Introduction and Overview
Welcome to this course on meeting the needs of young boys in early childhood programs. In today's early childhood programs, (e.g., childcare, Head Start, and early elementary school), young boys as a group struggle compared to young girls. There are a variety of reasons for this. This course examines some of these reasons and then makes some suggestions that can address this problem and provide some solutions. These suggestions are based on a radical paradigm shift regarding how we support the growth, development, and learning of our young boys.
Solutions that I provide involve three main areas: recommended policy changes, curricula, and instructional approaches, and considerations for the environment. Some of the policy changes that I recommend include revising the concept of school readiness and revamping our approach to special education. Changes to the environment include providing easy access and lots of access throughout the day to the outdoors. Some of the instructional approaches to change include the use of Garner's intelligences, Bruner's three types of memory, concrete manipulatives, and the use of the arts throughout the day.
My Background
When I was a Head Start director, I ran into my disability coordinator who works with children who struggle in the program. I was interested to know who was on her list and who she was working with. I asked her to give me a breakdown of the children by gender and she told me that twice as many boys as girls were on her list. Initially, this didn't bother me, but after a while, I thought about this and it didn't make any sense to me. Statistically, it seems to me, if we're providing what our children need, there shouldn't be a discrepancy between boys and girls in our special education programs and programs targeted to work with struggling children.
After some consideration, I decided to go into my classrooms and observe what was occurring with my students. I discovered some interesting things. First of all, as you are well aware, 97% of preschool teachers are female, and in my program all the teachers were women. I observed what the women were doing and I noticed that the women were working with the girls in the dramatic play area on the tables with tabletop puzzles and activities and in the art area. As I said, this is where the teachers were, but this is also where most of the girls were. I then observed where the boys were, and the boys were not in those areas. The boys were two distinctly different areas. They were in the block area and they were often on the floor, playing with blocks, playing with manipulatives, or playing with each other on the floor. The female teachers were not in the block area. They were not on the floor with the boys and, in fact, most of their interaction with the boys was to discipline them if they were struggling.
Statistics
As I continued to think about this issue, I began to look at national statistics around boys and girls in our early childhood programs. When we look at boys and girls in early childhood programs, we look at the children from infancy through age eight. This is a target group for this course. However, it does apply to older boys and girls as well. I also want to clarify before we look at these differences that there are boys who are very successful in our programs, as well as girls that struggle. Here we are talking about norms and about averages. We're not talking about the individual girl or the individual boy.
National statistics show that more young boys than young girls are identified with developmental delays or special needs, especially ADHD and specific learning disabilities. More young boys are recommended to be assessed for potential developmental delays than young girls. More young boys are suspended or expelled from early childhood programs in elementary schools. Specifically, boys represent 79% of children suspended once from preschool and 84% of those suspended twice. Now, these statistics are for children in public programs, Head Start, and school-related programs. We don't know the statistics for children in private programs because these statistics are not kept and one would imagine that they're probably the same or perhaps even higher.
More young boys than young girls receive a variety of special programs in the elementary school or in the early childhood program where they are served. More young boys struggle with emotional regulation, which can result in problems at home and problems in the school. More young boys than young girls are in some kind of behavioral program or have a behavioral management plan to address their behavior in the program. More young boys than young girls are held back from entering kindergarten or entering first grade. In fact, 61% of children held back from entering first grade are boys compared to girls. More young boys have problems in early childhood programs in the elementary schools (e.g., sitting still, following rules, cleaning up, doing what they're told, etc.).
Why Do Young Boys Struggle in ECE Programs?
Why do we have this discrepancy? Why do we have a problem where more boys are struggling in our programs than young girls? This question also implies that this is a problem that should not be occurring. If we want young boys to be successful in school, we need to make early childhood experiences positive. They need to feel good about themselves and need to feel good about how they interact with teachers. They need to feel good about their potential to learn because they have many years ahead of them in school. It's critical that the early childhood period is a positive period for all of our children, including our boys. The statistics suggest that many boys struggle and for many boys, the early childhood years are a failure, which is simply unacceptable.
