonding.
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