To think that most children are only friends with their own sex?

[YaYaWoahWoahYaYa]

I was reading a thread about SS schools and one of the negatives brought up was that children that go to them will never get a chance to be friends with the opposite sex.

My DD19 and DD14 are at a mixed sex school almost exclusively friends with girls, with DD17 having one male friend who was always bullied by the boys for being 'gay' and so has stuck with the girls since primary. Both insist that it is unusual for boys and girls to be friends, there's lots of relationships but they message on social media until the point of 'going out', and even then barely speak in school.

My DS15 does have female friends, but he doesn't speak to them in school (pre pandemic) and they are the girlfriends of his friends, so it matches up to what DDs say. He also agrees it's not really the norm.

We aren't in area where it might be taboo due to culture/religion. There's no state single sex schools in the county. The only separate lesson is/was PE.

Is this the norm everywhere? I had quite a few male friends as a child but even so I remember it being because they lived on my street, we didn't really speak at school either!

Dd has a mixed friendship group she met in primary through and went through to secondary. They all have quite a tight friendship, so I would say no, it's not unusual. I can't imagine them growing apart, not whilst they are in school anyway.

My DDs has no boys in their friendship groups at primary. No lasting friendships at all with boys. However there were boys in our village and they were friendly with them. Both went to single sex secondary schools and they found boys! Brothers of friends. School friends of brothers of friends. Not difficult at all. Perfectly happy to be at single sex schools.,

When I was at primary school all my friends were boys, however I didn’t start until I was eight and didn’t speak English, it just happened that the boys in my class did things I liked such as sport, so even though I couldn’t communicate through speech I could through play.

At secondary again my friends were all boys, I had a mixed group of friends at university.

My son is five, his friends at school are all girls, mainly for selfish reasons, he says they have the best colouring crayons!

My best friends were all boys growing up until i was about 14. Then i hung around with girls but still had close male friends i saw outside of school

Until I started year 10, all my friends were girls. I was never one of the ‘cool crowd’ who used to meet up in town in mixed groups at weekends and go to under 18 discos.

That changed when I started my GCSEs. I was one of only a handful of girls who did triple science, so I didn’t have much option but get to know the lads. I made some really good friends who happened to be male, and this continued through sixth form.

10yo ds has girl and boy friends, ie those he counts as his friends, but at lunch and break times tends to hang around with the boys as they tend to have similar interests - gaming and football - which is not as prevalent among the girls.

I remember very clearly having mixed sex friendship groups throughout both primary and secondary school. And at uni too.

My daughter was a girls girl in primary school as she said the boys all annoyed her. However, in secondary school it’s a very even split- she has just as many friends who are boys as she has friends who are girls.

My son is at a special school and it’s mostly boys there (just how it goes). I really hope he gets more opportunities to meet girls and befriend them as time goes on. He's primary school age and as many other boys his age would agree with him, girls are weird and awful and he doesn’t understand them at all. It would be nice for him to see that girls can definitely be awesome but he’s only going to believe that if he actually knows any- other than his sister and her friends as he’s very rigid in his thinking. I wouldn’t have ever chosen to send my children to single sex schools as I think mixing with the opposite sex is an important part of growing up.

DS15 is at a SS secondary school. Most of his friends are girls so I don't think it's as simple as you might think. He is not in any way LGBT. He doesn't want a girlfriend and prefers to concentrate on his studies. I think he is a bit mature for his age and finds a lot of his 'boy' friends a bit 'silly' whereas the girls are a bit more mature.

My son is only 6 year 2 but his closest friends are girls.

I'm an (almost) 47-yr old man and at primary school I had more friends that were girls than were boys, probably because in my class of 21 only 5 of us were boys and 2 of them lived in outlying villages. At secondary, it was probably 50:50.

I have DS12 and DD14. My DS is allergic to girls I think DD has one boy in her friendship group who is gay. She speaks to other boys in class etc but they aren’t her close friends.

I had loads of male friends at school.

My ds is year 6 and has a group of mixed sex friends. In the group chat it's all boys and girls. He's as close to the girls as he is the boys.

When they're younger they tend to stick with boys or girls IME, then when they're older they tend to assimilate.

I find all-boys or -girls schools a weird concept, they don't really exist where I'm from and doesn't sound very healthy!

My dd is 16 and has more male friends than female. It think she finds them less complicated. She's well into gaming and coding though and it sadly seems to be still the boys who share the interest.

I'm female - I had probably an equal mix of boy/girl friends at primary, but my best mate was a boy. At secondary I had various boy / girl mates. We had sleepovers together, went clothes shopping together, went on the piss together. As an adult, the only school friends I'm still in touch with are male.

My oldest daughter has loads of male friends. When going to secondary school she chose 3 of the boys from her nursery to go up with. None of the girls. They are still friends.
My youngest daughter has 3 best friends, 2 are boys. She has more boy friends than girl friends.

It was very interesting covering a PE lesson the other day. Normally, they’re taught PE separately, but together for everything else. The girls all took themselves off to one side of the gym, the boys huddled together on the other side. Like an interesting experiment!

My girls have mostly female friends. They do have male friends but the female ones are closer and they see them more often.

Both my primary age dds have some male friends. The majority of their friends are female, but I've never had a party they didn't want to invite a few boys to.

My DD15 has a mixed friendship group but they’re mainly boys (about 80%)

DS14 has all female friends.

Other DS14 has all male friends.

So more common here for them to have friends of the opposite sex.

Dd18 has mainly a big group of boys for her friends right from early age she just prefers how they are to how girls can be she hates drama and bitchiness 🤣

DS went to boys school, girls in 6th form only but from then and uni mixed.

I had friends of both sexes when I was a teenager, and my now adult stepson did too when he was at high school ten years ago. I thought that was pretty standard.

I had loads of male friends as a child in primary and secondary. Obviously in secondary school far easier to be friends with boys I didn't fancy but we used to have a lot of fun and chats. Same at uni and as an adult. If anything being friends with males easier than being friends with females. I have two boys and they're friends with some girls although not high on the list to invite round and thinking about it although I was friends with boys at school not enough to invite them over for tea.

My kids (now 11) are friends with a mix of boys and girls, but they do seem to be the only ones with a "mixed" set of friends of all their classmates. None of the other kids are friends with any other opposite sex kid in the class. One of my daughters is pretty much exclusively friends with boys (there are more boys than girls in their class but also, she tends not to like the things other girls in her class like) and the other has a fairly even mix but leans towards other girls. This has been the case at two schools - one in London and now one in the US.

Looking at the other kids in their school, this isn't unusual but things seem to get more mixed the older they get. And when I think back on my own experience in school, this was probably how things worked for me, too. Didn't really start having friends who were boys until Secondary school, though I always thought that was because of the way we were frequently segregated or called out by sex in school when I was younger - line up by sex, sit boy, girl, boy, girl, put in same sex groups when we behaved and mixed groups when we didn't, etc.

My experience in college in the first year was that the women who had gone to single-sex schools had a hard time seeing men in the same way as women from a friendship perspective. Not all of them (about 8 out of 20 in my single-sex halls went to single-sex schools), but the majority, had difficulty with the idea of friendships with men, though they were often oblivious to how differently they acted when men were around and would deny it if you brought it up. By year 3, though, most were not so tedious.