While scientific research normally argues that girls do indeed mature faster than boys, it often leaves room for other factors that influence growth and development, such as genetics, internal and external influences.
My husband and I understand this argument through our experience as first-time parents. My son was born one and a half months before his paternal female cousin and four months before his maternal female cousin. Yet both female cousins seem to have developed faster than he has.
Both cousins are fully potty-trained, while our son continues to struggle with doing his number twos. Both cousins are fully conversant with their parents or people on the phone, while my son recognises people and would not be bothered to hold conversations with them. Even with us, he keeps his conversations brief and to the point.
Whenever I go to pick him up from kindergarten, his female classmates will always have a lot of stories for me. Meanwhile on the drive back from school, I would ask my son how his day was, what he ate and so on, only to be met with silence. Most of the times he would rather speak about what he sees as we drive by rather than answer my questions.
Last week as I picked him up from kindergarten, I found one of his female classmates outside talking to her mother about her day. Her level of conversation, her grammar and command of language, as well as her general chattiness, could be compared to that of a teenage girl! This made me wonder about this topic. The girl in question is only about two months older than my son.
While my son is not eager to chat and express himself at length, he is more than advanced in other areas. He can name many parts and types of airplanes (his biggest interest). He has learnt to read at a level higher than his age. He can do simple math and count to 100. And I have recently found out he is a mini sound effects machine. He can make different sounds of different modes of transport almost exactly the same.
As such, my husband and I are not worried about his development, just curious at the growth rate between boys and girls of the same age.
While we can almost conclusively agree to the query on whether girls mature faster than boys, we, too, have to leave room for other factors. For instance, it is a fact that both my husband and I were extremely shy as children. A fact that we did not know until we had a child together.
