Raising a boy, raising a girl

Let’s ask ourselves a question: if boys have so many different deviations, if there are many losers and difficult-to-educate among them, then why are almost all outstanding scientists, artists, writers, doctors, composers, designers men? And why did so many great people do poorly in school? Probably, among the poor boys there are many who will never be able to realize what nature has given them. Why?

Apparently because we don’t know how to teach boys. The teaching strategy in both kindergarten and school is most often designed for girls. Both girls and boys are taught more often by women: at home — mother and grandmother, in kindergarten — a teacher (“a mustachioed nanny” is, unfortunately, an unrealizable dream almost everywhere), in elementary school — a teacher, and only in middle and high schools occasional male subject teachers appear. Isn’t it too late? Boys and girls have already turned into boys and girls, and all the hidden preparatory work for this difficult transformation has taken place without the participation of men. Can a woman raise a real man? Unlikely. Do you know why? She has a different type of brain and a different type of thinking.

Let’s imagine the drawings of children, because features of thinking are clearly manifested precisely in children’s drawings. Here the children drew on the theme of «space». Before us is one of the drawings. Here is a rocket: all nozzles and nozzles are carefully drawn, next to it is an astronaut. He stands with his back, but there are many different sensors on his back. Without a doubt, this is a drawing of a boy. And here is another drawing: the rocket is drawn schematically, next to it is the astronaut — with his face, and on the face and eyes with cilia, and cheeks, and lips — everything is carefully drawn. This, of course, was drawn by a girl. Generally boys often draw equipment (tanks, cars, planes…), their drawings are filled with action, movement, everything moves around, runs, makes noise. And girls draw people (most often princesses), including themselves.

Let’s compare the real drawings of the children of the preparatory group of the kindergarten: a boy and a girl. The topic is the same “after the snowfall”. All the boys in the group, except for one, drew harvesting equipment, and the girls drew themselves jumping over snowdrifts.

A typical drawing by a boy of this age on the theme «after a snowfall».

Something like this looks like drawings of girls on the same topic («after a snowfall»). Girls usually place themselves in the center.

If you ask children to draw a road to kindergarten, then boys often draw transport or a diagram, and girls draw themselves with their mother by the hand. And even if a girl draws a bus, then she herself looks out of the window: with cilia, cheeks and bows.

And how do boys and girls respond in the classroom in kindergarten or school? The boy looks at the desk, to the side or in front of him, and, if he knows the answer, answers confidently, and the girl looks in the face of the tutor or teacher and, answering, looks in their eyes for confirmation of the correctness of her answer, and only after the nod of the adult continues more confidently . And in matters of children, the same line can be traced. Boys are more likely to ask adults questions in order to get some specific information (What is our next lesson?), and girls to establish contact with an adult (Will you still come to us?). I.e boys (and men) are more information-oriented, while girls (and women) are more relationship-oriented.

Experts point out that the time required to enter the lesson — the period of development — in children depends on gender. Girls usually after the start of classes quickly gain the optimal level of performance. Teachers see this by the eyes turned to them and build the lesson in such a way that the most difficult part of the material falls on the peak of performance. But they are guided by girls. The boys, on the other hand, swing for a long time and rarely look at the teacher. But now they have reached the peak of performance. And the girls, on the contrary, have already begun to get tired. The teacher immediately noticed this, because. he has established good contact with the girls — he always sees their faces turned to him. He begins to relieve the load, the lesson moves into another phase. And the boys should be given the key material for the lesson right now. But the most important thing has already been given, but they missed it or did not understand it, because at the right time, the level of their performance, the ability to learn difficult knowledge were low. The lesson is over. But was it designed for boys, for the peculiarities of their physiological and psychological functions? Unfortunately no.

If a group of children is asked a question, for example, about the origin of man (this is a study by the Moscow art teacher N. L. Kulchinskaya), then the girls come forward and, interrupting each other, say that man descended from apes. The boys are silent. Then they tried to take the girls away and ask the same question only to the boys. First silence, and then fireworks of versions: from a monkey, from a “cell of a human rib”, flew in from space, etc. Why is this happening?

Girls in preschool and primary school age usually have better speech development, they are often physically stronger than boys, their biological age (even at the same so-called “passport” age) is higher. They push the boys back physically and “beat” them verbally. But their answers are more monotonous, and, apparently, their thinking is more uniform. Among boys there are more variants of individuality, they think outside the box and are interesting, but their inner world is often hidden from us, because they rarely reveal it in words. They are silent, and it seems to us that they do not think, are not looking for solutions, but the search is on, it is more interesting and richer than we can imagine.

In the gymnasium, the psychologist (N. A. Gudkova) gave the children of the first grade a number of test mathematical problems with an increasing level of difficulty. One additional condition was added to each task. When graphs of the success of the solution were drawn up for each of the tasks separately for boys and girls, the result was somewhat puzzling. In girls, as expected, with increasing difficulty, the number of solved problems decreased and the schedule gradually decreased. Boys, on the other hand, were unable to solve several problems of medium difficulty, but coped much better with subsequent more complex problems. What’s the matter?

