How to help a 10Y old girl with her confidence at school (boys are better, I'm no good, etc)

[ParentOfOne]

Not sure if this was more appropriate here or in the Parenting section.

Our 10 year old girl is preparing for her 11+
We have tried to strike a balance between motivating her for the test, but not making her feel anxious, because our message is that doing well at the test gives her more options in terms of schools but she'll end up in a good school regardless

She has a tutor who praises her and thinks she's ready to do well.

BUT a few toxic boys in her class have managed to get into her head: boys are smarter, boys are better, boys are faster, etc etc etc

So now every time she struggles on a question or gets a question wrong, she gets completely overwhelmed with negative feelings

I appreciate it's hugely subjective, but has any of you been through this?
Any specific tips? Suggested readings?

We have explained to her that many studies point to underconfidence being a problem with girls and overconfidence being a problem with boys (see Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01831-4 )

We keep stressing that everyone is different, that there are plenty of things mum does better than dad and viceversa, that you cannot generalise

We keep reminding her of all her achievements, that the tests are hard, that the tutor and the teachers always praise her, and that she shouldn't believe what the boys say because many will lie. We reminded her of all the instances where the very same boys invented the most ridiculous stories.

We have also shared (adapted for her age) real stories from our works of this type of over and underconfidence

But none of it seems to have much effect and it honestly breaks our hearts.

For context, she is used to a circle of friends and relatives where all the women work, she knows that in a couple of families she earns more than him, and the only women who have never worked are her grandmas. All of this to say that she's not exposed to the Iranian morality police or anything like that.

She has a couple of books like stories for rebel girls but they have never resonated with her.

Thoughts?

I’m a big fan of single sex education for girls but I do think that many girls’ schools encourage a level of compliance and perfectionism that I don’t think is healthy. OP, what stands out to me in your post is that your DD is getting upset if she finds something hard or gets a question wrong. That would concern me as those feelings will be there, annoying boys or not, and may become worse as the pressure at school ramps up.
I used to talk to my DDs about failure as a learning opportunity, that getting things wrong is fine and normal and that I stuff up all the time (with specific examples). Maybe try a bit of that if you haven’t already. And make sure she knows that when those boys brag about how they have done half the time they are probably lying.

My dd goes to a state girls secondary school and it’s quite simply fantastic.

There is no gender bias so they are very successful at getting girls to take stem subjects.

Whereas as the mixed state school nearby, not a single girl took computer science A level in the year dd visited for open day because (I quote the head of department on that open day) “it’s still really hard to persuade girls that computing is a subject for them.” I was gobsmacked by that!

The confidence my dd has gained at single sex school is remarkable; the absence of sexual harassment has been a massive advantage over local mixed schools. This was already a problem in Y6 as primary boys were starting to make inappropriate sexual gestures and behaviours and language towards girls and female teachers at school. (These are exactly the same boys who in y4 and y5 would be jeering at the girls in a more innocent way who then started getting access to phones and porn, who then started on the increasingly sexist and sexually aggressive behaviour in y6.)

And yes: I’m happy to “lock up my daughter” to protect her from some of the uncontrolled abuse that male pupils have frequently visited on female pupils in the last 20 years. She has male friends in clubs outside school, enough to know what boys are like.

What changes at 18? Well for a start my dd will be extremely well established as a confident young woman who has high self esteem. Second - she is a black belt in her martial art. So if any young man comes at her with any crap, she will be in a good position to put him back in his box either verbally or physically. She would not have been able to do that age 11.

So - for me single sex education is the only reasonable response for a parent of girls to what has become a travesty in our classrooms where girls do not feel safe or respected by their male peers.

@ParentOfOne
Hey I recommend theee books below to read with her as they are in her age range and focus on women's achievements in STEM and being confident. Also the book Invisible Women: exposing the gender bias women face every day. It's probably a hard read now but I'd recommend when she's going into her teens to show how the system works and how she can fight against that just being confident in her skills and also that it's not her that can't do STEM or is not as smart as boys but that society is trying to convince of that.

