Can anyone suggest why girls at 6 change their view of girls' ability to be brilliant?

[Italiangreyhound]

Can anyone suggest why girls at 6 change their view of girls' ability to be brilliant?

Just that?

What's the cause?

www.theguardian.com/education/2017/jan/26/girls-believe-brilliance-is-a-male-trait-research-into-gender-stereotypes-shows

There was an interview on the BBC breakfast news this morning promoting a show called "the secret lives of five year olds." It made me so angry, the little boys were saying derogatory things, "girls can't do science" and ridiculing their running. I HOPE I am wrong, but the psychologist (who was weirdly confident in her ability to predict personality development) seemed to be celebrating the gender stereotypes. No to that, we shouldn't be celebrating and confirming these. These ideas are social, and the psychologist was saying that kids changed their behaviour to match their peer's expectations. So if girls are told they can't, they won't. If I caught my boy or girl saying that boys or girls can't do X because...I would try to teach them that view was horribly inaccurate.

There was one girl who when told she couldn't do science by the boy replied "well I extracted the DNA from a banana once". Her parents should be proud.

Insidious sexism can come from anywhere and anyone.
Some teachers, some parents, other children, you name it, I've seen it and heard it.
My DD is almost 9 and has always played with boys and girls equally. There are still (very few) boys or girls left in her year, who will even bother to have opposite gender friends.

I noticed this change around year 1, at our school: boys and girls polarising towards their gender only.
Made me sad.
I wondered why it was, then realised that in many families, the parents themselves seem to encourage it. princess/fairy/cupcake parties, football /Star Wars parties etc, just set the scene even more. Most girls (or boys) in our school rarely, if ever, have a play date with the opposite gender, for example.
If these children are not encouraged to hang out with both genders, then it can't help the gender gap that inevitably ensues.

A lot of it is down to socialisation, I agree. Are there any differences in physical ways though that might make a difference? For example, differences in hormones?

But WE ARE DIFFERENT!!!!!!!! FGS. If we weren't we'd both have the babies. As much as we'd like to think it isn't innate, it is.

But WE ARE DIFFERENT!!!!!!!! FGS. If we weren't we'd both have the babies.

Being physically different doesn't mean interests, colours or tastes in sports are hard-wired by sex.
My niece was one of the best footballers in her year. She still had a baby.

Seachangeshell "Interestingly, there's actually a big concern in education at the moment (and there has been for years), that boys don't do as well at school as girls. This is a national trend. I'm involved in an action group at school to try to improve our boys' attainment." I am not sure that this is anything new, is it? There have been concerns over boys in education fro years. Yet boys usually end up with the better paid higher profile jobs, don't they? So it isn't really an issue for boys necessarily.

ppeatfruit I am not sure it is necessarily surprising that girls might gravitate towards baby dolls or teddies/soft toy animals (although my daughter never liked Barbie) because they mostly see mums with babies and not dads. That is changing.

Xenophile "...there's research that suggests that that kind of differentiation even before babies are born. That women who believe they are pregnant with boys report them to be more active than women who are pregnant with girls."

I've heard this before and looked for it. I cannot find it very easily, I found something a bit similar but not what people appeared to be talking about.

Does anyone know who did the study or where it appeared, please?

I'd say school has a big effect too. DS a few weeks after starting school randomly said he couldn't be my friend anymore because I was a girl, we discussed it and by the end of the day he was saying it's a very silly thing to tell people but he is very very easy to persuade, and his confidence is poor, we're working hard to improve his self esteem and we sadly had to stop his friendship with his only girl friend because she turned out out to be quite a bully.

The only thing parents can do is encourage their kids to mix but accept that to an extent children love the familiar and naturally gravitate towards their own sex. They have football/rugby parties, princess/knights, superheroes seems to be a particularly popular one at his school but they're whole class do's and pretty much everyone attends, he does rugby club which has a few girls but football sadly only ever has boys.

There are always many exceptions but I am speaking generally. More boys find school hard than girls. It's not the influence of their parents. I was a teacher and no one forces the boys to prefer 'rushing about'. It's innate.

ppeatfruit "But WE ARE DIFFERENT!!!!!!!! FGS. If we weren't we'd both have the babies. As much as we'd like to think it isn't innate, it is."