More and more research shows that as a group, young boys and young girls are simply different. They learn differently and they develop differently. What do we know about young boys in general? Those of you who work with young boys, those of you who have your own young boys know exactly what I'm talking about. Young boys' language development tends to be delayed compared to young girls, and this has to do with the development of their brain and their interaction with adults in their life. Young boys' emotional regulation is delayed compared to young girls. Young boys have poor impulse control and are prone to inattention and distraction. Many young boys are hyperactive. Further, in general, young boys need to move all the time. They simply seem incapable of learning something without moving a part or all of their bodies. Many young boys are messy and disorganized. Many young boys are more physical than young girls, whether it's interacting with materials, whether it's playing on the playground, or whether it's interacting with each other. Young boys have more accidents than young girls. This is shown in statistic after statistic. More young boys seem to struggle with following rules than young girls.
Why the Difference Between Boys and Girls?
Why do we have differences in fundamental behaviors of young girls and young boys, not only in our early childhood programs but in life in general? We used to believe that these differences were caused largely by hormonal differences. Specifically, at conception, a child is either XX or XY on the last of the 23rd pair of chromosomes. If the child is XX, that makes the child a girl. If the child is XY, that makes a child a boy, and then immediately after conception, hormones begin to develop and the hormones are different. They have different amounts of testosterone, estrogen, and other kinds of hormones that influence the development of the brain and therefore the development of boys' brains and the development of girls' brains is different. We believed that these differences come out of the evolutionary progression of the human species. Initially, we believed that these differences were purely hormonal and based on either the XX chromosome pair or the XY chromosome pair, but now we know that it's more than this. It seems that the overall culture in childcare, early childhood and elementary schools provides for a better "goodness-of-fit" to how young girls grow, develop and learn than to how young boys grow, develop and learn.
Goodness-of-Fit
The concept of goodness-of-fit is a theoretical concept that comes out of research on children's temperaments. This research showed that children have different temperaments and to maximize the development of each child, we need to change how we respond to the child. In other words, provide a goodness-of-fit. In our case, when we talk about goodness-of-fit, we're looking at a match between a child's unique behaviors, characteristics, and dispositions and the social and physical environment in which the child grows, develops, and learns.
For example, when we looked at characteristics of boys, one of the things boys seem to need to do is to move all the time. Therefore, a goodness-of-fit in early childhood programs in schools for boys would be to allow and encourage movement and to build learning activities, learning strategies, learning outcomes around this need to move. Conversely, a goodness-of-fit regarding movement would not be to punish young boys' movement, not to label them with ADHD, and not to punish them when they cannot sit still. One example of goodness-of-fit would be for boys to be encouraged and allowed to move.
Goodness-of-fit for boys and for girls can be broken down into two areas: social and physical. In the social area, it has to do with how we respond to young children and their behaviors. How do we respond to their learning? How do we respond to their needs? Physical goodness-of-fit is the environment. Do we use the outdoors? Do we allow children to explore? Do we enable children to make a mess?
Lack of a Goodness-of-Fit for Boys
One example of a lack of goodness-of-fit in boys is that we expect them to sit still to learn. A second lack of goodness-of-fit for boys in early childhood programs is we focus on literacy. The current focus of early childhood programs, curricula, and standards is literacy including teaching children how to read so they can read when in third grade. However, as we stated earlier, boys compared to girls are delayed in literacy. Thus, we have created a mismatch. We essentially create failure in boys because we focus on something that they are not predisposed to be good at.
Another lack of goodness-of-fit for boys is that we are usually in an indoor environment. Most of the time, boys need to use the outdoor environment, as well as the indoor environment. Also, many of the books in our classrooms are not about things that young boys enjoy, such as mess, action, explosions, monsters, trucks, construction and buildings. Some years ago, I had a student doing research on kindergarten reading and she was upset because the boys in her kindergarten class were not learning to read as rapidly as the girls were. She then focused on the books and she determined that the books did not provide subject matter that most of the boys enjoyed or that attracted and maintained the attention and interest of most of the boys. As a result, she made her own books. She created her own books that included mess, included action, included big explosions, included monster trucks and digging and constructions and all those kinds of things that a lot of young boys seem to be attracted to. Lo and behold, she saw not only an increase in the interest of her boys to look at books and to read books, but she also saw an increase in their reading skills.
