gendered playground behavior in preschoolers

[psocoptera]

One thing I hear a lot is "well, I didn't want to believe there were differences between boys and girls, but once I had kids, it was just so obvious". I had the chance today to watch Junie's preschool class at the playground (it's not a school day for her, but they were taking a little field trip and we were able to join them, and then they hit the playground after) and I thought I'd try to start looking for these obvious differences. No formal scoring, just rough mental tallying. Approximately 25 kids. What I observed: most of the activity could be divided into five types of play: running, climbing, swinging, digging, and banging with shovels. Running, climbing, and digging all seemed to be approximately gender-neutral. Climbing was the most popular activity, followed by digging. Swinging was heavily female, with girls swinging higher, more wildly, for longer. Banging with shovels, that I saw, was only done by boys; all the girl shovel-activity was localized to the sandbox and seemed to involve actual sand.

So, today's conclusion: while the most popular playground activities are gender-neutral, boys and girls do differ in their secondary choices, with girls showing greater interest in whole-body physical activity (swinging) and boys showing greater interest in making noise. Hypothesis: going down slides is also girl-dominated. (There wasn't enough slide activity at the playground today to count.)

Comments

[mst3kforall.livejournal.com]

That's really interesting.

I wonder if there may be some unintended influence from less aware parents. In the old days when gender roles were even more strongly entrenched, I always wanted to climb and play on jungle gyms but was yelled at and stopped; and I loved cars and erector sets, lincoln logs and tinker toys but was only allowed dolls. My brother got all the cool toys;-)

[psocoptera.livejournal.com]

I didn't notice much influence from the teachers at all, they mostly interacted with kids who came up to them.

(And, just to clarify, I would describe girls vs boys play as more similar than different, overall.)

[mst3kforall.livejournal.com]

Definitely came across as more similar than different! I was thinking that perhaps there might be parents who were surprised to see "their own personalities" who could possibly have influenced their children without realizing it. It was neat to remember running around and playing at that age, and I was gladdened to hear of the similarities in the play of the boys and girls (and the healthy activities)