1. “Women in Science: 50 Fearless Pioneers Who Changed the World” by Rachel Ignotofsky
2. “Hidden Figures (Young Readers' Edition)” by Margot Lee Shetterly
3. “Girls Who Code: Learn to Code and Change the World” by Reshma Saujani
4. “She Persisted: 13 American Women Who Changed the World” by Chelsea Clinton
5. “Rebel Girls Champions: 25 Tales of Unstoppable Athletes”
6. “Girls Think of Everything: Stories of Ingenious Inventions by Women” by Catherine Thimmesh
7. “The Confidence Code for Girls” by Katty Kay & Claire Shipman
8. “I Am Enough” by Grace Byers
9. Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls” series by Elena Favilli & Francesca Cavallo
10. “Stories for South Asian Supergirls” by Raj Kaur Khaira
11. “Young, Gifted and Black: Meet 52 Black Heroes from Past and Present” by Jamia Wilson
12. "Fantastically Great Women Who Changed the World” series by Kate Pankhurst - ...Who Saved the Planet...Who Made History
13. “This Book Is Feminist: An Intersectional Primer for Next-Gen Changemakers”
14. “Ways to Make Sunshine” by Renée Watson

@caramelty I am happy for you if your choice is working well for you.
But you have quoted single anecdotes, and the plural of anecdotes is not data.

Forgive my brutality, but the fact that, in a single school, fewer girls take Computer Science A Level does not mean absolutely anything in and of itself. There could be a gazillion other factors at play. If there were data and research suggesting that, nationwide, girls do better in single sex, and girls are more likely to choose certain subjects in single sex schools, there would be something to talk about.

I don't know if there is research on the UK, but the links I quoted about Australia suggest that the research there is inconclusive

Thank you!

@ParentOfOne This is a very interesting paper from the Institute of Physics. Girls are almost two and a half times more likely to take physics at A-level if they are at an all girls vs coed.

https://www.iop.org/sites/default/files/2019-04/its-different-for-girls.pdf

It’s a good read based on U.K. data. The stats have remained roughly unchanged since it was written.

Interesting, but the comparison is on single sex sixth forms. How man single sex sixth forms exist in the country?

The single sex I know of all become coed for the 6th form. I haven't looked into it, I'm sure there are others which remain single sex even for the 6th form, but I wonder how many there are and if there isn't something else going on.

From what I have read; coed education benefits BOYS, single-sex education benefits girls.
I did a quick search on google scholar and there are several published reports (since 2021) on the ongoing benefits to girls. However as in previous older reports no benefit to boys.
Recent research (2 different papers) explored mental health and found girls at single sex schools had less depression than boys at single sex schools.
Regarding your dd, does she really believe this stuff vs saying it to get a rise out of you?
Physically; the larger heart, denser bones, higher lung capacity and ability to train 365 days per year vs women who can not due to menses easily debunks the boys are better; yes they are as they are built differently, that’s why there are two different categories in sport M-F.
Menses also effects students ability to study, but that’s a different tangent.
Historically women couldn’t be published and many did work under pseudonyms. Giving the appearance that women are less capable than men. It really wasn’t that long ago that professional women were forced to quit during/after pregnancy.
At our kitchen table this myth that your dd is spewing would be quickly and swiftly debunked.
I’d be asking her why 5 times.
he puts his hand up first, because he knows the answer, because he gets extra help, because 3 yrs ago he was behind etc.

I went to a mixed school. Thee were zero issues with girls taking Maths (in fact my A level maths class was almost all girls) and Science and I never once felt that boys were somehow better than me or taking over or, as a pp said, not engaging in music or drama or food tech?!? 😂 None of this happened!!

The only negative was being a bit more worried re period leaks as boys were around.

Literally everyone I know who went to a girls school talks about levels of bitchiness and cliqueness and bullying that thankfully I did not have to endure. The girls I knew that went to all girls schools when I was a teen also seemed to be completely obsessed by boys, so my impression at the time was that not being exposed to boys regularly seemed to cause some sort of weird bit frenzy!! Some of the stories that came out of my local boys school were eyebrow raising. I think girls and boys when separated seem to behave more poorly than when they are mixed; mixing seems to moderate the behaviour of both sexes.

There is no way that I’d send my children to single sex.

@ParentOfOne Another analysis from the GSA based of DFE published information

https://gsa.uk.com/wp-content/uploads-gsa/2023/08/DfE-Research-Academic-achievement-in-Girls-Schools-final.pdf

There may be other factors at play, yes, but the data from multiple sources shows that girls do better in a single sex environment. Boys do better in coed. However, your post isn’t about this - but might help explain how the boys in your daughters class could potentially be making her feel this way.

Also, looking at independent school recent trends, it is mainly the boys schools that are going coed (Westminster, Winchester, St Albans, Abingdon as examples). I know Godolphin is going coed as an example of a girls school going coed. A Google search says there’s approx 230 all girls schools in the U.K.

@MyLov I have seen awful bitchy behaviour by girls in both single sex and coed environments (I work in education). I think some schools have bigger problems culturally along these lines than others. Some girls schools are very toxic but I can think of two London coed schools with the same vibe.

I also don’t think girls go crazy when they get to be around boys, and most parents with girls at single sex schools do encourage mixing outside school.

