Just last week, someone posted on Twitter the illusion that female and male brains are the same.   Why talk about girls and boys, these folks ask, their brains are the same anyway.

Nothing could be farther from the truth.  While there is huge overlap between female and male brains, and while there are more than 3.5 billion + ways to be “girl/female” and 3.5 billion + ways to be “boy/male” in terms of world population, female and male brains are different because the X and Y chromosomes are different—this sets up male and female brains in utero, before children are even born.  The brain differences show up in research from all continents.

Just one of the places these differences show up is ADD/ADHD.  Female-type ADD can get missed because parents, teachers, and other caregivers are looking for male-type ADD when they think “ADD”—they are looking for hyperactivity and significant difficulty with focus/attention.  Female-type ADD more often occurs without significant hyperactivity or lack of focus.

Why?

The female brain has some fail-safes for attention/focus that male brains often do not have.  One of these is the cingulate gyrus or cingulate cortex which, according to Daniel Amen, M.D. (Sex on the Brain) is up to four times more active in female brains.  Dr. Amen has studied more than 120,000 female and male brains.

Another fail-safe regards the hyperactivity component.  With less blood flow on average in the cerebellum (the physical “doing” center of the brain), and earlier pathway development to the pre-frontal cortex (the executive decision-making part of the brain), the female brain tends to control its physical impulses better than the male, especially during the developmental early childhood and school years.

Girls and women will often have ADD but not realize there is such a thing as female-type ADD, nor that you can have ADD without the physical impulsiveness males often get.

Female-type ADD shows up, quite often, in girls who see themselves as “flighty” or “spacy.”  These girls can often sit still, concentrate (for certain periods of time), and even multi-task their attention and focus.  But they forget things, miss things, zone out when they want to concentrate, get distracted, multi-task too much and miss fully finishing one task before going on to the next.  

These girls can seem “fine, just a little underperforming,” but what others might not realize is that they are working very hard to even just perform the way they are performing.  They are under constant internal stress. Female-type ADD is often comorbid (occurs with) anxiety and depression among girls and women.

The Amen Clinics (www.amenclinics.com) are a diagnostic and treatment facility you might want to look at online to see if they could help with diagnosis and/or treatment of a girl in your care. They have clinics all over the U.S.  For a girl or woman facing depression or anxiety and ADD, The Center, A Place of Hope, in Seattle, WA is also a facility that has been successful in diagnosis and treatment.

I wrote The Minds of Girls to help parents, educators, and others fully understand girls and help them grow.  Female-type ADD, anxiety, and depression are covered in the book, and of course the book covers much more.

Please allow me to plug this book as great back-to-school reading!  Here’s more about it.

The Minds of Girls

 “The Minds of Girls is a very important book.  In powerful prose and filled with practical strategies, it takes a fresh look at raising and educating our daughters in a new and complex world.   Brain science is key to this book and Gurian’s ability to match science with real life is a blessing.  I recommend this book to anyone living or working with girls and women.”

 –Daniel Amen, M.D., New York Times Bestselling Author of Memory Rescue and Unleash the Power of the Female Brain

While I as a boy struggled with ADHD, one of my daughters struggled with dyslexia.  The Wonder of Girls was researched and written while Gail and I were raising our daughters.  The Minds of Girls responds in large part to questions asked by professionals and parents:  “When are you going to write another book on girls?”  

I have been working on it steadily, and now it is out.  It helps you–parents, teachers, leaders, and policy-makers–set a resilient, powerful, and passionate course for girls in our very complex world. The book covers girls of all ages, including early childhood through college.  It also covers female-type ADD.

There are special sections in the book on the female brain and how to protect the emotional lives of girls; healthy boundaries for social media and screen time; STEM and STEAM teaching and learning; how to set up gender equal workplaces from all the way back in childhood; what girls need from parents and peers; how to protect girls who are struggling with depression, anxiety, and other issues; and much more.  

I hope you will share this information and spread this science-based revolution into the lives of your daughters.  Thank you for directing me to write this book!  With two daughters of my own, writing The Minds of Girls has been not just a powerful legacy project for me, but a deep labor of love.

Here is more from the Press Release

–Michael Gurian

RAISING AND EDUCATING GIRLS

WITH A REVOLUTIONARY SCIENCE-BASED APPROACH

THAT BUILDS STRONG AND SUCCESSFUL WOMEN

Michael Gurian has studied and served girls and their families for thirty years.  In Boys and Girls Learn Differently (2000), The Wonder of Girls (2002), and Leadership and the Sexes (2008), he blew the lid off contemporary thinking on how to help girls become strong, confident, and successful women.  “We don’t understand girls as well as we think we do,” says Gurian, whose newest book blows the lid off our thinking once again.

The Minds of Girls provides parents, educators, and mentors with a new understanding of who girls are, what they need, and how to raise them to their full potential. The book focuses on brain-based research and practical strategies growing from that science, including tools that have proven successful in the Gurian Institute’s programs and family interventions throughout the world.

Noting an alarming uptick in female depression and anxiety over the last two decades, Gurian provides assets for epigenetic analysis (gene testing) and ways to protect girls from environmental neurotoxins (in food, lotions, and other nearby products).  

A father of two grown daughters, he helps parents and others become citizen scientists on a girl’s behalf. Gurian advocates “nature-based theory,” which holds that nature, nurture, and culture are all equally crucial factors in gender development, with nature being foundational.  

Nature. The female brain and biological sciences.  Genetic factors, including environmental neurotoxins such as lead and aluminum in homes, BPH in plastics, artificial sweeteners, red dye, and monosodium glutamate in food, and endocrine disruptors in fertilizer, have been negatively affecting female gene expression and the development of brain and body over the last fifty years and we can all do something about it.

Nurture. Gurian’s practical analysis and tools for helping with ‘girl drama’ and relational aggression will surprise some readers as he shows how girl drama can be a good and natural experience, one that, with the right guidance from us, can often build emotional boundaries and resilience.

Culture. Lacking a science-based understanding of girls and women, our society, Gurian argues, hopes to solve issues of female development without fully understanding systemic issues.  One of those is certainly gender bias and stereotypes, but many issues go far beyond these popular concepts, says Gurian.  He presents findings on “gender symbiosis,” and advocates for that new approach to women’s issues.  

“Because girls’ issues are biologically and socially interconnected, we can’t solve them anymore just by talking about stereotypes,” he says.  “We can only help our girls and women with multiple systems thinking that deals with all elements together.”

In exploring technology use, screen time and social media—an area every parent is asking about today–Gurian provides specific guidelines girls’ themselves are likely to follow as they become scientists of their own development.  He provides these guidelines for seven age groups—the seven developmental stages girls go through in life.

Because Gurian has worked with Fortune 500 companies in tech and engineering fields to help advance women, his insights on how to build better math, science, and technology success for girls provide a rich new call to action for parents and school systems.

The Minds of Girls is a profound road map for raising healthy girls.  Inspiring, good-natured in its humor, and always practical, it is a parent’s bible for raising healthy and resilient daughters.  

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