There's no denying that men and women tend to excel at different skills.

Women, for example, are more likely to know the difference between periwinkle and lavender while men, in the main, are better at parallel parking. In a remarkable show of faith, the directors of my son’s nursery reconfigured the parking scheme this spring so that we all had to parallel park, which turned out to be a lot to ask of mothers with kids younger than four.

While I know that plenty of girls are great at problem solving, I have to wonder if it wasn’t the Y chromosome that was responsible for my oldest son’s recent experiment. Having caught him putting a button in his mouth, I admonished him to stop with the baleful threat that if he put the button in his mouth, he would choke and die.

Several weeks later, he found himself in class doing a project that involved pasting buttons onto a cup and applied the scientific method to determine if I was right or not.

He first formulated the theory that he would not actually die if he swallowed the button, and to test his theory, he conducted at least one experiment – he swallowed a button. He came to a reasonable conclusion which he published by proclaiming that he had eaten a button.

When I asked if he’d eaten the button in response to peer pressure or to humour his friends – all of whom would be enormously amused by button eating, I’m certain – his only response was that he didn’t die.

He applied the same theory a week later and came to the conclusion that the button that was responsible for his flu because his teacher told him putting things in his mouth would make him sick and his teacher, apparently, knows everything.

Now doesn’t that sound like a boy thing?

Laura Fulton