Why are we so quick to label baby behavior as "girly" or "boyish"?

You've probably seen this video (click here to watch) as it makes it's way from Facebook to Twitter to email in-boxes. Unlike (ahem) most other things that get forwarded and on and on online, this video made me laugh. Not an out-loud, wipe-the-tears kind of laugh an article from The Onion might get out of me, but it was entertaining. It's funny because we all know a baby like this. We've all seen or sat next to a big, opinionated voice blaring from a string of babbles and coos and intense facial expressions.

This baby is the one you inevitably sit in front of at church or who peeks over the booth at you over and over when you are finally out on a dinner date without the kids. This baby is the ones who keeps you smiling on a hot and crowded bus and may even make your ovaries flip after you've decided you are done having children.

This incessantly babbling baby may be just like your own incessantly babbling baby. In fact, she's a lot like my own child, now four-years old, who began the chatter only weeks out of the womb, started saying words at five months, and today conquers four- or five-syllable vocabulary words with ease.

The difference is, my child is a boy.

Is that significant? Or interesting? Not really. But it does go against the title attached to this video, to some research, and to many, many people's insistent opinions that girls talk sooner and talk more.

Sure, I am a tad bit defensive, mostly because I have heard it and heard it and heard it about there's no way my son would or could out-talk his female counterparts. I never had to beg to differ with the people who made these claims. My kid did it for me.

Once upon a time in graduate school when my professional and academic focus was on the study of gender, I believed that most of our female-ness and male-ness was a social construct rather than biologically determined. I've been witness to enough of my son's obsession with tools, cars, Star Wars, bad guys and almost anything not-princess to question to those old beliefs. In fact, I do feel strongly now that a lot of our genderedness is hard-wired.

Of course, we are socialized. My own son's love of everything pink was dropped the moment he heard other boys in his preschool class say that was a "girl color." But some of what he -- and other kids, clearly -- take to, I really think is seeded in the brain rather than in playgroups, classrooms, and at the dinner table.

What is significant and interesting, is that many of us take these hard-wired, engendered behaviors and tendencies and preferences and see them as absolutes. If girls tend to talk earlier and more often, then ALL GIRLS talk earlier and more often.

The problem here is that it creates a little box where every kid must live. And the more parents (and doctors and authors and everyone else who weighs in with an opinion) insists on these things as absolutes, the more we are securing the walls on this box. There's no room for exceptions or differenc or maybe -- just maybe -- change.

The question this cute and funny and perhaps very true (for you or your daughter?) this video asks is "Are women born this way?" And when you see that girl in her very-pink carseat in an intense chatter conversation with the man next to her, who can barely get a nod in, many of us will react by laughing and identifying and answering, "Oh, yes! Women are born this way!"

As un-revolutionary and everyday as this is to say, I think we will be making a lot of progress when we respond instead, "Sure, some women are." By leaving it at that, we are leaving room in that box marked "what is boy" and "what is girl." And maybe -- just maybe -- leave room for the walls of that box to open up, even just a little.


What do you think? Is our gender hard-wired? And is your kid the rule or the exception to what people think is boy or girl behavior?