Day: August 27, 2025

It is impossible to overstate the importance of talking in the lives of girls and women. Though estimates vary, it appears that males use about seven thousand words per day; and females, twenty thousand.* Women not only talk more, but their enjoyment in conversation is far more intense. Connecting through talking activates the pleasure centers of a girl’s brain, providing a huge emotional reward for her. It is why teen girls are obsessed with text messaging and computer chat rooms. It also explains why one of the most common sources of disappointment women express about married life is that the guys won’t talk to them. Show me a husband who keeps his thoughts to himself, and I will show you a frustrated wife.

Little and not-so-little girls need to talk, too, especially about what they are feeling. Let me speak directly to the busy mom and dad who are too exhausted at the end of the day to get your kids talking, either at the dinner table or in those intimate few minutes before bedtime: you may be making a serious mistake. You need to know what your children are thinking, and they need the pleasure of telling you about it. Even though some loquacious kids will “talk the horns off a billy goat,” and you come home too tired to listen, it is imperative that you tune in—especially to your girls. There will come a time when they will be talking primarily to their peers, and the missed opportunities for understanding and intimacy today will be costly down the road.

This is why we should engage our kids in activities that encourage conversation, including eating together as a family, playing table games, inviting friends with kids to dinner, cooking together, building things, adopting a lovable dog or cat, cultivating mutual interests, or learning a sport such as skiing or tennis as a family. Remember how your daughter is made and seek invitations into that private world. You won’t regret it.

From Dr. James Dobson’s book, Bringing Up Girls.

* Allan Pease and Allan Garner, Talk Language: How to Use Conversation for Profit and Pleasure (London: Simon and Schuster, 1985).

It begins at conception, when males and females start their developmental journeys down two very different paths. That juncture will affect the way they think, feel, and act for the rest of their lives. The brains of both sexes appear to be “female” until about the eighth week when a male brain is washed by a huge surge of testosterone. It is then transformed radically and even takes on a different color.

This male sex hormone kills some of the communication cells, including a portion of the bundle of nerves called the corpus callosum. It is a rope of fibers that connects the right hemisphere, where emotion is processed, with the left, where language is focused. Although the corpus callosum survives the testosterone bath, the male brain will never be able to “cross talk” as effectively thereafter, which has major implications for future masculine behavior. Testosterone also causes an increase in the volume of neurons and circuits located in the boy’s sex and aggression centers.

Because the female brain is not subjected to a comparable surge of testosterone in the womb and beyond, its communicative and emotional centers remain intact. In fact, these structures will grow larger and become better networked neurologically. A girl’s corpus callosum is up to 25 percent larger than a male’s and becomes an eight-lane superhighway capable of carrying great quantities of emotional information from one side of the brain to the other. (For boys, it is a country road.)

As a result, a girl is likely to be more expressive and emotional than most boys almost from birth. She will probably feel things more deeply and respond to subtle cues in her environment that boys are likely to miss. She will be far better at reading character and motives in others, although she probably won’t be able to explain how she does it. She will also cry more often, even as an adult. Every man knows that, and he is typically rattled by it. She is a girl, after all. That’s what girls do.

From Dr. James Dobson’s book, Bringing Up Girls.