In many early childhood environments, there is a lack of hands-on learning. Boys generally want to be hands-on learners. They want to grab things. They want to move things around. They want to manipulate things. They want to interact physically with things. Many programs have protocols that punish boys for their normal behavior, which involves movement, mess, disorganization, and challenging rules. That often seems to be normal behavior of young boys. In many of our early childhood programs and elementary schools, these behaviors are punished.
Also in many early childhood and elementary environments, there is a lack of physical play. Boys need play, particularly physical play. In addition, our emotional and behavioral expectations of children are too advanced. As I said before, we know that boys' emotional regulation, the ability to control their behavior, because of hormonal development is delayed compared to girls. There is also a lack of goodness-of-fit because there is not enough music, art, and dance in our programs. Furthermore, children who struggle are often denied access to music, art, and dance.
Often, there are only typical female props in the dramatic play area. When I was a kindergarten teacher in Pennsylvania and came into the classroom, I observed that none of the boys were in the dramatic play area. All the girls were there but none of the boys were there. I looked at the props in the dramatic play area, and most of the props were things that we associate stereotypically with women in our culture. There were dolls, ovens, and ironing boards. They were things that women in our culture are expected to do. I decided to change that and increase the props with additions from other places. I brought in fireman hoses, fireman jackets, hard hats, and tools. I brought in old typewriters and old equipment that could be broken down. Lo and behold, after I did that, the ratio of girls and boys in the dramatic play area was about 50-50. We need to change what's in our dramatic play area.
Another lack of goodness-of-fit is that boys often are on the ground. Boys often like to play on the floor in the block area and things like that. In many programs, female teachers do not engage in activities on the floor and in the block area. Now obviously there are wonderful exceptions, but in many programs, there's not a lot of adult activity in the block area and on the ground.
Reasons for Lack of Goodness-of-Fit
The lack of goodness-of-fit is because there is a mismatch between what young boys need to grow, develop, and learn and what we provide. We seem to provide more of a goodness-of-fit for what girls need to learn, develop, and grow than what boys need. Why is this? Why do we have this lack of goodness-of-fit?
The first reason is due to a push down of inappropriate academic expectations. Over the last 20 years, preschool and kindergarten have become first and second grade. That simply produces a lack of goodness-of-fit particularly for young boys who are delayed in various areas of literacy and behavior. Furthermore, there is a push down of inappropriate behavioral expectations. When we teach certain things, we need children to be able to learn. As such, we need them to sit still, to be quiet and to learn those skills, and that requires inappropriate behavioral expectations.
Another reason for the lack of goodness-of-fit is a focus on assessment. We have become fixated on assessment in early childhood and school programs. Additionally, there is a focus on teacher-directed as opposed to child-directed activities. Teacher-directed activities are much easier to develop in terms of specific standards, curriculum expectations, outcomes, and assessment, but they do not work well with young children, particularly young boys.
We take a deficit approach to teaching children with developmental delays. In other words, in special education, we tend to focus on what children cannot do or what children struggle to do. Finally, there is a total lack of understanding of how young children learn. When I say a total lack, I don't mean so much on the part of teachers, I mean on the part of curriculum developers, on the part of politicians who create policies, and the part of those who create and then impose standards for our children. These people don't seem to understand how children learn, develop, and grow, particularly young children.
There is a view of early childhood as the first rung on the K-12 educational ladder. When children struggle in K-12, the response always seems to be, "We've got to get them earlier, we've got to make sure that they can learn to read earlier, that they can follow directions earlier, that they can do math earlier." There is this view that education is a ladder and the first rung of that ladder is early childhood.
Early childhood is a field dominated by women who do things that they and girls tend to enjoy and find meaningful and often avoid those things that men and boys enjoy. Obviously, women are wonderful teachers, but men and women have different approaches. Men and women like to do different things. Men and women have different things that they enjoy. One example is that men in early childhood programs tend to be more physical. They tend to engage in rough-and-tumble play. They tend to enjoy playing in the block area. As I've said before, this is what boys enjoy. Boys enjoy many of the behaviors that come naturally to men, and not always to women.
