As a Mother Raising a Son
Today’s post is from a guest blogger. Mrs. Jeong shares her insights as a mom raising two active sons. This is translated from the original Korean post, so click on the Korean language link above if you would like to read the Korean version.
As a mother raising a son, patience is truly a virtue.
If you are a mother of only boys and hang around friends with daughters, you cannot help but notice that girls seem to develop quicker than boys. From something simple as learning to fold paper airplanes to displaying their prowess with the scissor, girls seem better than boys who appear to be cumbersome, slower, and rougher around the edges.
If you spend time in a kindergarten class, you can easily see more examples of this. When coloring a coloring book, girls are more detail oriented, being careful not to color outside the lines. Boys, on the other hand, are all over the place and do not stay within the lines. When cutting paper figures, girls carefully cut out the shapes whereas boys simply seem to ignore the shapes and cut through them as if they are not even there!
As a mother of boys, our worries do not end here. Upon learning that a female classmate is already reading and writing, you are once again overcome with concern. You console yourself, repeating, “It’s okay. Boys are just slower than girls. It’s really ok…”
However, I think it is important to take a step back and look at it from another angle. It is not that boys are slower than girls, it is just that they develop at different paces in different developmental areas. However, the moms especially more so than the fathers, expect our sons to develop at the same pace as their female peers.
For example, I have noticed that girls develop fine motor skills quicker . I can see the hand-eye coordination and the fine motor control in their hands when they write or use the scissors. Also, girls seem to mature quicker socially as well as seem to acquire language faster. Then what about boys? Boys develop gross motor skills faster than girls. For example, boys are better at balancing and running faster than girls.
During this developmental phase, boys prefer being active and playing outside. Instead of comparing our boys to girls and lamenting that they are slower, it is important for us moms to practice patience and encourage our boys to be active. We should get away from pejoratively using the word “slow” when talking about our sons’ development and approach it with understanding, patience, support and love.
