CARE
The Children's Attitudes Relationships and Education (CARE) Project is a Lives of Girls and Boys Initiative project funded by research initiative funds from the T. Denny Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics.
Play Together:
Research has found that elementary school-aged children are as much as 11 times more likely to interact with same-gender peers than with other-gender peers, a phenomenon called gender separation. Gender separation at this age may be due in part to the risk of teasing that can occur in these social situations (e.g., "Sarah's got a boyfriend!").
Children might also feel uncomfortable or outright dislike interacting with children of the other gender for a number of reasons. These reasons include: 1) not feeling that they know how to interact with and enjoy spending time with the other gender, 2) fear of being teased by peers for interacting with the other gender, or 3) fear of being rejected by the other gender.
One of our focal goals is to explore how children really feel about other girls and boys and how such feelings might change with age. A second goal is to explore children's expectations and perceptions of the norms related to interacting with own- versus other-gender peers.
Learn Together:
Children's interactions with their classmates play an integral role in learning. Peers have the capacity to affect children's academic lives in both positive and negative ways. Positive peer interactions support learning and school success. On the other hand, negative interactions with peers, ranging from encounters that result in feeling discomfort or exclusion to outright rejection and victimization, can lead to feelings of alienation and disengagement from school.
An overarching goal of our research is to learn how children's gender-related attitudes, expectations, and behaviors affect children's academic outcomes. The insights gained in this study will inform interventions aimed at promoting more positive and effective interactions between girls and boys.
Work Together:
Girls and boys not only tend to gravitate towards children of their own gender, but they also develop different interaction styles and relationships with their peers. For instance, girls (compared to boys) tend to exhibit interactional styles that are characterized by more cooperative and pro-social behaviors (e.g., offering help) and boys tend to have interactional styles are characterized by more competitive and assertive behaviors.
Importantly, the more that children are inclined to interact with same-gender peers, the more they learn the interaction styles associated with their own gender. Thus, the more time girls and boys spend apart, the more they develop gender stereotyped interaction styles.
These differences in interaction styles can limit the degree to which girls and boys are able to and feel motivated to work together in classrooms. One of our goals is to understand children's attitudes and expectations about interacting with girls and boys in the classroom context. For example, does the perception that boys have a more assertive, dominant style reduce girls' interest in working with boys?