Boys and girls are different. That's a statement that will never be discussed here.
But how different are they? According to physician, psychologist, and best-selling author Dr. Leonard Sachs, they are very different and respond very differently to almost everything, including disciplinary methods, parenting styles, and even educational environments. .
Dr. Sacks says allie beth stuckey The cognitive differences between boys and girls can actually be seen using in-utero brain imaging.
These prenatal scans confirm what has long been known about boys and girls: Boys grow much more slowly than girls.
In fact, the average 18-month-old boy has a vocabulary of 40 words, while a comparable girl has a vocabulary of 90 words.
It's no wonder, then, that boys tend to have a harder time than girls in the modern school system, especially in the early grades.
But that wasn't always the case, Dr. Sacks says. Back in the 1980s, kindergarten was all about “ducks, ducks, geese, songs, rounds, arts and crafts, field trips to the park, playing in the pond, chasing tadpoles.”
But things changed in the 1990s, when there was a sudden push for kindergarteners to learn “reading, writing, and arithmetic.” Suddenly kindergarten felt like first grade.
Sachs says this poses a major challenge for boys because “the language cortex of a five-year-old boy's brain” is equivalent to that of a “three-year-old girl.”
Therefore, “it's not developmentally appropriate to expect a 5-year-old boy to sit down for 45 minutes and learn about phonics and diphthongs,” he explains. “As a result, many five-year-old boys fail the school and decide that they are stupid and hate school.”
This attitude of defeat stays with them as they move through the grades and taints their overall academic experience.
“Researchers have found that once these attitudes are formed, they are global, stable, and not contingent.”
Dr. Sachs explains that global means “not just believing that you're stupid in reading and writing, but believing that you're stupid in all areas.'' Stable means that “if you tracked him down when he was in 10th grade, he still believes he's stupid and that his teachers don't like him.” Non-contingent means: “He thinks there's nothing he can do about it and there's nothing you can do about it.”
More than 20 years ago, Dr. Sacks wrote a paper advising parents to keep their 5-year-old boys out of kindergarten and wait until they were 6.
“I still think it’s a good idea. [today]” he says.
I'd like to hear more of Dr. Sacks' parenting advice. social mediadiscipline, and navigating culture in the episode above.
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