Why are teachers failing the narrative for boys, is boy playing incompatible with school

[Leteer]

Does anyone feel like boy play is deeply unsupported and thoroughly discouraged in school up to the point where boys are questioning if play is actually good / encourages boys to question if their hard wired need for play is a bad thing. Isn't this a downward spiral for boys to not support what nature gave them which could in turn affect academic work.

Not all boys are boisterous and not all girls are little darlings. Quite a few boys are gentle and sensitive and quite a few girls are boisterous/ challenging / argumentative or some may say confident, to challenge and dominant, subjective just depends on how you see it (for BOTH male and female)
Schools aim to encourage students to be critical thinkers and use aggression in sports alongside discipline

My kids reported both girls and boys enjoying chasing games like Tag.

Girls at my kids school enjoyed the apparatus as much as boys and were more likely to do cartwheels and other gymnastics moves.

I think that chasing games are fine but it’s far too difficult to supervise playfighting etc-there’s often less than an handful of adults and 100s of kids! Plus there is the problem that different people have different limits and opinions on what is playfighting and what is physical bullying. That’s why most kids only playfight with kids they know like siblings. Plus there are no school nurses anymore. Who is going to do the first aid when kids inevitably get hurt because it’s unreasonable for primary aged kids to know other’s limits?

Object focused play (excluding football) is too difficult to manage because of the possibility of losing stuff like vehicles and tools. I remember skipping, elastics and clapping games very fondly. I was amazed how many songs/rhymes carried onto my DD’s generation too.

Do some schools really ban chasing games? All of my kids loved chasing games at playtime and im
confident that it improved their behaviour when they went back in because they had run off some energy.

Because it’s easier to blame the school and sight that as the reason your child can’t behave, rather than set up as a parent and take some responsibility.

Let me guess. You have a son who keeps getting into trouble for being rough, boisterous and not sitting still in school? Plenty of boys can and do function perfectly well in school.
However overall I do agree that children would benefit from more physical and play- based learning in schools. But that’s all children. Not just boys. Not one of the activities that ChatGPT mentioned is the sole province of boys.

If you want to risk assess, manage and deal with the fallout of rough play, go ahead at home. My staff are trained to teach and should not be expected to umpire junior fight club then get ravaged by parents after.

So you don't think girls need play or?

I agree completely, and then they get labelled with being on the spectrum.

This topic always fascinates me.

When I do school drop-off in the morning the girls are always standing in groups on the playground, pleasantly chatting and laughing with each other, whilst the boys are madly and loudly chasing each other, playing tig, playing football, being really energetic etc. It’s a very noticeable difference between the sexes.

It’s the same when I do the pick-up too. The girls all seem to just head off home whilst the boys hang around for hours either having lots of chaotic fun in the park or playing physical games or sports on the fields.

On a large social scale, the differences between boy’s and girl’s needs/desires for physical activity isn’t something that can be ignored. Whatever the reason for it is, the huge discrepancy does exist.

Well, yes? What's wrong with boys and men being a bit softer and quieter that sounds great, given that the vast majority of violent crime is committed by men, perhaps the world would be a bit better if men were 'softer and quieter'? Maybe rather than seeing that as feminization maybe it should be seen as more appropriately socialising boys and men so that they behave better

Why is it in their power to choose to 'let the girl play'? You really don't get it do you.

Plenty of boys as young as 5 can be heard saying 'she can't play because she's a girl' - they hear antiquated crap from misogynistic dads who tell them at home that they ought to be 'one of the lads!' and not play with girls.

Too many people on the thread have no idea how entrenched some of this stuff is even by the time little 5 year olds start school

I completely agree. It’s so hard to make happen though. We live in London and unless I sit in a park all day and organise daily play dates, it just doesn’t happen. It makes me so sad

@LondonLady1980 says On a large social scale, the differences between boy’s and girl’s needs/desires for physical activity isn’t something that can be ignored. Whatever the reason for it is, the huge discrepancy does exist.
This is true. Boys, men are different to girls, women. I have mentioned 'risk' both the physical risk and intellectual risk. The women of Genoa and Spain or Portugal did not push for Columbus and others to sail westward hoping to find India. It was the men who encouraged the exploration and took part in it.
Science and mathematics and engineering it has been mostly the men who pushed onwards.
It is about risk taking and accepting loss or failure.

This is a very odd comment. Christopher Columbus was funded by the king and queen so a woman was equally behind it. The majority of women in 1490s Spain had very little control over her life or money so not sure how they’d have influenced anything.

Thats the problem with taking any lessons from history. In almost every situation, women were less educated, less wealthy, less free, less involved with politics… the list goes on. We actually are only just starting to have any idea what women and men could be like if they had equal opportunities. Even something so simple as skirts being required uniform for girls. That doesn’t encourage football at break time, it makes it quite impossible. All these rules and norms matter.