The evidence is inconclusive, that means it could go either wya and probably goes one way or the other depending on the child and the school. My children are going to single sex high schools, it’s a non negotiable for my daughter and a preferred for my sons. There was no bitching from my days there, I went to two different girls high schools and still have my two sets of best friends 25 years later, one set from each school. My children are all good at maths and stem and I think girls schools are better for that for girls, I think girls get to use the sporting faculties and ovals etc at girls schools instead of playing around the edges, and they get to be the best at sports instead of the best for a girl. After high school, university and my entire career has been male dominated, and having gone to a girls school was never a limitation in existing in the real world or having a thriving successful career in male dominated domains (being a woman was of course sometimes a limitation) I disregard that argument completely, it’s like waiting till the right time to feed your baby food or start school or send them to a week long camp- our children grow into the real world and even the real world has women and men treated differently and women’s sports and spaces where women can be together and a girls school provides that, protects them until they are more mature and better able to hold their own.
all that said, I’m sure some girls do better at some coed schools, everyone is different. But mine will be at single sex schools.

Re boys I’m looking forward to my sporty academic boys joining more into music and drama at a boys high school. They won’t join choir now in primary school as ‘it’s for GIRLS’ but they know that 100% of the choir and the shows will be boys at high school and they will be much happier to join in. (They are musical and love singing - the eldest does singing lessons with a friend, we cooked this up with the friends parents to overcome the it’s girly vibe)

From yesterday 's Financial Times (Stop telling women they are cautious investors)

At my girls' grammar school in the 90s, out maths teacher introduced us to trigonometry by saying that female brains often found it hard. At least half the class promptly switched off and probably never took an interest in maths again.

I don't think it's possible to normalise for all the many factors at play.
Maybe it's more useful to focus on the specifics of the schools one is considering

@ParentOfOne I agree entirely. Not all girls schools will see girls thriving in STEM, in the same way that boys might not be encouraged to take more creative subjects at coed or boys schools.

The best fit for your child is the one where their individual needs are met.

The raw data in the UK indicates that a larger fraction of girls who do GCSE in single sex schools take Math and Physics A Levels than of girls who do GCSE in coed schools. The data indicates that this also true at the next level, that a larger fraction of girls who do A Levels in single sex sixth forms study Math or Physics at university.

However, data is not the same as information. In the UK, whether a girl attends a single sex or a coed school is a primarily a decision of the parents, reflecting both the values and preferences of the parents and their assessments of the preferences and abilities of the girl. As such, there is a selection bias in which girls attend single sex schools in the UK. To quote the UCL Centre for Education Policy & Equalising Opportunities,

International evidence suggests that the majority, if not all, of these differences can be explained by the types of girls that attend single sex schools compared to those that attend mixed sex schools: in other words, the differences are largely driven by the fact that girls who attend single sex schools possess characteristics or traits that make them more likely to opt to study a STEM subject, regardless of school context, rather than by any effect of attending a single sex school on subject choice. In studies in which school choice is essentially random – either because students are randomly allocated to schools (as in one study in Korea[8] ) or because there are other reasons why school choice can be argued to be close to random (as in a study in Ireland[9] ) – girls in single sex schools are no more likely to study STEM subjects than those in mixed schools.

I have DD and DS who attended mixed sex comprehensives through to sixth form. Like me, they were quiet types and, like me, noticed there were louder types who projected self-confidence.

We did talk about this recently and both said that it was not necessarily a division of the sexes, but rather there are louder, very self-confident types and you need to decide how to engage with the behaviours that could generate.

Their approach was to decide on their own focus and on their own efforts and not try to obsess about making comparisons. That has served them well in the workplace too, where the same dynamics can sometimes hold true also.

Interestingly, both were sometimes marked down for being less participative in class, but that varied hugely by teacher (rather than by subject) and to some extent may have been a reflection of the teacher's ability to draw people in and dial others down (same can be true of managers in the workplace).

I would focus on this and steer the narrative away from boys vs girls, so it is more about 'how do I want to approach this kind of situation' rather than 'I am a girl so there is not much I can do about it'.

This was an interesting read.

https://ffteducationdatalab.org.uk/2024/05/do-pupils-in-single-sex-schools-get-better-grades/

It shows there's a modest effect on girls in single schools getting better results once other factors are controlled. What it can't show is the behavioural /mental health effects of single sex schools. Would love to see data on that aspect!

The problem with these studies is how you control and normalise for all other factors.
How do you control for whether a girl grows up in a mysoginistic, patriarchal family, or if in a supportive family, with no gender stereotypes, where both parents support her growth and try to boost her confidence?