Girls! Girls! Girls!

Distant, critical fathers may be agents in their daughter' eating disorders

Fathers who avoid closeness yet criticize their daughters' weight and diet may create an atmosphere that leads to eating disorders, new research suggests.

A study comparing women hospitalized with anorexia or bulimia to undergraduate without eating disorders found that the level of a father's intimacy with his daughter has a more significant influence on development of eating disorders than her mother's.

"The message may be that fathers should be more accepting of their children," says Renee Goodwin, a researcher at the Northwestern University Medical Center.

Goodwin and her colleagues, Jeffrey J. Haugaard, Ph.D., of Cornell University, and psychologist Fran Luckom-Nurnberg, discovered that the hospitalized women reported significantly less intimacy and acceptance and more avoidance and concentration on faults from their fathers than did women who had no history of eating disorders. But overall, both groups of women reported far fewer differences in relationships with their mothers.

The researchers defined acceptance as a relationship in which the parent regards the child as a full fledged member of the family who needs a certain degree of independence.  In avoidance, a parent neglects or rejects a child. In concentr4ation, a parent disproportionately directs control of a child.

Fathers of both groups of women spent a similar amount of time with their daughters, but the relationship was less satisfactory for the patients than for the undergraduates.

"The objective measures indicate that the father-daughter relationship is unsatisfactory, not because the father is never around - he is closely monitoring his daughter and her actions - but when he is around, he monitors her actions while he avoids her emotionally and refuses to accept her," Goodwin says. "He demands that she achieve a great deal without giving the emotional support she needs to accomplish such achievements."

Fathers of women with eating disorders were significantly more concerned with weight and dieting issues than were fathers of women without eating disorders.

"The fathering style of emotional neglect and over control, combined with the fathers' preoccupation with weight and dieting, may have influenced the daughters' focus on eating and dieting," Goodwin says.

The study found little difference in mother-daughter attachment between the two groups, nor was there a significant difference in weight and dieting issues among the mothers. "These findings are consistent with a previous study that reported that both parents of anorexics are both too nurturing and too neglectful," the researchers say.

Women with eating disorders were equally dissatisfied in their relationship with both parents, but this was not the case for the comparison group. But the key, Goodwin says, is how fathers of the patients seemed to be highly critical of the daughters' weight and diet.

Gifted girls have a harder time than gifted boys

Gifted kids are far from the social misfits may people still expect them to be. In fact, as a group they're less likely to be rejected by their peers than non-gifted youngsters are, according to recent research. There is, however, a sharp difference in their social status.

When gifted and non-gifted pupils, ages nine through 13, rated their classmates as popular, rejected and ignored, gifted boys were the most popular of all - and gifted girls the least. There was no gender difference in the non-gifted children's popularity.

Boys who are pulled out of regular classes for special instruction an activities for one or two hours a day, may win social acceptance and often popularity by being funny and highly verbal. Girls have more difficulty.

The girls were not popular, but they were not actively disliked either. As they grow older, they may either abandon their efforts to fit in, or become aggressive in their quest for popularity - and consequently less true to themselves and their talents.

Gifted girls' social behavior may reflect the mixed message they receive from society; on one hand, they are urged to exercise their gifts, on the other, they are admonished not to abandon their traditional roles as nurturing, supportive and complaint, not matter how smart they are.

Gifted child quarterly, Vol. 35, No. 3, p. 111

Marital roles affect girls' math and science ability

Parents' views on gender roles and the balance of power in their marital relationship may have considerable impact on their daughters' academic work, especially when the girls reach adolescence.

Parents often tighten their pressure on youngsters to conform to their traditional gender roles once they reach their teens.  Increased pressure for girls to participate in "feminine" activities such as dating may be at the expense of their math and science grades, according to a Pennsylvania State University study.

While in fifth and sixth grades there were no gender differences in the children's math and science grades, by seventh grade, girls from "traditional" backgrounds - where they spent more time with their mothers - scored significantly lower in the "masculine" subjects than girls from more egalitarian households.

The study found three distinguishing family characteristics which may work in combination to influence girls' grades at ages 12 and 13:

1. girls (and boys_ in egalitarian families spend more time with their fathers than children from traditional families.  There is no difference in the amount of time children spent with their mothers;
    

2. egalitarian mothers and fathers have less traditional views of sex roles, and therefore may be more likely to reward their daughters' math and science skills, and to emphasize future nontraditional career options; and
    

3. mothers with a higher degree of "marital power" - i.e. more income, education, and job prestige in relation to the father - may create a more equal division of labor with respect to child-rearing, providing girls with a more involved father.

An analysis of boys' families did not show similar results from this power difference.

The researchers conclude that in early adolescence, girls have a better chance of keeping up their math and science grades if they come from a family where the mother is "relatively powerful," and where both parents hold less traditional attitudes on sex roles.

Girls as likely as boys to have reading problems

Boys aren't the only ones with dyslexia after all.  Several studies show that girls are just as likely as boys to have severe reading problems.

So why do boys have the reputations of being extremely vulnerable to reading disabilities while girls are not?

The problem with many studies on reading disabilities is that many researchers only study pupils already identified as having severe reading problems.  Since teachers tend to place the reading disable3d label on rambunctious, disruptive, distractible boys and leave quite, compliant girls - whose frustrations with reading don't interfere with class routine - unclassified, most reading disability research has focused on boys.

Studies that test for reading problems from the general population show no statistically significant gender differences in the prevalence of reading disabilities.  In contrast to these findings, the schools which based their diagnoses of reading disability on teacher referrals had identified four times as many second-grade boys as girls as dyslexic, and more than twice as many third-grade boys as girls.

Fewer than half of the children referred for reading problems had disabilities.  The over-referral of boys for special classes for the reading disabled party reflects the teachers' typical view of even normal boys as less dexterous and attentive, more active and more likely to have behavioral, language and academic problems than their female classmates.

Most children singles out as reading-disabled invariably had behavior problems along with questionable reading skills, even it they were not actually reading-disabled.

Girls are as underrepresented as boys are overrepresented in reading disability classification and treatment.  The researchers concluded that physicians and parents should not rely solely on schools' identification of reading-disabled pupils, but should request tests of ability and achievement as hard evidence of their child's actual academic functioning.

Sally E. Shaywitz, Bennet A. Shaywitz, et al.  Journal of the American Medical Association, 264(8):998