By the time they get to school they have had 5 years of being moulded into the stereotypes

Im talking about older children though. I don’t think this moulding takes place in the early years or that this behaviour difference is ingrained in them before they start school.

From my experience the sexes are very similar in terms of behaviour and character when they start school and remain that way during Reception, Years 1 and 2 and it’s when they start getting to years 3-4 and onwards that I think the differences become very noticeable between boys and girls when it comes to the need/desire to be physically active.

I do believe nurture and social norms play a part in this difference but I think nature and biology play a much larger role.

@LondonLady1980the evidence would disagree with you. Adults consistently treat boys and girls different, even as babies. Heck it's even before they are born with the whole gender reveal/ gender disappointment nonsense.

Im definitely not disagreeing with that.

But men and women are biologically, fundamentally different.

There’s a reason why so many criminals are male compared to female, especially when it comes to violent crime, in exactly the same way that there is a reason that hospitals are full of female nurses and midwives instead of males, and why childcare settings are full of females.

Do I think these difference are due to nurture? Or gender expectations shaping children’s (and then their adult) behaviours? Or a result of children being forced into gender stereotypical roles?

No I don’t.

There is something intrinsically different in the hard wiring of males and females that differentiate us from each other in our character traits, our interests, our desires and our behaviours etc, and that is programmed into us from birth. Of course there will always be outliers, and of course nurturing and social influence will always have an impact on how a person turns out, but generally, I think sex, chromosomes and biology is the dominant factor in most aspects of how a person turns out.

There’s a reason why (generally speaking) men might want to spend a Sunday afternoon walking around a golf course followed by some beers and a game of darts, compared to a group of women who would prefer to go out for a fancy afternoon tea followed by a foot massage and like I said, I don’t think the reasons behind these differences are due to social stereotyping from birth.

As sexes we are different, that’s just a biological fact and I think that the biological differences between the sexes and the influences those differences cause within us, start playing out from a very young age, regardless of what nuturing or social influences are also impressed on us.

This is just my opinion though.

The nature versus nurture debate is one that applies to so many aspects of life, and when it comes to ‘stereotypical’ male and female (girls and boys) behaviour traits, I believe that nature plays a larger role than nurture.

By the time DS was 5 and in reception he was already being bullied for having 'girls hair'. There were comments about pink being a 'girls colour'. From children age four in his class. This really shocked us. We also had shed loads of comments and assumptions that DS was a girl from children and parents alike.

This 100% comes from the parents and the kids pick up on it. The boys with the football mad Dads were the absolute worst. But the Mum who had little princesses weren't far behind.

We'd generally tried to avoid the 'pink and blue rules' to an extent.

At nursery it was the boys who went outside and did the outdoor play. The girls stayed in and did things with pencils. So strangely enough by the time they started school who could write their own name and who couldn't. The nursery made the decision about which area the children were allocated. Some of this was down to personality but a lot of this was again dictated by the parents - the girls who turned up in white clothing were not going to get sent outside to play in the mud because the nursery weren't daft - they knew who would kick off.

So yes by the time they were at primary it was already very well ingrained about what boys should do and what girls should do.

DS has never been interested in football. This in itself has led to various assumptions and exclusions. His mates aren't into football either. One likes pink and purple. Various parents started assuming he's probably going to be gay - at age 7. He might be but the assumptions at age 7?! On the basis that he doesn't conform to shitty stereotypes?

I lived in London until DS was 3. I absolutely spent upwards of 3/4 hours a day in parks and other outside spaces. Don't all parents ?

@RedToothBrush yes! One of my sons is a ballet dancer. Bullying started in reception. Mums in reception asked me if i thought he was gay - a 4 year old child!!!! What us wrong with sone people!
Girls fet send to school in dresses, and shoes that are unsuitable for running. Boys wear trainers and sturdy trousers/short.
Girls get rewarded for sitting on their buns, boys for being toxic.
Ironically , my ballet dancing son is much stronger, agile and faster than any of the football/rugby crowd, so he occasionally plays a fixture to help his school win a tournament

@Neurodiversitydoctor They absolutely do not! Look at the parks. By the time DSs are 6, they are going home for their technology fix.

Yes I believe it's to do with nurture because when we look at the biological differences they are minimal and pretty much solely focused around how we reproduce.

The reason more women nurse for example is because we are raised to believe we are more 'caring' and 'nurturing'

I was talking about the pre-school years to be fair. But yes at weekends absolutely football matches, swimming lessons and hours of my life spent on astroturf, freezing touchlines and smelly sports halls isn't this just normal for an active child ?

I completely disagree with you, the Y chromosone and actually the absence of the 2nd X affects every single cell in the body from conception onwards, in NICU baby boys and girls respond differently and have different outcomes from the same treatments. Anyone claiming male puberty isn't a massive physiological and neurological event is being wilfully blind.

@Neurodiversitydoctordisagree with me all you like I couldn't care less. We won't ever know unless people start actually raising boys and girls the same and treating them the same and we are sooo far off that.