Of course we are different, biologically different. It is how our species procreates. How is that relevant to children? Primary-aged children won't be procreating for another decade at least.

KateAdiesEarrings has given a perfect example, girls might like football, or they may not. But there is nothing innately boyish about playing football, you don't need to use your own balls to play it!

ppeatfruit "There are always many exceptions but I am speaking generally. More boys find school hard than girls. It's not the influence of their parents. I was a teacher and no one forces the boys to prefer 'rushing about'. It's innate."

I am not sure how you can know that. I do wonder if being more active is as a result to some extent of testosterone, but you have not offered any evidence of why you think there are these innate differences. If you look at a big group of preschoolers can you notice the boys moving more than the girls? Wriggling babies, girls sitting more still? I'd guess no.

So somewhere between the wriggling baby and the 6 year old girls learn to sit still more some girls and boys do not.

As far as finding school harder what does that mean. Taking up more of teachers time, getting in fights and disagreements, not being able to do the work?

My dd is very dyslexic and found primary a nightmare, she loves to get dirty, climb trees, ride her bike and do all that. My son is much less active and as he is not dyslexic he finds school much easier than dd ever has.

I think sitting still for almost 5 hours a day is not normal for any child, so some will not flourish in that environment.

Yes, boys not doing as well at school as girls is not new, it is an ongoing problem that needs to be tackled.
There is a pay gap and something needs to be done about it. However the boys failing at school and dropping out are not the ones going on to earn all the money. And some of them play truant from school and get involved in crime, so it matters to all of us. Those boys matter to me because I want them to have a good life and enjoy their schooling. I want them to feel good about themselves and be happy. I'm thinking about individual boys at my school who are underachieving and who I care about. The girls matter equally, of course.

dd1 and dd2 Have innate cleverness and had no trouble succeeding at school or uni. With little 'hard work'.

So did I, but then I struggled when I entered the world outside school and just being really clever was no longer enough, because I had never learned to buckle down. I'm definitely a believer in the "growth mindset" approach that both genders should learn that by working hard, they can get better at anything rather than talent/brains being innate, and have lived the experience of how being labelled "clever" made me reluctant to risk doing anything I might not be good at, lest I be exposed as not really clever at all.

On the gender issue, the research is pretty clear, really. As soon as we know (or think we know) that a child is male or female, we change our response to them in a hundred subtle ways, most of which we're completely unconscious of. When we're told a baby girl is actually a boy, we treat her and respond to her like a boy, so we're responding to our expectation and not to the baby's actual behaviour. Plus there's a whole culture relentlessly sending messages about what boys do and what girls do and the rigid line between the two. Encouraging your son to play with dolls is probably not going to be enough to override all of that, especially since your expectations of him, despite your best efforts, will already have been unconsciously shaped by your own ideas about gender.

I have a DD who prior to starting preschool had female role models round her who don't conform to the gender stereotypes and generally work in male dominated fields. Since starting preschool the pink has crept in, she came home in tears once saying she couldn't run because she's a girl. We now have the boys and girls toys. I try to tell her that boys and girls can be and do anything they want. I feel like I'm fighting a losing battle. She is the youngest by a fair bit and things seem to have deteriorated badly with regards to gender stereotypes since her sisters were this age.

Seachangeshell it's great you care about the boys and the girls.

My experience is that some of the girls will be equally under achieving but they will not also be shouting in class, fighting and causing mayhem and getting the teachers attention and time.

It's fine to help the boys, and it's right for them to be helped. But girls can be underachieving too, I think it is just less noticeable because the teacher is not as alerted to this by behavioral difficulties at the same time.

In my dds class there were handful of kids really not achieving well, it was a mix of girls and boys. It was not very obvious that the majority of the class who were under achieving were boys. If anything, it was more girls who were less able.

Yes, that is one class. I know. Can you share a link to the degree of the problem of boys underachieving?

It's good you are a teacher who cares. I have a son and a daughter and would want both to have equal access to good teaching.

Does anyone know who did the study or where it appeared, please?

It's Barbara Rothman 1988. There's more in Melissa Hines: Brain Gender, where she interestingly says that 10 studies might be done on innate brain gender differences, 9 of which will show there is no difference, and 1 will show there is, but that it is invariably the 1 showing difference that gets the attention.

sarahnova69 "Plus there's a whole culture relentlessly sending messages about what boys do and what girls do and the rigid line between the two. Encouraging your son to play with dolls is probably not going to be enough to override all of that, especially since your expectations of him, despite your best efforts, will already have been unconsciously shaped by your own ideas about gender."

