Why aren’t more teenage girls out on the playing fields?
Girls, puberty, bodies – what could possibly go wrong? Jan Hoffman at the New York Times reports on one thing:
So why aren’t more teenage girls out on the playing fields?
Research shows that girls tend to start dropping out of sports and skipping gym classes around the onset of puberty, a sharp decline not mirrored by adolescent boys.
A recent study in The Journal of Adolescent Health found a surprisingly common reason: developing breasts, and girls’ attitudes about them.
Is it surprisingly? Not if you are a girl or a woman, and you know what it’s like to develop breasts.
In a survey of 2,089 English schoolgirls ages 11 to 18, nearly three-quarters listed at least one breast-related concern regarding exercise and sports. They thought their breasts were too big or too small, too bouncy or bound too tightly in an ill-fitting bra. Beginning with feeling mortified about undressing in the locker room, they were also self-consciously reluctant to exercise and move with abandon.
Two globes bouncing around on your chest while you run and jump? Who wouldn’t want that?
“We make assumptions about what we think we know, so it’s important to be able to say that as cup size increases, physical activity decreases for a lot of girls,” Dr. Sharonda Alston Taylor, an assistant professor of pediatrics at Baylor College of Medicine in Texas, who focuses on adolescent obesity.
What to do? Better support, first of all.
Joanna Scurr, the lead author of the study and a professor of biomechanics at the University of Portsmouth in England, said the breast itself had little internal support, so when a girl’s body moved, the breast moved independently, and the movement increased with breast size. In up to 72 percent of exercising women, she said, that movement was a cause of breast pain or discomfort.
Yet while sports and physical education programs frequently recommend protective gear for boys, like cups, athletic supporters and compression shorts, comparable lists for young women rarely include a mandatory or even recommended sports bra.
…
When researchers asked the girls how they would prefer to receive breast information — via a website, an app, a leaflet or a private session with a nurse — the overwhelming majority replied that they wanted a girls-only session with a female teacher.
A girls-only session with a female teacher? I don’t think that’s allowed any more.
Also? If you’re going to make us do calesthenics like jumping jacks, NOT IN FRONT OF BOYS! We knew damn well they were ogling and making jokes about the busty gals.
oh christ I totally remember my embarrassment when that happened to my chest. I could not believe it, and it hurt sometimes just b/c those things were there, pasted on my chest. God. And that doesn’t include how mortifying it was to be looked at by boys. Jesus. Yet another serious design flaw.
Well, I can’t say I ever thought breasts were a design flaw, but then I’ve never had to live with them or the consequences of having them. So, yeah…
I do remember the obvious embarrassment and shame that girls at my school were going through during the tween and teen years. That was of course both fuel for the behaviour of some boys and also probably in part initiated by the behaviour of those boys. Our teachers generally just tried to ignore it all and just intervened to make sure nothing ever went too far. Boys who were slower to develop or, (more rarely) faster to develop also had a hard time of it. Whoever thought it was a good idea to toss a bunch of pubescent naked kids in a room unsupervised needs a stern talking too frankly. As for the weird shit hormones do to you, boners and testicles, sheesh.
I think we can agree the entire concept of puberty is a design mistake. Given that this is a known ‘feature’ at a certain age range I think schools, and society, could have a whole lot better processes for handling this time.
I was a late bloomer (in pretty much everything!) and a tomboy… to my mother’s embarassment (I remember borrowing a boy’s skates to play ice hockey), so I couldn’t understand why my peers began shunning gym and sports. My best friend tried to explain things to me. I nodded but never really understood things until puberty finally arrived. It was then that a heavy religious curtain descended on me. I was doubly segregated; I was transferred to a girls’ school and forbidden to do a whole slew of things, including wearing makeup or shorts. And I was getting religiously indoctrinated. Having been fashioned from a rib, females were “bent”. Allah created us with “special duties” and playing sports or, especially, listening to music, was “lahw” (useless, distracting) or “haram”. The only good thing about all this is that I had more time to spend in the library. And no one was around to censor what I read. A year under hijab was to come but the seeds of rebellion were already planted…
#2 & #3, design flaw, design mistake? I wasn’t aware this was a creationist / I.D. website!
#5:
Oh, please. Neither of those people were promoting creationist ideas. Design can happen by nature, too.
