SAN DIEGO – While the bulk of current literature suggests that young girls exhibit less verbal and physical aggressive behavior than young boys, results from a new analysis funded by the National Institute of Mental Health suggest that may not be the case at all.
“Young girls–particularly those 5–6 years old–are more physically and verbally aggressive than we're giving them credit for,” Mariann Suarez, Ph.D., said in an interview during a poster session at the annual meeting of the Society for Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics. “We typically think of boys as more physically and verbally aggressive and girls as more relationally aggressive, when in fact both [genders are all three types]. Little kids are very aggressive at a very young age.”
The finding is important because pediatricians may be misidentifying aggressive symptoms in girls due to biased gender norms, said Dr. Suarez of the department of pediatrics at the MetroHealth campus of Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland.
As part of a larger NIMH study, Dr. Suarez and her associate, James J. Snyder, Ph.D., set out to investigate the gender differences in the development of verbal, physical, and relational aggression in a sample of 161 kindergarten and first-grade students at a public elementary school in Wichita, Kan. Dr. Suarez conducted the work while she was a graduate student at Wichita State University.
For nearly 2 years, the investigators used the Behavioral Playground Observation Coding System and a 12-item peer nomination measure to assess the youngsters' pattern of behavior. Assessment periods for the coding system were six 5-minute periods during the first and second halves of kindergarten and four 5-minute periods during the first half of first grade.
Study participants completed the peer nomination measure during the fall and spring of kindergarten. The investigators found that girls displayed increasing rates of verbal/physical aggression, while boys displayed relational aggression at a rate that surpassed girls. “That surprised me,” Dr. Suarez said. In kindergarten, more acts of verbal and physical aggression were observed among boys, compared with girls, but there were no gender differences among the first-graders.