Mind Games
November 1st, 2008 by Stephanie Painter
Raising a son and daughter is making Terri Harris an expert in human nature.
Before her son Alex was born, the playroom in her home was overrun with her daughter Julia’s Barbie dolls. Now she finds forts and roadways constructed with blankets and pillows by Alex, her budding engineer.
“Our daughter Julia used her imagination and fantasy when she played with Barbies,” she says. “Alex taps into his imagination when he’s on the computer. He’s more visual, and he needs to see things on a screen.”
The Germantown mother notices other style differences as well. “Our son is more competitive in sports and wants to win. Julia just wants to make friends on the team.”
Parents soon discover what preventive psychologist Dr. JoAnn Deak has learned, that girls and boys seem to have different mental blueprints. Deak, the author of Girls Will Be Girls: Raising Confident and Courageous Daughters, says girls and boys are “as different from the neck up as from the neck down.” As an educator, she works with kids, and as a brain development expert, she studies images of the brain.
Neurobiological predispositions give kids strengths as well as challenges. For girls, language and fine motor skills, sequential ordering skills, and multitask thinking skills come earlier and more readily. But girls often avoid taking risks, notes Deak, and have also struggle to develop self-esteem.
Boys, in contrast, are geared for spatial reasoning, nonsequential ordering, gross motor skills, and tend to be more comfortable with open-ended problem solving. However, boys have trouble taking in auditory and visual information at the same time and don’t work with details as well. (It should be noted that 20 percent of kids are predisposed toward the other gender’s thinking style, according to Deak).
Step out of the comfort zone
Deak spoke to parents last summer at Temple Israel, focusing her remarks on ways parents can help their children strengthen ap-titudes and skills that do not come easily. Children need to “even out their thinking skills and emotional skills” to prepare for choices and challenges in life, says Deak. “We need boys to be talkers and girls to be risk-takers.”
Deak is especially passionate about helping girls. She designs strategies to help them learn, factoring in the role that emotion plays in their daily lives.
Due to brain structure, girls often experience more frequent and intense emotion than boys. That may be why change and the un-known cause girls greater anxiety. They’re also more reluctant to take risks, Deak says. Yet it’s essential to risk, whether trying out for a play or applying for a promotion at work.
“Let’s encourage girls to get out of their comfort zones,” says Deak, “to do harder things that will create a stronger person. We want girls to do trial-and-error learning and not worry about making mistakes.”
Mistakes help us learn, says Deak. The brain’s “mistake filter” activates when we make a mistake and helps us retain information. So offer kids practice in their weak areas, and encourage them to try new things. “The brain is a muscle,” says Deak. “You make it stronger, or it stays the same size, or shrivels in the area you don’t use much.” As neural connections multiply, the brain grows more versatile.
Deak references her own life as an example. Math didn’t come easily for her as a kid. But she worked hard at it, eventually earning a Ph.D. in statistics. “I tell kids, ‘You have a small rubber band in this area, now work hard and stretch it.”
Daily work in elementary school gives boys the chance to develop their weak areas. “We push little boys to read, talk, and deal with details, even though they are not wild about it. The end result is, we improve their weaker side while they are naturally working on their strengths, making a nicely outfitted brain by adulthood.”
Girls don’t get the same sort of concentrated practice. In elementary school, girls tend to be successful due to daily work that stresses language, fine motor skills, and sequential ordering. It’s not until middle school that the focus shifts to spatial reasoning and problem-solving. If a girl has difficulty transitioning to more abstract math, she may get discouraged if she believes she can’t be as successful as she was in elementary school. She may just need more time to build her confidence and risk making mistakes.
At St. Mary’s Episcopal School for Girls, abstract thinking and problem-solving is stressed in the elementary grades. Dr. Patti Ray, head of the upper school, says, “By the time girls reach middle school, our students are more likely to feel secure about tackling abstract problems. We research how girls learn and what may be the challenging areas for them, and design our curriculum in a way that serves them best.”
According to research, males and females have equal aptitudes in math and science. Yet boys enroll in Advanced Placement science and math classes in greater numbers than girls, which likely affects career choices.
Give her a boost
So how do parents and teachers give girls a boost? Start in preschool by encouraging work with 3-D art, blocks, and tangram puzzles. A preschool girl may not be excited about building with blocks, but put a stuffed animal or doll in the block corner, and she’ll start to build around it, notes Deak. Older girls can be encouraged to use tools or help with projects around the house.
Girls also need to work on problem-solving and divergent thinking approaches. Here’s an example. Say to your girl, “Think of three things to do with this magic marker other than writing.” Or give her a story problem and ask her to figure out two different ways to find the answer.
A biology teacher at St. Mary’s Episcopal School says that lab experiments are a great way to help girls face risk-taking fears. “Oftentimes, our experiments fail; that is real science. It is important for girls to see that they do not always have to get the “right” answer and that if we never try anything novel, we will never discover anything new.”
To help girls thrive, teachers should make academic material real and relevant. Girls recall in-formation faster and at a deeper level when teachers use personal stories in lectures, or present history as a story, says Dr. Ray.
A supportive learning environment also helps girls learn. Girls work well through collaboration, bonding with each other and with teachers. “Girls particularly need to talk to relieve high stress and feel security and safety with a teacher or friend.”
Feeling confident, competent, and connected to others is key to girls’ self-esteem, and will help them face life’s challenges facing life’s challenges.