Contents
A survey of educators and teachers regarding the individual characteristics of the behavioral characteristics of children makes it possible to consider that boys are usually more excitable, irritable, restless, impatient, unrestrained, intolerant, unsure of themselves and even more aggressive than girls. Apparently, in most cases this is true. However, it must be borne in mind that our vision of a child does not always objectively reflect what it really is.
We compared the characteristics given to the same child by parents (almost exclusively mothers, not fathers) and caregivers (also women). To our surprise, the discrepancies were quite significant and different for boys and girls.
So, parents often consider boys to be unemotional when educators note their increased emotionality. At the same time, when assessing the emotionality of girls, the characteristics of both mothers and caregivers coincide. But parents often consider girls to be anxious when neither the teacher nor the psychologist notes anxiety in them. In boys, there are only the opposite cases, when the psychologist says that the boy is very anxious, and the parents declare with full confidence that such a quality is not characteristic of their son.
This means that parents tend to somewhat exaggerate the emotionality of their daughters, apparently because it is manifested in their speech and is more obvious, and not to notice the emotional experiences of their sons. I.e parents usually understand the inner world of boys worse. Even such seemingly obvious behavioral traits that we usually associate with the concepts of a “fast” or “slow” child are evaluated differently by parents and educators. If in relation to girls they are unambiguous, then boys in the eyes of their parents are more often unnecessarily slow, although educators consider them fast. True, sometimes, on the contrary, it is the educators who complain about the slowness of the boys, and their parents believe that their sons are very mobile and fast. That is, here, too, the disagreements concern almost exclusively boys.
This leads us to think about some significant differences in the organization, in the regulation of the motor and emotional spheres of boys and girls. A person’s brain organizes and regulates any activity of a person. You can study the features of the brain using objective neuropsychological tests and direct recording of the bioelectrical activity of the brain during various activities.
First, we conducted a neuropsychological study, which consisted in the fact that the child — at the same time to each eye separately — was presented with a picture, but the pictures were different, and the child did not know this. This test is called dioptic viewing. Usually the children at the same time said that they see only one picture, and called the right one or the left one. Let us now leave the question of the specifics of the processing of incoming information by the left and right hemispheres of the brain and focus our attention on the child’s perception of emotionally colored information.
In a number of other pictures, we showed a smiling and sad face, and if the right eye saw a smiling face, then the left eye saw a sad face. After some time, the pictures were swapped, and positive information entered the left eye, and negative information entered the right eye. If you bring all the results for six-year-olds together, it turns out that both boys and girls, regardless of which eye is shown which picture, are more likely to say that they see a smiling face. They see a sad face less often; the eye sees something, the brain receives information about what has been seen, but it is not allowed into consciousness.
And so our children went to the first grade. This is a colossal nervous burden on their psyche. The whole habitual way of life is changing, the external environment in which the child lives is changing, and in response to this, his brain begins to work differently. At the end of the first grade, we did the same study again with the same and new children. In girls, the picture was preserved almost completely and practically did not differ in different classes. But for the boys, this year did not pass without a trace: they began to say more often that they see a sad face. That is, negative information began to break into consciousness, and when perceiving both positive and negative, the brain began to choose the negative more often, which is usually not typical of children’s (and maybe even adults’) perception.
Importantly, the results of the brain’s analysis of positive and negative influences were very dependent on the personality of the teacher who worked with them. The teacher of an authoritarian type (demanding unconditional obedience, emphasis on following strict rules, exclusion of subtle spiritual contacts even with the outward appearance of a benevolent attitude: “I said — you did”) has such an increase in the brain’s mood to accept unpleasant, causing negative experiences, and ignoring the positive, the emotionally positive side of the perceived world is expressed most strongly.
In those classes where the teacher preferred a democratic type of education (the desire to achieve the desired behavior not through pressure by his authority, not through the requirement of submission, but through the desire to understand the inner world of the child, the ability to hear and understand the essence of his difficulties), children, but first of all the boys were more fortunate, they retained the quality inherent in childhood: to see the world as kind and joyful. And specifically in our case, the boys continued, as before school, to see a smiling face more often and less often a sad one.
Recording the brain biocurrents of children, we also learned a lot about how boys and girls perceive and analyze pleasant and unpleasant influences. We gave children of different ages to feel various objects, and the child did not see them, but touched what was hidden in the box. Some of the objects were pleasant to the touch: soft, fluffy, while others were unpleasant — prickly or rough. It is known that babies are very fond of soft fluffy things, they play with plush, fleecy toys with pleasure or touch their mother’s jacket made of soft wool. But they hate prickly clothes, rough, prickly objects are usually bypassed.
In children, starting from the age of four, we found differences in brain activity during the perception of pleasant and unpleasant. In girls, brain activity at the moment when they touched a furry object was much higher than in boys. But when the object was unpleasant to the touch, the brains of the boys showed great activity. Three-year-olds did not have such a pronounced reaction: the level of inclusion of the higher parts of the cerebral cortex in the perception and analysis of information did not depend on the sex of the child, nor on what emotional sign she wore (Fig. 3). True, more subtle studies show that even in such babies, different brain structures are included in this activity differently.