Yet another reason for lack of goodness-of-fit for boys is that we have rules, discipline procedures, and program expectations that do not support the normal development and normal behavior of young boys. Again, the push down of academics, push down on behavioral expectations have ended up in rules that are counterproductive to the normal and healthy development of all of our young children, including our young boys.
Solutions: Paradigm Shifts
The rest of this course will be addressing various solutions to this dilemma. It's important to understand, however, that these solutions are not just about changing what we do in the classroom. The issue is bigger than this. The issue is a need for a fundamental shift in how we view early care and education. This shift should include a paradigm shift, which means that we radically change our view and we radically determine a different way of looking at early childhood education from infancy through age eight.
Here are some of the overall paradigm shifts that need to be made if we are going to improve the situation:
- We must insist that early childhood is not a junior K-12 program. It is not a push down of what works at K-12. We need to change that. We need to help politicians understand that that needs to be changed and we need to help curriculum developers to understand that change needs to be made.
- We should not see the main role of early childhood education as preparing children for school entrance. In fact, we need to make sure that rather than expecting children to be ready for school, we must expect all schools to be ready for all children.
- We need to make sure elementary school curricula and instruction are developmentally appropriate. One of the catchphrases in today's education is alignment. We need to align the curriculum, but unfortunately, the early childhood curriculum ends up being aligned to the K-12 curriculum. We need to do the reverse. We need to align the elementary school curriculum with early childhood: developmentally appropriate, play-based, active curriculum.
- We need to eliminate most assessments. We have far, far too many assessments for young children. Assessments often produce anxiety, they produce failure, and if the results are negative, it can produce a negative relationship between the program and parents. So much of the outcome of assessments of young children is very negative. There are only two areas where assessments should be used. The first is to determine real developmental delays that need to be addressed early on so the child can be successful. The second is to determine whether or not the curriculum is effective. Beyond that, we need to eliminate assessments for children from zero to eight years old.
- We must increase the number of men in our programs, including teachers and family volunteers. We must create different approaches to increase not only the number of teachers that go into early childhood programs but those that remain in early childhood programs. I want to address some ideas in how we do that in a minute. We also need to increase ways to have more male family volunteers in our program. When my children were young, I would often volunteer in my children's early childhood programs, and it was not a particularly positive experience. I didn't feel welcome all the time. I didn't feel my presence there was positive. We need to find ways to not only increase male teachers but also to increase male family volunteers.
What We Should Not Do
Jerome Bruner, a great American psychologist, talked about what we should do and what we shouldn't do in order to improve something. He called these positive and negative instances. I want to look at a couple of specific negative instances of what we should not do before we focus on what we should do.
First, we should never take the arts and physical activities and outdoor play away from children who struggle academically or behaviorally. We should not deny children what they're good at, what they need, or what makes them feel successful in order to enable them to do what they're bad at. This is simply an unacceptable idea. I remember in my Head Start program, I was observing a classroom and a young boy was running around and causing all sorts of havoc. Teachers got really upset and they turned to him and said, "As a punishment, you cannot go outside to play with the other children." Of course, what this child needed more than anything else was to go outside and play. Do not deny children what they need, what they're good at, what meets their goodness-of-fit by taking away and punishing what they're struggling with.
Also, be very careful before recommending special education for any child, but especially for boys. We will come back to this, but many more boys than girls are in special education. Research shows that once a teacher recommends a child for special education, it results in the Pygmalion effect, whereby further assessments end up confirming this initial recommendation.
What We Should Do: General Suggestions
What should we do? We will start out with some general suggestions, and then we'll look at some specific behavioral curricula and environmental suggestions.
The first general suggestion is what we've been alluding to throughout this presentation. What is fundamental to any kind of change in how we work with young boys, is to accept, acknowledge, and understand that in many significant ways, young boys and young girls grow, develop and learn differently. Again, we're talking about the norm. We're not talking about individuals. There are individual young girls who are physical and need to be outside and do a lot of things young boys do. Conversely, there are some young boys who are cerebral, quiet, focused on learning and can be successful. Here we're talking about generalities: the general focus of young boys and the general focus of young girls.
