Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Vive la différence!

So maybe stating the obvious, but having only one offspring and that of the female persuasion, I don't have opportunities to observe the differences in male-spawn versus female-spawn play. Yesterday we went to the indoor play park at a local church--still working on the whole jacket issue for outdoor play--and I had a chance to do some first-rate sociology fieldwork.

Cars, roads, and road signs were the articles of play. The Spawn, who was amongst the earlier arrivals at the place, wanted to get out the just mentioned items to play with them. We set up the roads together. Then she put road signs at frequent intervals along the road, after asking what the unfamiliar ones meant. Next she carefully selected two cars and proceeded to drive them along the road. They stopped to comment and exclaim over each of the signs. They encountered one another and had long conversations. They expressed woe over a stop sign.

Along came two boys, rather smaller than the Spawn, but probably a little older. They each grabbed a couple of cars and proceeded to zoom them down the road with all the sound effects. They zoomed and vroomed. They screeched and crashed. That last sound effect was literal crashing, by the way, in addition to vocal crashing. The Spawn was rather nonplussed and soon decided to move on to the wagon full of plastic animals--who spent a lot of time discussing who ate meat and who at leaves and "feed".

I guess there really IS a difference...though I refuse to speculate on the amount that can be attributed to nature versus nurture.

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