When it comes to mean or destructive social behavior, Pamela Orpinas says “so much of the research has focused on girls.” “We’ve had papers and books and qualitative analyses and focus groups” about the ways girls mistreat one another socially, the professor of health promotion and behavior told Op-Talk, “but we don’t know that much about boys.”  Dr. Orpinas may be helping to close that gap, with a new paper comparing “relational aggression” in boys and girls. She and her co-authors, Caroline McNicholas and Lusine Nahapetyan, define relational aggression as “harming others through damaging or manipulating peer relationships.” In order to measure the quality, they relied on a survey asking students how often in the past 30 days they had done things like spreading false rumors, ostracizing people or making mean comments about someone to turn other kids against that person. Six hundred and twenty students took the survey regularly from 6th grade through 12th grade.  The result: Significantly more boys than girls exhibited a pattern of high relational aggression in the early years of the study (overall, such aggression declined with age, a finding the authors expected). Specifically, the group of students reporting high aggression was 66.7 percent male.  “People say, ‘well, boys are physically aggressive, but girls are aggressive in their relationships,’” said Dr. Orpinas, “and it just does seem to be a myth.”  Others, too, are questioning whether girls really have a monopoly on social nastiness. A 2012 study of kids from nine countries found no significant difference between boys and girls when it came to relational aggression. And Rosalind Wiseman, whose book “Queen Bees and Wannabes” gave rise to the movie “Mean Girls,” turned her focus to the social lives of boys for her 2013 book “Masterminds and Wingmen.”  “Boys don’t demand our attention in the same ways that girls do,” she wrote. “We don’t give them a language for talking about their worries and experiences like we do with girls. And we really don’t think enough about what our culture — and ourselves by extension — demands and expects of boys and how it frames their emotional lives, decision-making, self-esteem, and social competence.”  This, she argued, needs to change: “The reality is that most boys’ days are filled with many of the same social challenges that girls face, and what they learn from those experiences matters now and for their futures, as it does for girls.”  Dr. Orpinas believes schools need to recognize relational aggression isn’t a single-gender phenomenon: “It’s really important to think about boys and girls when we do prevention programs,” she said. Parents, too, “need to pay attention to what both boys and girls are doing.” And “they need to model the positive behavior, including not being relationally aggressive themselves.”  Ms. Wiseman offered similar advice in her book: “Don’t lay down your values, expect your son to follow them, and then act differently yourself. If you talk badly about other people (especially other children he knows), it’s only reasonable to assume that he won’t do anything different.”  As for kids themselves, Dr. Orpinas told Op-Talk, “we need to make it cool to be positive and caring about other kids.”  The way adults talk about kids’ aggression, she added, may even be contributing to the problem. “We don’t talk as much, for example, about how kids do really cool things for each other.” Most kids aren’t aggressive, and “we do need to emphasize the positive,” she argued. “We have many examples of kids saying good things and kids helping each other, but that doesn’t sell very much so we don’t talk about it.”
Girls’ social aggression gets a lot of attention, but new research suggests the problem may be even bigger in boys.