In recent decades, linguistic and other social scientific research has upheld and strengthened the proposition that children enter the world with a strong predisposition to learn human languages. Human children can do with remarkable ease something which no other species can do, despite the intense and sustained experimental training of scientists. Advanced primates and a few other social mammals are capable of acquiring competence in extremely rudimentary patterns of sign/object associations, learned through formal operant conditioning (either in the wild or with the aid of researchers), but this is not language. By contrast, very young children are able to acquire an immense and complex rule system as well as a rich and vast vocabulary at a time in their lives when they are cognitively incapable of learning even basic arithmetic.

What’s more, they are capable of acquiring this astonishingly complex system of syntactic, grammatical, and lexical patterns without actually having any of it formally taught to them. Aside from a handful of word-object associations at the very earliest stages of language learning and the occasional formal corrections, parents and other adults do not come anywhere near teaching children language in the manner that, for example, second languages are taught.

Children do not learn the rich vocabularies and complex grammars that underlie linguistic expression and communication by rote memorization or through the patterns of reinforcement and non-reinforcement that form the foundation for operant conditioning. And they don’t acquire language by trial and error. For although some rote memorization, formal parental correction/instruction, and trial and error do occur, the fact remains that by age 3 or 4, cognitively normal children are capable of creatively forming sentences (i.e. forming sentences they’ve never before heard themselves) which accurately reproduce the grammatical sophistication and complexity of the language their caretakers speak, even if the caretakers themselves are not formally aware of the existence of the rule systems in question. Children acquire communicative competence in their native language with utterly remarkable, miraculous, savant-like felicity that linguists, cognitive and behavioral psychologists, anthropologists, and philosophers have attempted to account for for more than half a century.

What’s my point?

I don’t care if your 4 year old son grabs the stick and plays with it like a sword, and your 3 year old daughter plays with it like a fairy wand.

Let me clarify, beginning with an important acknowledgment. Sexual dimorphism—hormonal, developmental, neuro-anatomical, and behavioral sexual differentiation—in human beings is a very real, and well researched phenomenon. Boys and girls, men and women, are different. The differences in question are highly variable and fluid. Particularly in the realm of behavior and neuro-anatomical structure, the range of variability for females or for males is as vast as the statistically relevant patterns of difference between males and females. The three biggest, most significant patterns of sex difference are in reproductive anatomy (including secondary sexual development), body size, and (significantly) in what cognitive psychologists call *core gender identification*—one’s sense of oneself as being male or female.

Patterns of behavioral difference between males and females exist in all cultures, though the specific content of those patterned differences varies widely from culture to culture. In fact, one of the only cross-culturally universal behavioral patterns of sexual differentiation actually involves childhood play: toy and playmate sex preferences (there even seems to be some cross-species universalism here as indicated by research on non-human primates). But these differences involve a narrow set of behavioral patterns (girls typically do prefer dolls and boys mechanical toys, but for the majority of toys there are no cross-cultural universal patterns of difference) and they correlate in experimental research not with genetic sex but with hormones. Genetically female children whose pre- and perinatal hormonal environments were more typically male tend to make toy and play choices that correlate with male patterns, and vice versa.

Having said that, I return to my main point. Even very young children display behaviors that are strongly coded in their culture as masculine or feminine, and those patterns very often align stereotypically masculine behaviors with boys and feminine ones with girls. But the fact that your son prefers primary colors and swords and toy soldiers and your daughter prefers glittery pastels and fairy wands and my-little-ponies is not evidence of an innate, inborn, inherently male or female predisposition (much less an eternal spiritual essence) to prefer such things any more than their remarkable fluency in the English language indicates an inborn predisposition to speak English.

That children are capable of acquiring fluency in the complex social and cultural grammars and vocabularies of gender difference, that they are able to competently and seemingly instinctively make their gender identity legible to those around them is not at all surprising to me. But tiny speakers of English or Mandarin or Tagalog or Arabic acquire their mastery of the structural patterns and complex rules and units of meaning in their native language, not because they are predisposed to learn English or Mandarin or Tagalog or Arabic, but rather because they are strongly predisposed to learn Language.

As parents we can choose to teach and unteach, reinforce and challenge, cultivate or ignore behavioral expressions of gender in our children however we wish. There’s a lot of nature there, and there’s a lot of culture too. But an awareness of how astonishingly capable even our very young children are of internalizing and successfully reproducing incredibly complex and nuanced structural patterns and rules for social signaling—even (and especially) the rules we are not consciously aware of but nevertheless fluently deploy in our own lives—can only improve our ability to make such choices from as informed a perspective as possible.