Moms Talk: Do Bright Girls Give Up on Challenges More Readily Than Bright Boys?

An interesting post came up yesterday by Heidi Grant Halvorson, a writer for The Huffington Post (which is now owned by Patch's parent company AOL), on a study that looked at the difference between how bright girls and bright boys dealt with challenges, and what implications that has for the difference in confidence levels in adult women and men. Halvorson's graduate advisor, psychologist Carol Dweck, conducted these studies in the 1980s.

Halvorson wrote:

(Dweck) found that Bright Girls, when given something to learn that was particularly foreign or complex, were quick to give up; the higher the girls' IQ, the more likely they were to throw in the towel. In fact, the straight-A girls showed the most helpless responses. Bright boys, on the other hand, saw the difficult material as a challenge, and found it energizing. They were more likely to redouble their efforts rather than give up.

Why does this happen? What makes smart girls more vulnerable and less confident when they should be the most confident kids in the room? At the 5th grade level, girls routinely outperform boys in every subject, including math and science. So there were no differences between these boys and girls in ability, nor in past history of success. The only difference was how bright boys and girls interpreted difficulty -- what it meant to them when material seemed hard to learn. Bright Girls were much quicker to doubt their ability, to lose confidence and to become less effective learners as a result.

Click here for the link to Halvorson's entire article

Moms and dads: Have you noticed a difference between boys and girls in the way that they approach challenges? How do you approach it when a child seems to give up on an activity too quickly? Let's open the discussion.