Boys and girls are different. That’s a statement you’ll never see debated here.
But just how different are they? According to physician, psychologist, and best-selling author Dr. Leonard Sax, they are so different that they respond vastly differently to nearly everything — discipline methods, parenting styles, and even academic environments.
Dr. Sax tells Allie Beth Stuckey that the cognitive differences between boys and girls can actually be seen using brain imaging in the womb.
These prenatal scans reinforce something that has long been known about boys and girls: “Boys mature much more slowly than girls.”
In fact, the average 18-month-old boy has a vocabulary of 40 words, while his female equivalent has a vocabulary of 90 words.
It’s no surprise, then, that boys tend to struggle in our modern school system more than girls — especially in the lower grades.
But this wasn’t always the case, says Dr. Sax. Back in the 1980s, kindergarten could be described as “duck-duck-goose and singing and rounds and arts and crafts and field trips to go to the park and splash in a pond and chase after tadpoles.”
But that changed in the 1990s, when there was a sudden push to get kindergarteners to “read and write and do arithmetic.” Suddenly kindergarten became more like first grade.
This has posed enormous challenges for young boys, says Dr. Sax, because “the language areas of the brain of the 5-year-old boy” are equivalent to that of a “3-year-old girl.”
Thus “it is not developmentally appropriate to expect a 5-year-old boy to sit and learn about phonics and diphthongs for 45 minutes,” he explains. “The result is many 5-year-old boys fail and decide that they’re dumb and … that they hate school.”
This attitude of defeat stays with them as they advance to higher grade levels, tainting their overall academic experience.
“Researchers have found that once those attitudes are formed, they are global, stable, and non-contingent.”
Global, Dr. Sax explains, means “he doesn’t just think he’s dumb in reading and writing, he believes he’s dumb in every subject.” Stable means that if you “track him down in 10th grade, he still believes that he’s dumb and that the teacher hates him.” Non-contingent means that “he doesn’t think that there’s anything he can do about it or anything that you can do about it.”
Over 20 years ago, Dr. Sax wrote a paper advising parents not to enroll their 5-year-old boys in kindergarten and instead wait until they are 6 years of age.
“I still think that’s a good idea [today],” he says.
To hear more of Dr. Sax’s parenting advice, including his stance on social media, discipline, and navigating culture, watch the episode above.
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