Boys and girls develop differently. Anyone who's had a son and a daughter can tell you that. From learning to kick into their babygro feet to walking and talking, girls seem to get there faster. But when it comes to building blocks or even later maths, boys seem to surge past girls. 

But it's not because boys develop more slowly than girls, nor that their brains are hardwired differently. Boys and girls just develop in different areas first. And it's a difference which even affects learning to read.

Learning at Your Own Pace

According to Dr Leonard Sax, research pyschologist and author of the book, Boys Adrift, areas in the brain develop at different rates for boys and girls. For example, researchers have found that the areas of the brain involved in:

• Language and fine motor skills (e.g. handwriting) mature about six years earlier in girls than in boys, whereas
• Targetting and spatial memory mature about four years earlier in boys than in girls.

It's an astounding gap. But it explains why for instance, at age two, a boy is likely to be able to build a bridge out of blocks more easily than a girl of the same age. And why three-year-old girl may be able to interpret facial expressions better than a boy at age five.

What is means for later education is even more significant. Take reading and maths. Girls, advantaged by their earlier developing language skills, learn to read faster and more easily than boys. But boys, advantaged by their earlier developing spatial memory and targeting skills, learn to do maths faster and more easily than girls.

Is either better at the subject than the other? No. Each gender merely blooms at their own rate.

One Size Does Not Fit All

Knowing this offers a completely different perspective on how and when to encourage learning various subjects on a child. The principle is simple: don't expect to run before you can walk.
The problem is that trying to (well-meaningly) push a child before they are ready, is more likely to create a negative association with the subject, which ends up being more damaging than anything.

The classic example is maths and science. There has been a long held world view that men are simply better at numbers than women. They are simply hardwired in that way. And to be honest, if you look at all the male scientists and mathematicians out there, you'd be hard pressed to disagree.

Sax argues this a direct by-product from undifferentiated education systems. A one-size-fits-all approach. If girls had the opportunity to learn math at their own pace, the chances are good that we would have many more teenage math geniuses who are girls.
Like many boys bloom late to literature and foreign languages, many girls are - or could be - late bloomers to math and science. So by the time girls are ready to dive into the world of numbers around 12 years, their experience in school system has told them that this is not for them.
This leads into an interesting debate on the merits of separate and tailored curriculums, which I will discuss in a later post.

Relaxing Into Reading

Which brings me to back to how this all affects reading. When I was small, kindergarten was all about socialization - finger painting, playing on the swings, dressing up and my personal favourite, making your own fairy cake to take home!
But today, its all about teaching literacy and learning basic arithmetic. Scarily, in 2007, the kindergarten curriculum at most American schools, both public and private, looked very much like the first-grade curriculum of 1977.

Is it a bad thing to want your kid to get a head start? No. But is it developmentally appropriate for your child to be adept at reading and writing at an early age? The answer is still no.
Why?  Because your kid's brain is simply not there yet. And depending on whether your child is a boy or girl, it may take longer to do so.

Getting reading specific, an expert team of 15 neuroscientists, based at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, discovered that the brain’s language centers in many five-year-old boys look like the language centers in the brain of the average three-and-a-half-year-old girl. It's a normal developmental lag, which needs to be taken into account.

Now anyone who has ever tried to teach a three-year-old girl to read can tell you that its pure frustration for the child and teacher alike. Why? Because you are simply asking a young girl to do something that her brain is just not ready to do yet.
Similarly, trying to teach many five-year-old boys to read and write may be just as inappropriate. This has little to with innate inteliigence, but a lot to do with timing.

So does this mean you shouldn't try and read with your child at an early age? Not at all. Reading together definitely helps language development and later literacy level. But relax your expectations on reading ability and achievement.
Keep your reading consistent, but an unpressurised activity. Make it fun, almost a source of play-time. For example, reading a personalized children's book starring your child as the hero and then later encouraging him to act it out in play. Don't get disheartened if their attention wanders. Your child will blossom when they are ready to.

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