Julie Jay: The science doesn’t lie - girls are easier to raise

In a moment of madness, I recently offered to mind my pal’s two little girls for a couple of hours, while she nipped to the hairdressers. As I ushered her two little girls into our kitchen, I silently nominated myself for canonisation and braced myself for what was, I was fully sure, about to be an hour of carnage.

Instead, the girls’ presence brought a degree of zen to the house. They were basically the equivalent of feng-shui, but with less lower back pain from moving couches. These two tiny queens played, jumped around, and engaged in hide and seek as much as my boys, which would somehow suggest they were of the same species.

Yet the ease with which they conducted themselves made them the dream houseguests, not least because they gifted me with a handmade friendship bracelet before they departed, cementing our bond for life.

In the final few minutes of their visit, I felt a gentle tap on the shoulder.

“Can we do beads?” the older girl asked with such earnestness I was fully sure she was taking the piss.

But no. She diligently sat down and began methodically playing with her beads, sorting them into colours and sizes before finally following a careful outline with such precision that I can see a future in cardiac surgery.

Her sister was equally pleasant, as she proceeded to make teacups out of playdough.

“Were they OK?” my friend asked upon her return, and in that moment, I felt a mixture of envy (her blow-dry was perfection) and rage at her continuing in this pretence that her little girls are capable of bad behaviour.

As a fellow mammy to small kids, I have occasionally offloaded to this friend about the minor struggles, and the moments when I literally tear my hair out and have the slightly electric-shocked ’80s hairstyle to prove it. And all along, she echoed my complaints, pretending she too experienced similar insanity firsthand.

Little did I know this was all a lie. My friend was harbouring two angels who engaged in things like ‘organised fun’ and did so without eating tissue paper in the process. It was a hoodwink of the highest order.

The level of betrayal is up there with your friend insisting she hasn’t studied for the Leaving Cert mocks, only to turn up rocking not just with flashcards, but flashcards that are highlighted.

Increasingly, I have been looking at my friends with little girls. While, of course, I would not change my two for the world and adore the bones of these little scamps, it currently feels like being a mammy to boys is fraught with a lot more wrecking of my head and the house.

This is more than evident when I pick my boys up from the childminder, where the girls present will take a momentary reprieve from playing dolls' house or shop and greet me at the door. 

Here, they will tell me, with a sigh, that Number One is rolling around in muck or that Number Two is ‘breaking’ sandcastles out the back. (I thought they had meant building sandcastles and simply misspoken, until I witnessed the baby’s demolition derby in the sandpit).

Birthday parties in play centres are the same, with Number One’s gal pals arriving in their party dresses and glittery runners and elevating the fashion stakes considerably. Before they do anything else, they take a moment to put their unicorn bags in a safe corner and secure their hair before diving into the ball pit.

Despite being only four, these girls are so organised that one lent me a bobbin when they saw me attempting to hold my hair back with a plastic party bag in the playground last week. 

The fact that a four-year-old is more prepared than I should probably signal an inner alarm bell to get myself together. Instead, I couldn’t help but admire the gals as they trundled along with more class and integrity than to get embroiled in a Dáil fracas on speaking times.

Of course, there are exceptions to the rule — we all know that boys can love beading, girls can love muck, and parenting small kids is without a doubt going to be the toughest thing any of us do, regardless of gender. But quite frankly, I am too tired to talk in anything less than sweeping generalisations.

While I’m not saying boys are harder to care for, let’s just say I will be babysitting for girl mammies only in the future. A cynic might suggest these girls were in visitor mode in my house, hence the stellar behaviour, but I will not budge on this, given that the last time I babysat a friend’s boys I ended up with a mysterious hole in the wall, but this last act of philanthropic babysitting on my part saw me coming away with a friendship bracelet and a renewed faith in beads as an art form.

An afternoon of crafting and a bracelet to prove it, or an afternoon of carnage and a wall needing plastering? It’s a no-brainer. Now that, my friends, is real girl math.