Design flaws introduced by the Blind Idiot of Pseudo-random Chance are still design flaws…
I mean, if we were well designed surgery would just be a matter flipping open the hood…
I’ve just checked our (Polish) statistics. It looks worse than I expected. The prevalent opinion is that what we have at the moment is a real “plague” (the word appeared in a couple of places) of fake medical leaves for girls, permitting them to skip gym at schools. Nothing analogous happens with the boys.
I have a personal motivation for being interested in the topic, as my daughter is one of the school sport drop-outs. (Just in case: we refused to go to a doctor for a fake medical leave, but we know that some other parents were not so reluctant.) Anyway, her main stated reasons are (1) those horrible teachers (yes, as usual – nothing new here), (2) her hatred of team sports which are promoted at school, to the effect that the kids blame each other (read: her) for the failures of the team and (3) changing rooms which are “uncomfortable and awkward”.
Design flaw or the flaw of the school system? The following quote from the linked article suggests the second:
This accords also with our practice. She’s been always more than ready to use any loophole to skip gym at school, while enjoying swimming and tennis in her free time, with no “design flaws” being an obstacle to the latter.
@5, if I thought for a second you actually believed that, I would wave a middle finger in your general direction. Instead I’ll snort and say yeah, right. Have a good nights sleep.
Glad one of you gets me, Rob. :-)
It’s not nature’s design flaw. It’s patriarchy’s, and in that case it’s really not a bug. It’s a feature. If it wasn’t, the issues of sports bras, private changing areas, and choice of sports would simply be addressed in a straighforward way.
And that goes for puberty itself, too. There’s always some awkwardness because nobody has any clue what they’re doing at that age. But the massive hangups (everybody) and cruelty (some, mostly male…) are completely optional. And we’ve opted for them because too many people think they’re somehow going to gain by it. Always makes me wonder about the “sapiens” part of “Homo sapiens.”
I think that phys-ed activities should be gender segregated starting at age 10 or so. And apart from body image issues, it’s tech devices that are also cutting into outdoor play time as well. Not only is texting terribly sedentary, it also provides a situation in which an inordinate amount of junk food consumption can occur. And that applies to boys as much as girls.
Soccer balls everywhere are lonely
I don’t recall anything like that from my school days. PE was definitely mostly segregated in middle and high school (mostly, because on rainy days classes were co-ed because there was only one indoor gym – on such days gym class would often become a folk-dancing class), co-ed in elementary. The code phrase for being on one’s period was ‘today I’m working to the best of my ability’ because the teacher had a strong objection to some of the slang phrases. One was supposed to at least change into the uniform, show up, and at least try the lighter activities.
I’m not saying everything was happy-clappy. Everyone had their preferred activities – some liked long distance running, some liked ball games, some liked gymnastics, some preferred the more artistic performance aspects – and their disliked activities (personally I disliked running more than half a mile at a time, as well as anything dance-like, I liked all ball games, gymnastics, swimming, short distance running). But nobody dropped out altogether or even mostly.
In the later grades the teacher emphasized activities that can be done in limited space with no specialized equipment such as aerobics, in the hope we will remain active post-school regardless of where we end up. We were supposed to invent an aerobics routine as an assignment (yes, homework in PE).
Nevertheless, few if any girls were involved in sports outside of PE class, while among the boys there were still those who played soccer or basketball during recess and possibly outside school. The school had a boys’ track and field team that competed internationally but no girl teams whatsoever. I suppose the girls that were involved in scouting and other youth movements got plenty of physical activity outside of school.
So in summary – I think my school did have some policies that kept girls active though not to the same extent as boys.
Breasts exist at ALL times of the month, and once you reach a certain size range, it’s very difficult to find a workout bra that will keep them under control, and the ones that do exist don’t even look like ordinary sports bras. Unless your teacher has DDD or higher herself, she’s not likely to be able to steer you to a model that can keep you supported if you jump your best.
It *is* a design flaw. There is no good reason for some women to have unwieldy mounds of flesh that restrict arm movement, make them bump into things, and weigh so much.
I know there’s also been several reports on puberty (and, specifically, breast development) occurring earlier in girls; a little Googling turned up any number of explanations for the trend, but it clearly exists. If this is the driving factor in girls dropping out of sports, then it’s going to get more pronounced without some direct efforts at intervening.