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Which Child Is Allowed To Interrupt?
Certainly kids interrupt you. Some days it seems like you can’t get a full sentence out, say nothing of an entire anecdote, before one of your kids interrupts with something off topic and often unimportant. The question is, what do you do when that happens? How often do you switch your focus to the child who is interrupting? And, more to the point, do you listen to one of your kids more often than the others?
An interesting, home-grown investigation of this question was conducted by a mother who is also a scientist and a blogger for the online magazine Slate. She had noticed in her work setting that men who interrupted were more likely to be attended to than were women who interrupted. She wondered about the roots of this behavior. Does the attention of a group switch to boys who interrupt others more than it does to girls?
As the mother of a four-year-old girl with plenty of friends and plenty of playdates, she had the perfect research opportunity. She invited kids over and then watched what happened when someone interrupted the others.
Things fell out exactly as they had among the grownups at work. Over 10 hours of observations during playdates spanning eight weeks and involving between two and four kids at each playdate, kids interrupted each other a lot, at an average of once every 76 seconds. Playdates that included boys and those that included girls only had very similar numbers of interruptions. Both boys and girls interrupted frequently.
But in play groups that included boys, the boys made three times the number of interruptions that girls made. And with a greater proportion of boys in the group (with three boys to one girl in contrast to one boy to one girls), the rate of interruption increased. The only time interruptions by girls exceeded the interruptions by boys was when girls outnumbered boys in the group 2:1. When girls played together without any boys in the group, they interrupted each other three times more frequently than they interrupted anyone when boys were present.
This runs counter to what popular culture tells us, that females talk all the time and that males can’t get a word in edgewise. In fact, this set of informal observations confirms the idea that girls’ contributions are valued less than boys’ and that boys actually talk more and are listened to more than are girls.
What’s the take-away?
- Be more mindful of how you distribute your attention. Notice if you tend to listen more or permit more interruptions from boys than from girls. Be more fair.
- Listen to children all the way through. By definition, someone who interrupts isn’t listening to everything another person is saying. This behavior might seem to come naturally, as our brains work faster than another person’s mouth, but it’s also learned behavior. Teach how to listen by being a better listener yourself.
- Help your daughters, especially, to feel valued and listened-to. There is nothing you can do to make the boys in your daughter’s play group or classroom pay better attention to her – and you shouldn’t try to enforce any sort of rules about that. But you can support your children, especially your girls, in feeling that what they have to say is important.
- You don’t have to be a researcher to see what’s going on for your kids. While certainly a small-scale set of observations like this isn’t the sort of science that’s going to win a Nobel prize, every thoughtful parent can stop and really notice what children’s lives are like. Pay attention. You might learn something interesting!
Realize that the boy-girl differential appears to be bigger than the preschool. Women’s voices are dampened in many areas from the sciences to the arts and this will affect your daughter throughout her life. Keep up your support.
Be a force for leveling the playing field and for listening to every child.
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© 2014, Patricia Nan Anderson. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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