We carefully solved everything ourselves, and it turned out that typos were made in several problems: one of the conditions that had already been encountered in previous problems was omitted. That is, these problems had no solution, more precisely, they had many solutions. It was these problems that the boys could not solve or gave one of the possible solutions. But what about the girls? And they didn’t even notice the typo and continued to solve problems according to the previously given template.

The same children were asked in class what bricks could be used for. The first answer lay on the surface — of course, to build a house. Then the girls raised their hands and it began … You can build a “garage”, “and also a fence”, “and also a barn” out of bricks … Finally, the topic of construction has been exhausted. The boy raises his hand: «You can put a brick in a bucket when mom salts mushrooms — for gravity.» A new version. Again, a forest of girls’ hands and a variety of suggestions on where you can use a brick as a load. Once again they exhausted the topic, and again the boy: “Bricks can be laid over a fire so that the grass does not catch fire.” The girls again pick up this version and give different recipes for saving from a fire with the help of bricks. And again the boys: “You can put a board on a brick, and you get a swing”, “You can throw them like shells”, etc.

Of course, this does not mean that no girl will ever come up with a new idea, but the trend here is very clear.

Determined that men perform search activities better, put forward new ideas, they work better if it is necessary to solve a fundamentally new problem, but the requirements for quality, thoroughness, accuracy of execution or design of it are not high. And at school, a boy can find a new non-standard solution to a mathematical problem, but make a mistake in the calculations and get a deuce as a result.

Women usually perform better tasks no longer new, typical, stereotyped, but when the requirements for thoroughness, elaboration of details, and the performing part of the task are high. And that’s exactly what the school wants. First, it explains how to solve the problem. That is, the search stage is excluded, it is taken over by an adult, and children are required to solve typical problems that were discussed in the lesson. The minimum requirements for search and innovation, the maximum — for the thoroughness of execution. It’s good for girls as well the boy needs a little underexplaining and pushing him to find the principle of the solution. By this, of course, we will not teach him accurate and consistent writing in a notebook, but only in this way will he understand, and therefore remember the principle of decision: what he has reached with his mind is usually not forgotten.

Let’s turn to history. Already familiar to us V.A. Geodakyan recalls that knitting was invented in Italy in the XNUMXth century by men, and for several centuries it was a purely masculine affair. Then women began to master knitting and brought the process to such perfection that men could no longer compete with them and retreated. Now knitting is a purely feminine affair. And so it was in everything. First, the profession was mastered by men, and then women brought it to the heights of perfection.

In any activity that requires a search, a fresh, non-standard solution, men are ahead. And where the highest performing skills are needed, women are in the lead, or at least not inferior to men. Thus, there are more composers among men, and among good performers there are no fewer women; there are more inventors among men, and both are innovators. Previously, the profession of a cook was a male one. It was they, men, who were looking for new components, ratios, invented recipes, wrote cookbooks, and women cooks perfectly cook according to these recipes. Men are not interested in doing the same thing day after day, such work does not correspond to the peculiarities of the organization of their brain and psyche. That is why men, for example, experience great difficulties when working on an assembly line.

Psychologists believe that women (and girls) outperform men in speech tasks. Even initially non-speech tasks they can solve in a speech way. Men (and boys) outperform women in video-spatial skills, because the performance of spatial-visual tasks requires a search. Special studies have shown that in boys the specialization of the right hemisphere of the brain in relation to spatial functions, spatio-temporal orientation, and hence the best organization of those types of activities where spatial thinking is necessary, already exists at the age of six, while girls do not even have it by the age of six. thirteen.

Let’s take an example of solving geometric problems. Geometry is the science of relationships and spatial forms.

Boys more often solve a geometric problem using geometric, spatial methods: they mentally rotate the compared figures in space and superimpose one on top of the other.

Girls and women, including usually a teacher of geometry, designate all angles and sides with letters and then act with letter symbols and with learned templates-theorems. Actually, they practically do not use geometric methods. But at school, the principle “do as I do” applies, and the teacher demands from the boy a speech strategy unusual for him to solve initially non-verbal, spatial problems. But geometry is a science for men.

Teachers of higher educational institutions know that it is for female students that descriptive geometry is a stumbling block. The same can be felt when teaching mathematics in high school: girls are easier to cope with algebra (counting, manipulations with numbers and formulas), and boys with geometry (spatial thinking, mental manipulations with geometric shapes).

So, speech is better developed in girls and women? It turns out that this statement is debatable. As for the “performing” part of speech, the perfection of the speech process, this side of speech is undoubtedly better developed in women and girls: they have higher speech fluency, reading speed, and better spelling. But that side of speech that is associated with the search: finding word associations, solving crossword puzzles, is better represented in boys and men. This once again proves that the strength of men is the ability to find a new non-standard solution, to innovate.

In relation to the male sex, evolution led the selection for quick wits, resourcefulness, ingenuity. It is important for the female sex to survive, and the selection went to adaptability (adaptability to changing living conditions), education. So under unfavorable conditions, for example, when our pedagogical influences do not correspond to the individual characteristics of the child’s psyche, girls accept an unusual strategy for solving problems imposed by adults, and to a certain extent, better or worse, cope with tasks. Boys in such a situation try to get out of the control of an adult, not to obey him, because. It is extremely difficult for a boy to adapt to activities that are unusual for him.

Features of the emotional sphere of boys and girls

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. See →

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.