This probably belongs in the Pit too, 'cos my ears are currently being assailed by the piercing screams of about 10 little girls playing outside my house. God, it’s a 'orrid noise.
However, it got me thinking about just WHY little girls let fly with such a high-pitched sound when they are playing (happily) in a group. They’re playing chasey and tag and all sorts of wonderfully innocent games, but for some reason, insist on punctuating the reverie with banshee screams. Why do girls do this? How come little boys are much less inclined to burst my eardrum…at least with screams?
Now we are talking LITTLE girls here (between about age 4 and 8)…before they have been chronically socialised into the ‘damsel in distress’ way of behaving. Which makes me think that perhaps it is genetic rather than environmental. In which case, maybe we can figure out which strand of the DNA to snip so that future generations will not have to put up with Saturday Afternoon Screams Of Delight from the neighbourhood kiddies!
My SO has 2 little girls (4 and 5) and they are easily twice as loud as anybody else in the house. That house includes 1 Adult male(me), 1 Adult Female(SO), in the summer 1 7 year old boy (my son) and a 7 month old boy(our son). The 5 year old is especially loud. She will ask what time dinner is and it will be louder than an F-15 with full afterburners on. At least daily she wakes the youngest seconds after we get him to sleep. She gets to spend time alone in her room to think about it when she does that. She just started Kindergarten and I’m hoping that will quiet her down a bit. A week into it has shown no change in volume. I will keep you informed as to her progress.
Err, sorry Loaded…it’s ME now saying ‘ohmigodohmigodohmigod that is SOOOO gross’ to my kids! The youngest (boy) got back from a ski camp yesterday to tell me that the best part of the camp was organizing a farting contest…the skiing was passe, the camp life was boring, and the only thing that kept him interested for the whole 4 days was the way he and his ‘mates’ would fart and belch their baked bean and lasagne dinners all over their schoolfriends! And I paid 300 bucks for this? OMG, I bloody-well hope he turns into a comedian after this…cos he certainly ain’t gonna be a brain-surgeon!
You haven’t got a little girl have you? Or neighbours whose genetic predisposition has been to birthing females. Lot’s of them. A veritable plague of little girls…who all like to scream in delight. I hope you never have to suffer the same fate, mate!
But. but. but…while I appreciate the commiserations and all, I still need to know WHY little girls are so predisposed to squealing and screaming! Why do they do this? Maybe this is a question for Cecil, no less!
How I hate squealing little girls! When my daughter was small one of her playmates had an older sister who did that. So the younger girls began. I told my daughter that if she kept it up she’d be forbidden to play with these girls. She stopped - and so did her little friend, but the sister apparently still thought it was cute. The sister never played at my house.
I live in a U-shaped apartment building, at the bottom of the “U”; so it seems that all sounds are funnelled directly into my front windows. I hear the peircing screams of little girls, the occasional barking of dogs, interminable cries of “Marco!” “Polo!”, and the neighbours who decide to have a barbeque at just the time I decide to go to bed. I’ve always wondered why little boys have to SHOUT everything when engaged in normal conversation. I’m like, “Little dude! You’re just talking with your friend. Do you have to shout?”
Of course if I say anything to the partents, I become “the cranky guy who doesn’t like kids”.
They even practice! I have two daughters (now grown, thank god), and I’ve seen girls sitting astride a park bench taking turns screaming into each others faces. And, appearantly, having a ball.
Peace,
mangeorge
Little boys make noise too - but instead of screaming, they yell. We have more boys than girls in my neighborhood, and when they get together to play, they make plenty of noise, let me assure you.
In winter, the hill across the street from me is a sledding heaven. I hear both boys and girls screaming in winter as they go down the hill.
Well, I suppose they sound shrill because the different parts of the larynx are immature. I have heard a little boy give a high pitched wail when he thought he had lost his mom in a store, so boys can make the same screaming noises as girls. As to why girls do it more - I’m guessing it has to do with differences in the language center of he brain. The sound drives my Rottweiler wild.
I do believe there’s some biological differences here. Just as boys tend to be more agressive and physical in their play, more inclined to wrestle from day one, little girls are tend to be more vocal from birth as well. Not just the high pitched screams - they also tend to learn to speak sooner, among other things.
There’s another physiological mechanism at work here. There is a range of pitch that the human ear is most sensitive to. It can surprise people that this is not the pitch of normal conversational speech, but rather that of a shrill, high scream. But it makes sense - this is the emergency channel for the human voice, and in an emergency you want it to carry far and wide for maximum effectiveness. The voices of little girls are right next to or even in that range. So, they aren’t actually louder, but it seems louder and more penetrating because it’s in a range your ears (and everyone else’s) are particularly senstive to. We are also somewhat hardwired to treat incoming messages in that range as emergency notices, which accounts for why they are soooo penetrating and annoying. So, if a little girl says "but I wasn’t screaming she might, in fact, be right - she may not have been particularly loud. Problem is, it sure seems that loud.
Another thing - a young boy’s voice is not that different in pitch from a young girl’s. In some instance, you may be hearing boys’ voices but mistaking them for girls since we tend to assume the higher pitches are female. Not true prior to purberty. (Or even post puberty in some cases - consider Wacko Jacko)
I’m at the end of a cul-de-sac, where a lot of kids gather to play. When there’s just a couple of girls playing with a group that’s dominated by boys, there’s no screaming. The amount of screaming by dirs is inversely proportional to the percentage of boys that are part of the play group; if there’s no boys, there’s constant screaming.
In college, groups of girls would randomly scream if they were out on the town, or if they were gathered together and one of them announced good news.
what you are hearing is unchecked emotion. children have not yet learned, or been told, the world sucks.
children also laugh tremendously more than teens or adults. their lives are full of happiness. there was a long story about this in the news just last week.
as soon as they discover evil republicans they stop laughing and really start screaming.
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I’ve heard that emergency vehicles’ sirens are deliberately tuned to the same pitch as a baby’s cry, for the same reason.
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