So true. Even as a feminist I have ingested ideas about males and females from my own parents, who were born in the late 1920s/early 1930s, so some of my ideas are kind of from 'The Depression' era, how depressing!

It reminds me of a programme I saw about healthy eating and kids. Because messages about healthy eating are presented to kids by parents and at school, we hope to get that message across with information and diagrams of plates full of healthy food!

But messages about unhealthy snack food or junk foods are presented by television, in music, and generally presented with cartoons, action, stories, colours, 'fun' etc; also in playgrounds at McDonalds; also from ice cream vans that play songs and feature cartoon characters on the sides of the van; or perhaps through toys connected to films connected to fast food; and these messages are bombarding kids a lot of the time.

So then of all those messages, which will win out!

Unless we can present our ideas on healthy eating with cartoons and fun, and a lot of the time, then we can't really compete with messages about unhealthy food!

I think it is similar with sexual stereotypes! We can tell boys it is OK to play with dolls etc and we can tell girls it is OK to like football. But if boys and girls see mums tending babies, and other girls with dolls, and see men playing football on telly, then the ideas of who does what can be quite rooted in our culture.

I can't remember the last time I saw a televised women's football match even being advertised, or in fact anything much to do with women in sport except the Taekwando champion, Jade Jones.

and I just Googled 'Taekwando champion' and the first thing up was "List of World Championships medalists in taekwondo (men) - Wikipedia".

There's also a great book by Cordelia Fine, Delusions of Gender, where she argues that a lot of neuroscience studies which claim to show differences between 'male' and 'female' brains have the maths on them done completely wrong.

(I think, it's ages since I read it, but it's a great book on this topic anyway.)

Xenophile I meant the bit that specifically said that mothers talked differently to babies they perceived to be female?

And thanks for the place to look but I can't find what I am looking for!

I don't think anyone is denying there's a difference between boys and girls. I should imagine it's a lot to do with hormones, not brain structure differences.

Girls can't possibly like playing princess or pink or tea sets as an innate charactistic. None of that existed pre-history. They may well identify with their mother, as the person closest to them, and mimic her behaviour. But superficial choices can't possibly be innate as they are entirely socially imposed.

Maybe hormones like testosterone are related to strength, which is displayed through physical activity. Hence boys rushing around.

Although, when I was a kid the physical games were about the only way we spent our leisure time. Outside. On bikes, playing British bulldog, 4040, etc. No-one suggested the girls go inside and play with dolls. We could have of course, but wouldn't have dreamt of it.

www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2014/aug/21/gcse-results-2014-biggest-gap-11-boys-and-girls-a-c-pass-rate?client=safari
This article shows the gap in achievement and puts it down to coursework being more suited to girls, but I think there's a lot more to it than that.
The underachieving boys are quite often ones who get into trouble and are turned off school. 9 times out of 10 the child standing outside the head teacher's office is a boy.
As educators it's our job to identify those underachieving, whether they're boys or girls. It just makes me sad when I see certain boys displaying really antisocial behaviour and getting into loads of trouble with their main class teacher ( a man, as it happens) and then coming into my Literacy lesson and responding really well to a bit of praise and understanding. Boys often get labelled as being naughty so they live up to the label.

Here is a 1998 meta analysis on parents' gender-typed interaction I dug up in a quick Google Scholar search.

psycnet.apa.org/journals/dev/34/1/3/

datun yes I agree about the hormone thing.
I think hormones can cause some differences, but that these are amplified by socialisation.

The interesting thing about my two boys is that although the eldest wouldn't play with dolls or teddies when very young, my youngest DS who's two does! He likes a wider variety of toys than my eldest.

Teddies are the boys' version of dolls. Most of them are very fond of their teddies. But wouldn't dream of playing with a Barbie. But only because it is perceived as girly.

I know this is just an anecdote, but my youngest loved his Barbie (given to him by my mother, so as far as he was concerned it wasn't particularly gendered). He came home from school one day and reluctantly asked me if it was girly. Despite my explanations, he never played with it again.

Still loved his teddies though.