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.

You're speaking about a few female pro footballers. Yes ive heard Beth Meade and others say that too.

I am talking about the daily life of most primary school kids where none of the boys or girls are going to go on to a career in football. They just want to be able to have a structured game of it at lunch time. This is where the girls would constantly disrupt the games and under the guise of "joining in". They thought it was funny and enjoyed the attention from the boys when they did it. Except when they would wind someone up who already had impulse issues and they would hurt them.

This is why it came to a head. No she shouldn't have been hit but why did she think it was okay to continually mess up the game? Who has told her that's cute? Why has this been allowed to go on for so long?

If it wouldn't be okay for Billy to come and smash your bracelet making table to bits and chuck all the bits everywhere, it's not okay for you to insist that you are included in football only to be disruptive.

I think so much of this is down to early socialisation. If you expect little girls to sit quietly and be agreeable, you will correct them more often for displaying boisterous behaviour. If you encourage little boys to play to win, correct them less often for playing rough, and spend less time completing calm activities with them, of course they will be more boisterous overall.

School should give all children the opportunity to run, jump, climb and play. And it should show all children how to work calmly when the situation calls for it.

My daughter had a group of mixed sex friends at primary who gave each other piggy back rides, swung each other round by the hands, played wheelbarrow, tag, and just generally hugged/climbed on each other/sprawled out on the grass together a lot. So they had lots of active physical contact, but it wasn't rough. I feel like roughness isn't a necessity in (physical) play.

Bit of a leap, did I even mention professional footballers?? But just to clarify I’m not talking about Beth Meade etc

I’m talking about Susie and Priya and Jessica that I meet at various schools I attend.

The fact is much of society is sexist and this affects boys too and how (many of them) treat and regard women/girls in sport.

We see this played out on the playgrounds with boys being over aggressive tackling girls or just plain excluding them from football

Again these are girls who are just as passionate and just as serious if not more about football that are being treated like this, and I’m not necessarily saying the example you saw in that one school didn’t happen.

However the other situation I am describing which is driven by sexism happens a LOT and I say this as someone who has been in multiple schools across the years.

Lots of schools now have equipment to encourage safe physical play (like trim trails or tyres etc) Many have also invested in Opal play type schemes. Our lunch times have so many different activities available or the option for free play. But unfortunately we still be have a core group who try to play in unsafe games and it results in fighting! This then pull staff away from activities many other are enjoying (cricket, mini-hockey, den building) to sort out the fights!

As a teacher, I completely agree re more outdoor time. The curriculum is far too restrictive. However, what I am finding is that we get SO many parents
complaining about such minor things.

E.g, little Johnny is bumped into during a game of tag, and there is a minor argument. Parent then complains to the school that there was no immediate phone call about this, despite the fact that Johnny is absolutely fine. Yes, banning tag is ridiculous, and my school hasn’t done that, but I can see schools being driven to it by constant parental complaints. It is a huge problem, and I don’t know what the answer is.

I’m not saying ban contact but how do young children find it hard to know their boundaries. Some children will know they can have a little nudge when playing and it’s fine, others see that as a red light to smack someone ‘well he did it first’. I don’t see robotic play in children, I see they have a lot of fun and adults step in when it’s going too far.

That’s also my experience and I should know as I’m often on the pitch supervising or even playing myself. We had to do girls only sessions to give them the opportunity to play/learn. The boys complained.

I think it would be interesting to see if girls and boys were raised identically just how much difference, if any, there is. Girls are taught from the get go to sit quietly, they are generally given ‘girl’ toys like dolls, boys on the other hand are more likely to be given cars/trucks/building blocks. By the time they get to 2/3 this stereotyping is embedded. I also think parents are more likely to encourage rougher more physical with boys from a young age. Regardless this is what society expects to see hence the narrative of boys needing outside space, room to exercise. Frankly I suspect girls need this to but it is very vocalised about boys needing it, by the time they get to school boys already take more space and push girls out, hence the boys take over the space playing football etc.

So I’m not convinced how much of this is nature vs nurture. Surely children need to understand that there’s a time and a place, the classroom isn’t for running around.

I was being sarcastic

teachers are wasting so much time reporting to parents events because the recipient child didn't know play was approaching

Are they?
Parents tend to want to know what happened when their child has been hurt.

What on earth do you mean by 'the child didn't know play was approaching'? Children know when it's play time and are used to playing. It's as if you are describing schools in an alternate universe tbh.

The physical environment available is important too-most schools don’t have much space. And it’s very easy for it all to be taken over by football…

Football is a physical game. No everyone can't all stand back while Emily has a free kick at the ball in any direction. If Emily wants to be part of the team and is able to work out how to be beneficial to her teammates, then she will be included. Kids are often okay with just seeing the intention to do the right thing, even if you cannot execute it.

But its more like Emily running around.giggling trying to get near the.boys and grab the ball from them. You try and encourage Emily to find space, stop following the ball, and generally be a teammate but for whatever reason, she blanks that out, keeps giggling and trying to chase Billy, who can't stand her and just wants to play football.

