When I was in elementary school 40 years ago, during recess usually the boys would play together and the girls would play together. I don’t remember seeing groups of boys and girls together. I wonder if it’s still like that today or if it’s become more common or even typical for mixed groups of elementary school kids to play together. Say, between the ages of 9 to 12.
Thanks very much. I don’t have kids or spend time with kids so need your input.
I have 16 years of recess duty behind me; my observation is that, in DC at least, they definitely do.
As far as I can tell, here in the nether reaches of the Great Plains, boys and girls play together more than they did when my kids were young (in the ‘80s and early’90s) and certainly more than I remember in the ‘50s and early ‘60s when I was in elementary school. My experience is gleaned from my nearly 4yo granddaughter in preschool at the state university College of Education child development lab school.
Maybe in schoolyards, but when my sons and daughter were growing up in the 80s, the kids on our street tended to group by age (or, I guess, size) rather than gender. And there were enough boys and girls around that they could have clumped together in pretty much any grouping they wanted.
When i was a child, in the sixties and seventies, all the neighborhood kids played together. We played kick ball, and four square, and kick the can. We played in sandboxes. We didn’t split up by sex.
At school we sometimes did split by sex, especially as we got older. But not the little kids at recess.
When my kids were small, in the nineties, the kids mostly segregated by sex on the playground. But my son hung out with girls in smaller groups until middle school, when it became uncool. As an adult, he’s now “playing with girls” again. Or, he’s geeking out in extremely technical discussions of complex knitting with a mostly-female group.
I went to a K-2 primary school in the early 80s. We had a boys and girls side to the playground (switched every week). No idea why.
Must be old, I don’t really remember anything other that trike/ bike riding when I was little. I don’t think I ever played in a sand box. From about 4th grade on it depended on what we were playing. Tag, ditch, kickball, playground games - boys and girls. Baseball, football - boys only.
Currently in the places I’m familiar with, most of the time it seems to be sibling with sibling. Occasionally 1 or 2 others. Almost always in a fenced back yard. Front yards seem to be for mom to sit on the steps looking at her phone while the little kids ride their trike/bike back and forth on the same 30 feet of sidewalk.
I was born in 1985, so my childhood experiences are a bit later than what the OP asked for, but I played in mixed groups until the age of about 7, when playtime started to split along gender lines. My older son is just about to turn 7 and is still equally happy playing with friends of either gender, but I suspect that’s about to change (not that I’m bothered either way). I don’t discern any difference there between now and my own childhood 30 years ago.
Your son sounds awesome, and lucky! (Genesis for this post was, I’m a man whose friends today are mostly women; I liked playing with the girls in elementary school but hardly ever did it because of self-imposed ideas that it just wasn’t done. Missed out on a lot of fun.)
Watching my grandkids play, I notice that they separate into gender groups more often than not. When I was a kid in the 60s-70s I seem to remember that it was the same thing. We would all play together if it was a game like tag, kick ball, etc.
In South Africa, we self-segregated for some games, and not for others.
Like, only boys played Cops-and-Robbers type games - actually, we generally played Cowboys & Indians or The Blue and The Grey, as US historical politics wasn’t on our radar but nobody at a Coloured school in the 80s would willingly play a cop), only girls played skipping or hopscotch.
But everyone played hide-and-seek or tag or marbles or circle games like Drop Ball (a Drop Handkerchief variant).
Nowadays, I don’t see the same degree of segregation with my kids, no. But then, I don’t see anyone playing those games, either.
I was born in '71. In my experience, in preschool through kindergarten boys and girls generally played together but started to self segregate through elementary school. Personally, my best friends tended to be girls up through 2nd grade, but I was the exception, and got some teasing because of it.
This documentary " The Human Animal Ep. 4 - The Biology of Love" examines this phenomena starting around 5:40:
It says that pre-sexual children separate into separate, sometimes antagonistic groups so that they can later re-engage in a new way to form a strong sexual relationships that have not been dulled by undue familiarity. Not only does this pertain to the friendship aspect, but also trying to figure out sexual signals. The documentary implies this may be one part of why humans have life-long sexual relationships that have little correlation to conception.
If this is true, I wonder if it’s consistent with gay children. Do gay boys tend to hang out with girls and lesbian girls tend to hang out with boys so that when they later enter puberty, they feel a strong sexual attraction to potential mates?
Most of the gay boys/men I’ve known did indeed play mostly with girls. But the lesbians I’ve known weren’t any more likely to have played with boys than the straight girls/women were. I’m a straight woman, and I played with boys almost as often as with girls.