Harvey Howard is the owner of My Gym Children’s Fitness Center in Cherry Hill, NJ. He is a certified special education teacher, elementary teacher, guidance counselor, and student assistance professional located in New Jersey. Here he discusses the differences between girls and boys when it comes to education.
Obviously, any differences mentioned are very generalized differences, because when it comes to playtime and education, girls are boys are more similar than they are different. However, there are some noticeable differences in the boys and girls that we see here at My Gym, no matter the age.
Awareness
Usually, girls seem to be much more aware of each other than the boys. While the girls in the My Gym classes are communicating with each other and playing, the boys might be crashing into each other and throwing things at each other. So it is that awareness, both spatially and of the other children in the same room, that we notice at an early age in girls that we do not see in boys until they get a little older.
Activities
Here at My Gym, we see that girls who are 4 to 6 years old are much more into the gymnastics apparatuses than the boys. While the girls are having fun checking out the various apparatuses—bars, beam, etc.—the boys will be throwing things at each other and crashing into each other. They have the most fun doing this. In general, when it comes to boys at this young age, they are much more interested in making physical contact with each other than the girls are. Of course, once again that is very generalized.
Cooperation
Young boys tend to have a mentality of wanting to throw things, crash into each other and get knocked down. None of that is cooperative in the least; forming alliances and cooperating with fellow children is not something young boys are focused on, for the most part. For a lot of girls, however, even at a young age, they are interested in exploring themselves and forming cooperative relationships with others. Whereas the boys are most interested in winning a certain competition or becoming top dog, the girls just aren’t worried about doing that at this early age.
We actually notice that when girls of different ages are put together in classes, the older girls will group themselves together with the younger kids and act in a nurturing way—almost as a mothering figure. They do this from an early age, so this isn’t something that just develops later on. Meanwhile, the boys do not seem to be interested in this type of activity at all. Here at My Gym, they are simply the most interested and focused on playing around, unlike so many of the girls here. You can see this play out in other areas of education as well, since young girls and boys tend to behave very differently in the elementary classroom.
