Dr Jenny Harasty advises that if you have worries about your boy’s speech and language development (if he isn’t talking as well as you think he should), trust your intuition. Speak to a speech therapist from your local hospital or community health centre. Sessions of speech therapy are fun for children and can make all the difference to a good start.
Whether the cause is hormonal or environmental, there is no doubt that these brain differences exist between men and women today. Because of their more connected brain halves, older women who suffer strokes usually recover more speedily and completely than men: they can activate extra pathways to the other half of their brain to do the job of the damaged parts. Girls who have learning problems improve more quickly with tuition for the same reason. And boys are more prone to problems resulting from brain damage at birth, and so on. This may explain the greater numbers of boys with learning difficulties, autism and many other disorders.
Why is it important to know about brains?
Knowing about the differences in boys’ brains helps to explain some practical difficulties that boys have, and what to do about them.
If your brain is somewhat less connected from right to left, you will have trouble doing things well which need both sides of the brain. This involves skills such as reading, talking about feelings and solving problems through quiet introspection rather than by beating people over the head! Do these problems sound at all familiar to you? So now can you see the importance of all this brain research?
Danger: sexism alert!
There is a vitally important point to be made here. To say that ‘boys are different’ can very easily turn into an excuse for saying ‘they are defective’ or, worse still, ‘they can’t help it’. The same sort of generalisations were once applied to girls: ‘They’ll never be any good at science or engineering’, ‘They’re too emotional to be in responsible jobs’, and so on. So please take the following points on board very seriously:
The differences are slight for most people.
They are only tendencies.
They don’t apply to every individual.
Most important of all, we can help boys to overcome them.
Helping the brain to grow
We can work to help boys read better, express themselves better, solve conflicts better and empathise better – and so help them to be great human beings. Schools have equity programs to help girls in Mathematics and the sciences so they have access to these careers. We are now beginning to see that we can help boys with English, Drama and so on, which can better equip them to live in the modern world. (For some great ways to do this, see the chapter on schools, ‘A revolution in schooling’.)
Our brains are brilliant and flexible devices, always able to learn. Parents can teach a boy how to avoid getting into fights by working out better ways to join in a game or solve a dispute peacefully. They can help a boy learn skills like:
how to figure out people’s feelings from their facial expressions
how to make friends and join in a game or conversation, and
how to read his own body signals – for example, to know when he is getting angry and needs to walk away from a situation.
By working on these skills with their sons, parents are building connections from one side of their son’s brain to the other.
STARTING SCHOOL: WHY BOYS SHOULD START LATER
Brain differences have one huge implication – that of deciding when boys should start school. Read this next section carefully if you have a small boy: it may make a huge difference in his life.
At the age of five or six, when children start serious schooling, boys’ brains are an astonishing six to twelve months less developed than girls’. They are especially delayed in what is called ‘fine-motor coordination’, which is the ability to use their fingers carefully and hold a pen or scissors. And since they are still in the stage of ‘gross-motor’ development, developing the nerves to their bigger arm, leg and body muscles, they will be itching to move their bodies around – so they will not be good at sitting still. In fact, until they finish their gross-motor development, they will not gain fine-motor skills. For boys, one leads to the other. (Girls do it in reverse: their brains go straight to finger coordination, and they often need help in body strengthening by bouncing on trampolines and playing basketball or swimming.)
The other delay boys experience is in using words well. This affects being able to tell a teacher what they need, answer questions in class, and communicate verbally with other children. Many boys at five are still very young socially, and not really ready for the demands of a school environment. In talking to early childhood teachers, from country schools in outback Australia to big international schools in Asia and Europe, the same message comes through: ‘Boys should stay back a year’.
For all kids, boys and girls, the calendar is a terrible way of deciding who should start school. Kids vary so much, and with a once-a-year intake some will always be young for their year. New studies from the UK show that kids who are young for their year actually do worse in school right through. Staying back for a year in these cases can be just the thing to make school more of a success in the twelve years following. It’s important to treat every child as an individual case and to think about each, not in terms of ‘how old?’, but rather ‘how ready?’ In boys’ cases, the answer is often: not yet.
KNOWING WHEN TO START
It’s clear that all children should attend nursery or half-day preschool from around four years of age, since they need the social stimulation and wider experiences it provides (and because parents need a break!). Unlike childcare, preschool has fully trained teachers who provide playful but appropriate learning experiences that are a halfway step to school. (Daycare centres may have ‘early learning’ in their names, but this is really just a marketing ploy: as one staff member told me, ‘That just means we have letters on the blocks’.)
In preschool or nursery, it will become clear which boys are ready for school – they are happy to sit and do work in books or craft, and are able to talk happily – and which boys are still needing to run about, and are not yet good with a crayon or pencil. Most boys will fall into the second group.
Based on your own observations, on discussion with the preschool teacher, and perhaps checking out what is expected of children going into primary school, you will soon get an idea – ready, or not ready yet. By taking another year in preschool, your boy has a whole year more to get ready to do really well in primary school. For most boys, this would mean that they move through school being a year
