School Readiness for Boys
Parents of 4, 5 and 6 year olds begin to wonder about first grade readiness: Is he ready for school? How is he ever going to be able to behave in school? He can’t sit still!
It is important to think about what schools are asking of children. The pace of education has increased. However, our brain structure and development has not changed since our brains evolved when we were hunters and gatherers.
What are we asking our children to do that they don’t actually have the brain structure and development yet to do?
When you observe kindergartners or first graders, the boys are typically 1 to 1.5 years behind the girls in their fine motor development, their ability to sit still, and their ability to follow directions.
Send him to school as late as possible! That way, he’ll be the oldest in his class. This will benefit him through all the years of school
An extra year of kindergarten is advisable. A rising trend in America, and more established in Europe, are outdoor kindergartens. This gives boys, especially, an opportunity to be outside, to be physical, learning in a way that suits him much more. It is better than teacher (93% chance she is female) saying, Here you are in the classroom, it’s time to sit still and learn.”
Another part of development is the language areas of his brain. They are slower to develop than girls. So, while there are girls in first grade who can write complete stories, follow sequences, and read, your boy may not be ready to read until second or third grade.
Of course, there are boys that read when they are 3 or 4, each child is different. But overall, trying to teach a 5 year-old boy to read is like teaching a 3.5 year-old to read! Can you image?! Developmentally his brain is not yet ready to process language, track words across a page, and be able to match sounds and symbols.
In school, we’re asking too much, too early, of many of our boys.
Having boys enter school before they are developmentally ready and attempting to teach them to read before they are ready, sets them up for failure from the beginning. In first grade, they feel school isn’t for them, they see the girls succeeding where they can’t – yet.
What are their alternatives to this stress? They become withdrawn. Or they get even more rambunctious, perhaps becoming the class clown because somehow they have to act out, to process what they’re feeling.
We see this pattern of failure manifest at the other end of school, too. Fewer males are graduating from high school than ever before. And even in college, here in America, only about 44% of the college population is male. The males that do go to college are less likely than their female counterparts to finish their degree program.
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