I've noticed something curious.
When children are showing off in a park, a playground or a beach, it's almost always the girls doing handstands, cartwheels and walkovers.
The boys are usually trying to kick something, climb something, break something, or convert a stick into a weapon.
It's an odd little window into how early we steer children. Nobody gathers them together and announces that cartwheels are for girls and football is for boys. It just seeps into the culture until it feels normal.
The irony is that a cartwheel requires strength, balance, courage and coordination. Qualities we supposedly admire in everyone, yet somehow the public display of them has been quietly sorted into the wrong mental drawer.
Children are not just expressing themselves naturally. Quite often, they're expressing the expectations adults have wrapped round them before they're old enough to notice.
The girls invert themselves gracefully.
The boys prepare for siege warfare with a twig.
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