Girls are more ready for school, Statscan says

TENILLE BONOGUORE
Globe and Mail Update

By the time a child is three, the groundwork for their schooling abilities is laid and differences between girls and boys, rich and poor is already starting to appear, new research suggests.

In general, girls are more ready to learn at the age of five, says a Statistics Canada report which assessed children's readiness for school and then traced back two years looking for earlier behavioural hints.

At five years old, girls have better communication skills, attention and self-control levels, and are more independent in dressing, while boys display more curiosity.

Boys and girls were evenly matched for cleanliness, co-operative play, vocabulary and work effort.

A family's income also appears to have a strong impact on how ready a child will be for school, but it doesn't determine the entire picture, the researchers found.

Children from lower income households didn't understand as many words, couldn't communicate as well, had lower knowledge of numbers, and lower attention and co-operative play rates.

But the family's affluence had no impact on work effort, curiosity, self-control and independence of dress and cleanliness.

More important than income was positive interaction with parents. Children who talk to their parents and receive largely positive feedback — being encouraged to do one thing, instead of discouraged to do another — rated higher in communication, curiosity and co-operation.

Sport also helps develop communication skills, number knowledge and use of symbols, and children who attend kindergarten go to school with better copying and symbol use, the study found.

But there's a lot of flux between the ages of three and five.

At the age of three, affluent children ranked higher than less affluent children in work effort and self-control of behaviour, but these differences had disappeared two years later.

In the same age bracket, girls and boys start off with the same levels of self-control of behaviour, but girls surge ahead by the time they're five, developing more self-control than their counterparts.