Critically, we must view the typical behavior of young boys (inattention, messiness, need for physical movement, need to challenge rules and authority) as normal, not as deviant, not as the exception. We need to see this as the norm and find ways to channel these behaviors, ways to utilize these behaviors in positive ways and not to punish, not to see it as the exception, not to automatically recommend the child for special education.
We need to understand that providing a goodness-of-fit enhances the potential school success of all children. The bottom line here is we're not molding children. Our job is not to put children in a mold or into a form. Our job is to take what children have as their characteristics, as their personalities, as their dispositions and to find ways to enhance and utilize those traits in a way that will make them successful in school. We need to understand that providing a goodness-of-fit is not simply letting children get away with things that they shouldn't be doing, but it enables them to be particularly to be successful when they're young, which is critical.
We need to use the outdoors much more than we are. One of the approaches to education in Finland is extensive use of the outdoors. I often take my grandchildren outdoors. I have a grandson and a granddaughter and we go outside and it's very interesting to see the differences in how they respond to the outdoors. My grandson immediately anticipates what's in the environment and starts heading toward it, even before we can see it. He loves to climb on the old tree trunks and tree stumps and jump from them onto the ground and we'll start heading that way even before we are close to it. My granddaughter, on the other hand, tends to stay with me until we are there and then joins in the activity. There's a real difference between how boys and girls interact with the outdoor environment.
We must use the arts throughout the day, visual arts, music, dance. We cannot and must not deny children the access to these activities if they're struggling academically and/or behaviorally.
Generally, we should use Gardner's eight intelligences, specifically kinesthetic, musical, spatial, and naturalistic. Let me spend a little time on Gardner's eight intelligences, particularly the ones I had mentioned. Gardner says that children learn in different ways and they learn through different processing. Some children learn through words. Some children learn through pictures. Some children learn through music. Some children learn through interaction with the natural environment, but we don't all learn the same. The focus here is if we want young boys to be successful, we have to include activities and focus on kinesthetic learning, musical learning, spatial learning, and naturalistic learning.
- Kinesthetic learning involves movement: moving, jumping, dancing, sliding, swinging, all those kind of things. I had a college student who was teaching math facts with elementary school students. These students had real trouble learning the math facts and multiplication tables. The college student of mine decided to build in the multiplication facts into skip rope and teams. The children would do the math facts, skipping, and then would then challenge each other through the skip rope routines. This is a great example of using kinesthetic learning to learn academic skills.
- Musical intelligence is the use of music, dance, and playing instruments. There's a lot of research that shows that playing instruments increases intellectual capacity in schools. Again, what we need to do here is make sure that children who struggle academically, who struggle emotionally, who struggle behaviorally still have access to musical activities.
- Many children learn spatially. Some of you may be spatial learners. I'm a spatial learner. Spatial learners are people who see pictures before they see words. They use pictures to solve problems. One of the interesting things about Albert Einstein is he used pictures to develop all of his theories. All of his theories that he became famous for, he initially saw pictures. He saw pictures of elevators going up and down. He saw pictures of trains coming together. He saw all these pictures, and then he developed his mathematical theories, but he always started with pictures.
- Naturalistic children learn best in the environment. They learn by interacting with plants, with animals, and with the ecology. John Muir, who helped start the great American park system, was a naturalist. Again, we need to encourage children to be able to learn kinesthetically, musically, spatially, and naturalistically, and not deny them access to these opportunities.
Another general suggestion is to focus on concrete, hands-on learning. Many children struggle with abstract learning. They particularly struggle when it comes too early. They need to manipulate it. They need to feel, to smell, to combine. Many young boys need concrete learning. Whenever we teach new concepts, whether it's size, sequence, or various approaches to building and all those kind of things, we need to provide hands-on learning with concrete manipulatives, so children can see what we're talking about. When we're talking about the impact of water from the destruction of dams, for example, children need to play with water and see how water can move things around, how it can be destructive. Water in sand shows the power of water, so they need to see the concrete thing before they learn about the abstract concept.
We need to focus on play-based and emergent curriculum. Finally, we need to encourage movement throughout the day for everybody and not deny movement to children who struggle, because probably one of the reasons they struggle is because they need to move.
What We Should Do: Specific Suggestions
We've just looked at some general suggestions. Now we're going to look at some specific suggestions.