If we follow how the activity of the brain changes over the course of long-term activity, which is of an emotional nature, then surprises await us here too. Preschool children watched and listened to the fairy tale «Little Red Riding Hood». From time to time the action was interrupted and the children were allowed to feel, among others, an object that was invisible to them, pleasant to the touch (it was a fox’s foot from an old collar, covered with soft wool). Once they did this before the tragic events of the fairy tale, and the adult called the object: «this is a paw.» Another time, the tale was interrupted after the wolf rushed at Little Red Riding Hood (but had not yet had time to eat it) — the children again felt the same paw, but the adult suddenly told them: «This is the wolf’s paw.»
Of course, this evoked unpleasant emotions in most children: some froze, others threw the object, their eyes widened, vegetative reactions showed the presence of emotions. Then the fairy tale was shown again, and when the wolf rushed at Little Red Riding Hood, they again let the same object be felt. Children, of course, immediately recognized him. The adult said again: «this is the paw of the wolf.»
But not all children experienced negative emotions. Some rare children (and these were girls) smiled when they recognized the object, and joyfully reported that they thought it was a wolf’s paw. For them, it was more important not what happened in the fairy tale, but whether they guessed what kind of object the adult had given them. The main thing for them is to establish contact with an adult, to correctly complete the task given by the adult, and not to worry about Little Red Riding Hood. As soon as the adult got involved in the activity — he began to give some tasks, in this case, to feel the object — the attitude of these girls changed and completely switched to contact with the adult. One might think that they also watched the fairy tale now in order to be able to remember everything and, if necessary, answer questions. The boys, however, like many girls, watched the fairy tale, almost not paying attention to the adult until he interrupted them from the action of the fairy tale to perform some tasks, but even then they still lived in a fairy tale.
What was going on in their minds at that time?
In girls, even before the fairy tale was shown, as soon as work with an adult (feeling different objects) began, the level of bioelectrical activity of the brain increased and remained high all the time while the girl watched the fairy tale and felt the objects.
Boys have a different picture. When they simply feel the object, only those centers are involved that are directly involved in the regulation of this particular activity, and the overall brain activity is low. After the paw turns out to be a wolf’s paw, activity rises and then falls again. When the boy himself recognizes the object (wolf’s paw), the activity rises again and falls again, not even rising at the words of an adult («this is a wolf’s paw»). Moreover, the activity is very selective: the auditory and motor centers of the speech hemisphere are turned on, as well as the frontal structures that program the child’s subsequent actions and predict the result.
You can think that the boys comprehend the situation and prepare a way out of it. In girls, the entire brain is activated: the visual, auditory, motor cortex, and associative structures of both hemispheres.
So, boys briefly, but vividly and selectively react to an emotional factor, while in girls in a situation of activity that evokes emotions, general activity sharply increases, and the emotional tone of the cerebral cortex increases. The brain of the girls is, as it were, preparing to respond to any trouble, keeping all the structures of the brain in a state of readiness in order to respond at any second to the impact that came from any direction. Apparently, this achieves the maximum focus of the female body on survival. Men, on the other hand, usually quickly relieve emotional stress and switch to productive activities instead of experiences.
Adults should take into account the peculiarities of the emotional sphere of boys. It is difficult for mothers, educators and teachers to understand this side of a boy’s life — they themselves are different. So it turns out that the mother (or the teacher) scolds the boy for a long time, pumping up emotions, and gets angry because he does not worry with her, but, as it were, remains indifferent to her words. No, he is not indifferent. It’s just that he already gave a peak of emotional activity, reacted in the first minutes of the conversation, but, unlike his mother (and sister or classmate), he cannot hold emotional stress for a long time, he is not adapted to this and, in order not to break down, he simply turned off the auditory canal , and the information does not reach his consciousness. He no longer hears you. Your educational efforts are wasted. Stop. Limit the length of the notation, but make it more capacious in meaning, because The boy’s brain is very selective in responding to emotional stimuli. If your whole speech comes down to two words: “you are bad,” then what do you expect from a boy? He is disoriented. Explain the situation to him very briefly and very specifically — what are you unhappy with.
So, we have come to an important conclusion: a boy and a girl are two different worlds. Very often we misunderstand what is behind their actions, which means we react to them incorrectly. If you are already raising a glorious daughter, and you have a son, know that in many ways you will have to start from scratch and your experience in raising a daughter will sometimes not only not help you, but even interfere. The same thing will happen if after a son you have a long-awaited daughter, although there are usually less difficulties here.
A boy and a girl should never be raised in the same way. They look and see in different ways, listen and hear, speak and remain silent in different ways, feel and experience. We will try to understand and accept our boys and girls as they are, as different and beautiful in their own way as nature has created them. But whether it will be possible to preserve, reveal, develop these inclinations, not damage, not break — depends only on you and me.
Video from Yana Shchastya: interview with professor of psychology N.I. Kozlov
Topics of conversation: What kind of woman do you need to be in order to successfully marry? How many times do men get married? Why are there so few normal men? Childfree. Parenting. What is love? A story that couldn’t be better. Paying for the opportunity to be close to a beautiful woman.