Listen I don't blame Emily. Emily has been socialised to think this is what girls do. Girls shouldn't be skilled at sports and her lack of skill elaves her feeling vulnerable hence the deflection. No different to the class clown with the literacy issues.

The.majorty of women who play football today were playing with boys as a child. Yes the boys could be sexist, but they were included because they had the skill to compete with them and took it seriously.

When DD was little she had a male friend she spent a lot of time with. They’d often run around and play rough and tumble. His mum would often interfere with stuff like “no darling , you need to be gentle with her “, “you need to remember she’s delicate , like a pretty flower”, “you can’t play with her like you do with Johnny”. I told her to back off and that DD could hold her own . He also loved coming to our house as we also had “girl” toys (on top of bikes, balls , trampoline, cars, trains, diggers etc) and he had been banned from having them after the age of 2. He loved DD’s dolls house and her toy pram.

Yep! This is one reason why I believe all girls schools are better for girls.

I see the problem but “no contact” cannot be the solution. Viz:

The problem with “chatting” is that one child’s chatting is another child’s “being derided”. We can’t police all conversations at scale,
so the only answer is “no talking” at school.

I went to a girls'secondary school. Don't even mind linking it right here. It has no religious affiliations. Not once in 5 years did I ever see a girl get out a ball at lunch time. Fags? Yes. Balls? Never.

I now know one of the sports coaches at said school. I know that she runs practice for her main team at lunchtimes and people attend that, but I really doubt any girls are doing anything physical during break times. They arent having a game of headers and vollleys or a basketball scrimmage. They've probably stopped a lot of the smoking though!

You’re making up shit (sorry being sarcastic) , to justify your narrative.

Once again, girls outperform boys in most countries regardless of how the system is set up. Scandinavian countries are given as the gold standard, it happens there too. It happens in countries where schools are very sport focused as well. How does that work with your explanation that it’s a (UK)systemic issue?

Why does everything have to be about what boys want and need though? Just because girls are a bit better at conforming to social norms doesn’t mean that they don’t struggle, they just struggle differently.

I honestly believe that all children need more movement, curiosity and exploration in their school day.
it makes me so sad, in EYFS we see indoor/outdoor provision, tyres, trees, mud kitchens, sandpits etc then as soon as they hit year 1 that all disappears and out come the hard plastic chairs, long spells sitting cross legged on the floor, mind numbing phonics sessions and writing expectations that completely disregard actual age-development levels.

If I ruled the (educational world) the provision we see in EYFS would stay throughout primary school and then at the end of primary, children could choose to follow either a practical or a more academic route.

but can we please stop the narrative that TEACHERS are the ones doing this?

The teachers are the ones exhausting themselves trying to make a crap system slightly better for their pupils.

I think it’s nice when schools prioritise being outside. I think it’s even better when parents do. I have a boy and a girl and they’re both super high energy and need a lot
of activity so I prioritise that for weekends and after school.

I am not sure exactly what you’re suggesting - play fighting to be encouraged in school? That will be very problematic for all the reasons others have said. I don’t make a big fuss when my kids get hurt - active kids get injuries. But I’d have a huge problem if I found out they were encouraged to wrestle and punch each other during the school day. That only leads to injuries and upset. My kids can do all that at home. I think a far greater problem is the lack of unstructured play opportunities outside of school.

OP - maybe I'm jumping to conclusions, but you seem to be new to MN and are only on two threads, both of which you started today. One is promoting a somewhat traditional attitude to boys' behaviour. The other seems like it might be promoting traditional womanly behaviours. It all sounds a bit sexist to me tbh.

100 percent there is a "play gap" between kids because simply some kids don't go outside and play at all, causing so many problems.

I think we have to see children’s lives as a whole, rather than expecting all needs / wants to be met entirely within school.

A child can walk / run / scoot / cycle to school; go to the park / hills / fields straight after school; attend structured or unstructured active hobby clubs (Scouting, tag rugby, martial arts); go swimming weekly; bounce on the trampoline or climb / run / dig / tumble in the garden; playfight with adults in the home or on playdates; spend weekends getting wet / muddy / tired at parks or fields or on walks or in sports events etc etc

In this wider context, playtimes at school play a part but not the only part, and the reasonable constraints inherent in managing communal, crowded environment safely are understandable.

Where there is no physical play and interaction outside school, it is unreasonable to expect that schools must meet the whole need all children have for exercise and movement.

I know two women who are hairdressers who originally wanted to be car mechanics. (I mentioned to my hairdresser that I had a friend at school who was a hairdresser but had originally wanted to be a car mechanic and she said "So did I!"
They were put off by it being so male dominated. I guess they are people who wanted to work with their hands but ended up in a more traditional career for their sex.
Hopefully that will change in future. One is in her 50s.

The majority of hairdressers in our town are male.