Special Education
Again, we go back to the fact that far more young boys than young girls are in special education. That simply makes no sense. It should be about the same. The first set of recommendations is to look at certain things before we even recommend that a child be assessed for special needs. First and foremost, are there factors outside of the child's own experiences or outside of the child themselves that are affecting their behavior? This might be the environment, unrealistic expectations, English language challenges for children who don't speak English as their home language, etc. Don't initially look at the child. Look at things that might be impacting the child. Again, understand that simply recommending a child for special needs can often end up putting the child in special needs even if they don't need to be there. Talk to parents. What's going on at home? How do they see their child socially and physically at home? Do they think their child has a special need? One of the critical things about children with developmental delays or special needs is that the parents see their child far more than the teachers in this program do. Ask the parents first.
Instruction
Use Bruner's representations of knowledge. Bruner has three representations of knowledge. Representation is simply a fancy word for memory. Bruner says that we remember things in three different ways. We've already addressed one of them, which is pictures, but Bruner says we have three kinds of memories: enactive, iconic, and symbolic.
- Enactive memory. In modern parlance, we call this muscle memory. We talk a lot about muscle memory when we look at sports. We look at muscle memory of being able to hit a baseball. We look at muscle memory for other kinds of professional sports, but we all use muscle memory on a daily basis. When you get in your car and drive home or drive to the store, every time you come to an intersection, you don't sit there and wonder which way to go. You automatically go in the right direction because that's been put into your muscles, been put into your memory. When we get up and walk, when we get up and dance, when we swim, when we do those things, we don't think about it. It's already built into how we do it because it's memorized. We know that people who go through certain kind of brain trauma have to relearn muscle memory. Muscle memory is all the things that we memorized around movement, direction, climbing, swinging, riding a bike, and things like that.
- Iconic memory. These are pictures and visual symbols. These are directional ideas, maps, and visual patterns.
- Symbolic memory. This involves words and numbers.
The problem is that we jump too quickly to the symbolic: we focus on words and we focus on numbers. We need to encourage children also to remember things enactively. Do you remember how you moved when you did this? Do you remember what you did with your hands? Do you remember how you kicked the ball? Then pictures. Do you remember what it looked like? Do you remember the colors? Do you remember the lines? Do you remember the shapes? We need to focus on the first two and not immediately jump to words and numbers. Again, unfortunately, because our focus of curriculum right now is literacy and now we're also getting to STEM, the focus is on words and the focus is on numbers, and many boys struggle with this. We need to provide lots of opportunities to process information using memory, muscle memory and pictures.
Encourage children to use private speech. Most of you know that private speech is when we talk to ourselves. Talking to each other is social speech. Talking to ourselves is private speech. Private speech is incredibly powerful in helping us not only control our behavior, but also in remembering how to scaffold learning. Encourage children to use private speech. Encourage children to use private speech out loud. We are too fixated on saying that this has to be done quietly. No, it doesn't. Unless the child is disturbing other children's learning, they should be encouraged and allowed to use private speech out loud.
Encourage play, especially functional play. We tend to jump to dramatic play. There's a lot in the literature about how important dramatic play is, but unfortunately, dramatic play focuses on symbolic literacy and abstract thinking. Young boys need lots of opportunities to move things around, to manipulate things, to construct things, to learn how things work, and to get the feel of the things through their hands, such as the texture, smell, and weight of things. An example of this is carrying blocks or carrying pieces of wood around. This is all great for brain development and matches the way boys learn. We need to encourage functional play and constructive play. Functional play is how things work. Constructive play is how we put things together.
Help children with metacognition. Metacognition is an area of study that has only recently been looked at, but it is an area of study that holds great potential for helping children and adults learn. Metacognition simply is for each individual to know how they learn. This recognizes two things. First, it recognizes that we all learn differently, which is one of the focuses of this presentation. Second, it recognizes that if we help children understand how they learn, they are going to be better learners.
Help children understand their strengths and weaknesses. Help children learn what they're good at and what they struggle with. Furthermore, once they understand what they're good at and what they struggle with, they can use what they're good at to help areas they struggle. This doesn't suggest that they should avoid what they are weak at. It suggests that they should know what they're good at, know what they are powerful learners in, and then get help for areas where they struggle.
