“In the early weeks, through to beyond six months, they smile less and cry more, are more irritable and demanding and show less emotional stability.” Dr Chilton adds that baby boys need more emotional support from their mother, and for a longer period than baby girls.
However, a 2018 Gallup poll found that 54% of Americans said boys were easier to raise than girls, while only 27% said girls were easier, and 14% said there was no difference. Some research suggests girls are better communicators in the younger years, but this may change later on.
Boys mature slower physically, socially, and linguistically. Stress-regulating brain circuitries mature more slowly in boys prenatally, perinatally, and postnatally. Boys are affected more negatively by early environmental stress, inside and outside the womb, than are girls.
Male baby pregnancies are more likely to result in complications, possibly because they grow faster in the womb and require more nutrients and oxygen than supplied by the mother through the placenta -- the temporary organ that attaches to the wall of the uterus during pregnancy to help the fetus grow and develop.
The right side of baby boys' brains develop at a significantly slower rate than that of baby girls. They also have significantly less stress-regulating hormones than baby girls (even during gestation!), making them more vulnerable to environmental, emotional, and physical stressors.
The ways boys' brains and bodies develop is a normal process — that's a fact, explained Schore. They naturally experience more frustration at 6 months and display more intense reactions to negative stressors at 12 months. They're not less tough or weak — they're simply boys being boys, developing as developing boys do.
Baby boys have higher levels of testosterone than girls and lower levels of serotonin, which causes them to be more easily stressed and harder to calm down. Infant girls, on the other hand, show a greater tendency to comfort themselves by sucking their thumbs.
So it appears there's not enough evidence to back up claims male or female pregnancies differ significantly in terms of the maternal hormonal environment. This makes it unlikely that anecdotes of moodier, angrier or uglier pregnancies are due to the sex of the fetus.
A recent study suggests that carrying a male or female foetus could lead to different immune responses in pregnant women. Pregnant women carrying girls have a greater chance of experiencing nausea and fatigue, according to the results of a study from the USA's Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center.
One myth suggests that pregnant women who do not experience mood swings are carrying boys, while those who do experience noticeable changes in mood are carrying girls. The truth is that most women will have mood swings during pregnancy, especially during the first and third trimesters.
Seems a little harsh but parents say this is the age where those tantrums intensify and it's really hard to deal with. What is this? Obviously, each child and family is different but overall, parents think the hardest years are between 6-8 with 8 being the hardest age to parent.
1-3 Months
The first three months with your baby often seem the hardest.
Little boys aren't all mud, worms and wrestling. They're also soft, sweet and sensitive. Your little boy might cry about little things, love princess stories and dress up as a witch. He will have a soft side that only you see, as he snuggles into bed with you each morning and tells you how much he loves you.
Gender inequality starts even before birth. Across the world, would-be parents tend to prefer their first (or their only) child to be a boy rather than a girl or to have more sons than daughters (1–8). This results in millions of “missing girls” at birth due to sex-selective abortions (9–11).
Moms who have girls are much happier than those with boys, particularly when the children reach early adulthood, according to a study from the Journal of Family Issues.
In a survey of more than 500 parents by financial resource site MoneyTips released exclusively to MarketWatch, parents say it's the girls that cost you more. They estimate it costs, on average, an additional $2,160 a year to raise a daughter versus a son through age 18.
The researchers found that women who gave birth to boys were consuming about 10 percent, or 200, more calories per day than those who went on to bear girls. Yet the amount of weight mothers gained during pregnancy did not differ between those who had girls and those who had boys.
Nature is designed to favour the conception of boys from September to November and girls from March to May because of an evolutionary mechanism aimed at keeping the overall sex ratio as near to 50:50 as possible, the scientists said.
But there's no evidence that there's a difference between the movements of boys and girls in the womb (Medina et al 2003).
Levels of the pregnancy hormone hCG, which triggers morning sickness, tend to be higher in mothers who are pregnant with girls. But anyone who's pregnant can have morning sickness, even bad morning sickness, when they're carrying a boy. So no, you can't count on it being a girl if you've got serious morning sickness.
“What we have been taught conventionally is that — bar any genetic disorders that cause early pregnancy loss that only affect girls or boys — there is always a 50/50 chance of one or the other gender each time. The chance of a girl after three boys is still the same probability.”
His groundbreaking work has shown that the delay in brain maturation makes boys more vulnerable in the long run to social stress (attachment trauma) and physical stress via endocrine disruptors or toxins in the environment.
Most of the time, Dr. Brizendine says that any sort of gender disappointment disappears once the baby is born.