What works for girls doesn’t necessarily work for guys

This column isn’t about sex or banned books. It’s about what’s considered “normal” and how that relates to reading. I started thinking about that topic on a recent visit to my local pharmacy. I happened to be walking down an aisle when a woman knelt down, extended a strand of her hair, and compared it to a tiny hair sample that was curled in front of what I soon realized was a box of hair coloring. I’ve visited pharmacies for at least 50 years, and I had never noticed those little bundles of hair folded like hearts in front of rows of boxes.

About 10 minutes later, I passed through the same aisle, and this time, there were two girls there—each about 10ish, I’d say. One was extending a strand of her hair with precisely the same practiced motion as the woman I’d just seen. Clearly this girl already knew all about something that I’d been blind to for most of my life.

That incident reminded me of another evening, this one in Manhattan. I was strolling through a relatively poor Hispanic neighborhood at dusk. As I passed various vacant lots and basketball courts, I noticed they were still full of guys. I smiled to myself. I recalled the times when I would stay out to play, even after dark, when you lost sight of the ball as it passed beyond the silvery cone of light cast by the closest street lamp. And then it hit me. Where were all of these guys’ sisters? What, I wondered, do girls do in their spare time?

One more story. For years, doctors who examined girls entering puberty used a standard scale to determine if their young patients’ first periods were early, normal, or late. Then reports started to surface of abnormally high rates of early menses. Why was that? Was it because of hormones in the food, the water supply, sociological changes, or better nutrition? Then, somebody noticed something else. The scale was based on studies of girls from northern Europe. Normal, according to that particular scale, was normal for girls from there—not here. When researchers looked at girls from other regions and more diverse ethnic backgrounds, they discovered that earlier menses were perfectly normal. For example, in one 1997 study, 48 percent of African-American girls had signs of the onset of puberty by age eight, as compared to only 14 percent of white girls (to read the report, “Secondary Sexual Characteristics and Menses in Young Girls Seen in Office Practice,” visit pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/content/full/99/4/505). So the seeming rise in early menses was, in part, the result of comparing very different populations. Normal, in other words, is what is true of most people in a particular group.

That brings me back to the girls who were considering coloring their hair and the guys who were playing ball. Each of those groups has a different standard of what is normal. And I think that in kids’ books, and especially in today’s elementary schools, when we say “normal” what we really mean is what’s typical for girls—they’re our baseline. Well-behaved, attentive, eager-to-please girls are seen as normal. Restless, aggressive, pride-filled boys are seen as hyperactive troublemakers. A social worker recently told my wife that first-grade boys all across town are having meltdowns. Sitting still just doesn’t seem normal to them.

Boys need discipline. They also need to learn to be neat, to read, and to listen to their teachers. But I wonder how often a dominantly female educational system treats what is normal for boys as abnormal. And how much does a dominantly female publishing system cater to that educational system? It may be that for boys being restless is perfectly normal.