Focus on child-directed activities and peer learning, especially peers of different ages. We've talked about how boys often are oppositional, how boys often can't follow rules, and how boys don't do very well with teacher-directed activities and teacher-directed learning. The solution to this is to create lots of opportunities for child-directed activities and learning and peer-directed activities and learning.
Environment
Provide easy and frequent access to the outdoors. Boys thrive in the outdoors because they can be messy, they can make a lot of noise, they can use a lot of space, and they can move. They can get on top of tree trunks. They can climb trees. They can jump in the water. They can do a lot of things that they simply cannot do inside. We have to encourage the use of the outdoors, such as providing playgrounds that have a lot of loose parts, dramatic play, and a garden. Most playgrounds simply have swings and tripods and slides, and this is just basic play. Boys need opportunities for constructive play: sand, water, loose parts, pieces of wood, milk crates, things to move around, and a garden. The garden provides lots of activities to interact within the outside world.
Provide many opportunities to explore and learn about nature. All young children (both boys and girls, but boys in particular) are fascinated by the outdoor world and by nature. We need to provide opportunities for exploring and opportunities for interacting with nature. As the seasons change, there are multiple opportunities to learn, to develop, and to interact. We need to do a better job of using the community, especially parks, greenbelts, and outdoor museums. When we lived in Kansas City, my family and I used the Jackson County Outdoor Museum. Here in Colorado, we used the Littleton Outdoor Museum. It's a wonderful environment to learn about animals, to learn about plants, to learn about farm equipment, and to learn about all sorts of outdoor activities and outdoor opportunities.
We must include stereotypical male props in the dramatic play area: hardhats, a variety of tools, firemen's hoses and coats, old car wheels and so on. We simply must provide materials that interest young boys based on their home environment and based on their community experiences. Use books that cover topics that young boys like: construction, mess, fantastic monsters, moving equipment, how-to, how things are made, how things are constructed, how things are destructed, blown apart, all the things that young boys love. Provide a woodworking area. Boys love to make things. Boys love to manipulate things. Obviously many girls do as well. I created a woodworking area in my kindergarten classroom in Pennsylvania and the girls were as interested in making things in the woodwork area as the boys were.
Work with Parents
Encourage male volunteers throughout the program. Create male support groups in early childhood programs in schools. One of the real challenges in early childhood programs in schools is there are few male teachers and few male volunteers. When you're few in number, you feel like a token. You feel that you're picked on. You feel you're singled out, and eventually, you leave. We need to provide support groups to make both male teachers and other early childhood providers feel needed and wanted and to make male volunteers feel needed and important to the program.
Critically, help parents understand how boys and girls differ in many ways. Help parents to not compare their children to each other. Help parents understand that the developmental milestones (what children should be doing behaviorally, academically, and related to speech) are very general. They are averages and they often don't apply to individual children. Furthermore, in boys, these milestones (particularly behaviorally and in terms of literacy), tend to be delayed.
Encourage parents to play with their children and to turn off cell phones and TVs. Encourage parents to use the outdoors with their children, to use the parks, greenbelts, trails, community gardens, and outdoor museums. There are tremendous opportunities in communities for families to engage in the outdoors.
Help parents advocate for their children, particularly children who struggle academically and behaviorally. If they have a boy who struggles, give them permission to determine what's going on, permission to understand what's going on, permission to advocate for their child. Help parents to understand the critical developmental and learning value of play, hands-on learning, use of the outdoors, and learning about nature.
Summary and Conclusion
In summary, throughout this course, we have mainly discussed two things. First of all, young boys (birth to age eight) struggle in our early childhood programs and in our elementary schools. They struggle because there is a lack of goodness-of-fit between how young boys naturally learn, develop and grow, and the kinds of environments that we're providing for young boys in our early childhood programs in schools. If we care about the success of young boys, we must focus on a paradigm shift that provides a better goodness-of-fit between our programs and the needs of young boys. This goodness-of-fit focuses on hands-on learning, using non-traditional approaches to learning and to education, making sure that the early childhood program is not considered the first rung of the educational ladder, using the outdoors, and encouraging more movement and the arts in our early childhood programs in schools.
