Parenting & Pregnancy >
Parenthood
Get a Widget for this title
RSS FeedIs communication easier with a son or a daughter?
Results so far:
| Son | 42% | 28 votes | Total: 67 votes | |
| Daughter | 58% | 39 votes |
Son
Write now
Print
Invite a writer™
Add to FavoritesI am the mother of a son and two daughters. Of course, the personality of a child makes a huge difference of how a child communicates with their parents. In my experience, my son showed his love or unhappiness by his actions. My oldest daughter, on the other hand, is more vocal but she has a short fuse and when she is unhappy she makes sure everyone in the house is unhappy too. My oldest daughter will argue the point like a Philadelphia lawyer even though she knows she does wrong. When I ask my son to do something, like chores, hell go do it and usually wont complain too much. My daughter prefers to argue why she has to do everything and if she does do the chore what will she get in return. When I try to explain why her attitude isn't appropriate she holds her hands over her ears and sings really loudly if she thinks she wont like what Im about to say. How can you communicate with someone who has their hands over their ears? You can't. She is extremely dramatic to the point she could win an Oscar for her acting because she can make the tears fall from her eyes faster than I've ever seen. They also stop at a moments notice when she gets what she wants. If you ask her to repeat herself her voice rises with a sarcastic tone whereas my son wouldn't make such a big deal about having to repeat himself. I also find that my daughter takes everything I say to heart even though she usually misconstrues what I'm actually saying to her. She also likes to put words in my mouth and claims that I said things that I know good and well that I did not and would not say to her.
My mother had always told me that she found boys easier to raise than girls. I would have begged to differ with her when my son was a toddler because he was more destructive and would run away from me while I would run frantically behind him hollering his name to come back . Little did I know then but he would outgrow this with time. My daughter at that same age would scream at the top of her lungs over anything and everything. Thinking she would outgrow this I patiently waited and that time hasn't come yet. She is very competitive with her younger sister who is only two years old for our constant attention. My youngest child, however, is very sweet natured and hopefully my opinion of the difficulty of raising boys and girls will change as she grows up. But as of now I still believe that boys overall are easier to communicate with than girls.
Learn more about this author, M. F. Carbo.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.
Daughter
There is not much that hasn't been said about being a parent to teenagers. Both sons and daughters come with inherent challenges stemming from their basic need to separate and our need to care. Both also come with unexpected joys; and as a parent of both a teen aged son and daughter, I must say that communicating with my daughter, however volatile it can be at times, is easier than communicating with my son.
My son and I have a good relationship. Quiet, but good. Granted, he is away at school now, but during his teen years at home, our communication ranged from the semi-guttural, to the monosyllabic on any given day. We had talks on serious, meaningful issues, but these were at his discretion and on his timetable, usually late at night when I was exhausted and he was suddenly, inexplicably voluble. Older by four years than his sister, he started talking very early, speaking in sentences at around a year. Our early years together are a treasure chest-filled memory of precious first words and precocious sayings such as "owls can definitely kill you", uttered at two and a half. All that changed with the onset of adolescence; my formerly talkative little boy became a rather smelly, rather secretive individual. This has relaxed somewhat, now that he is almost twenty, and very close to being on equal, adult footing. The best conversations I have with my son revolve around abstracts: books we are both reading, art or movies we like. Occasionally during those conversations I can gently veer into the personal; but I have learned not to probe or pry, this will not give me any more information; the shifting from full sentences to vague "uh, maybes" is my first clue.
My daughter, however, is a whirlwind of words. She is everthing complex a fifteen year old can be. Our relationship, though better then it was during the horrifying middle school years, can be loud: we are both yellers, both volatile, quick to anger, equally quick to want to smooth things over and move on. But the main difference between her and her brother is that the day to day minutae, and the talking about people can keep us chatting for hours. My son and I don't really chat. I think chatting- about who was wearing what, hair, music, fashion, food, tends to be more of a female pastime. My daughter attends the same high school where I teach, so there is plenty of fodder for the drive to and from school. My son was a senior at the same school when I started teaching there. I don't remember the drives home being any more wordy than when I didn't know any of the players in the high school cast.
I cherish them both, as much for their differences as their sudden striking similarities: the turn of a phrase that both will use, a joke that is funny to all of us and nobody else, a family code word that cracks us up. But I have a feeling that it will be my daughter who I communicate with daily as they pass beyond adolescence and into adulthood.
Learn more about this author, Maureen Thomas.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.
