While 'playful girls' are not labeled the same way
The Education of Playful Boys: Class Clowns in the Classroom
The Education of Playful Boys: Class Clowns in the Classroom
Research has also shown that teachers exert influence on children's peer relationships (Hughes et al., 2001) by providing social cues about how likeable a peer is (Hughes et al., 2001; Farmer et al., 2011). The teacher's prominent visible role in the classroom provides extensive opportunities for students to observe exchanges with classmates, and to develop ideas about those who are liked and disliked, which then influences their own affective evaluations (Hughes et al., 2001, 2014). In accordance with social referencing theory, Hughes et al. (2001, 2014) found that students reported liking classmates who they viewed as having a positive relationship with the teacher, and disliking those they observed to be conflictual. Their findings emphasize the significant role the teacher plays in serving as a socializing agent who can significantly influence children's social relationships with peers.
It is thus crucial to children's social development and status that they are perceived by their teacher as agreeable and affable. Classmates will recognize children whose relations and exchanges with their teacher are disapproving, and they may adjust their impressions to dislike or shun these peers. The children who are most likely to have negative interactions with their teachers are those with a higher tendency to show disruptive classroom behavior and less able to constrain or redirect their frequent offtask activities (Kean, 1995; Rothbart and Bates, 2006). Their teachers come to regard them as less competent academically, and more challenging to manage and teach (Rothbart and Bates, 2006). The characteristics that have been identified as distinguishing playful children, including the propensity to be more physically active (Lieberman, 1977; Singer et al., 1980; Barnett, 1991b), verbal (Singer et al., 1980), impulsive (Barnett, 1991b; Rogers et al., 1998), aggressive (Barnett, 1991b; Rogers et al., 1998), and mischievous (Barnett, 1991b), would portend a poor relationship with teachers, which could then be transmitted to their classmates. Consistent with this literature, we wondered if more playful children would, at least initially, be viewed by their peers different in social status than children who are less playful, and whether their views would change across time (grades).
There are a number of indications, drawn from diverse literatures, that the constructs under scrutiny in the present study might yield differential outcomes for playful boys and girls. There is a voluminous body of literature demonstrating differences between boys and girls in a multitude of variables within and surrounding the school classroom. The amount and quality of teacher-student interactions, even in kindergarten, has been shown to be different for boys and girls (Jones and Dindia, 2004), and they are generally viewed as more difficult to manage (Matthews et al., 2009), and more disruptive in the classroom (Jones and Dindia, 2004) compared to girls. From the early grades on, teachers report, and have been consistently observed, to use significant amounts of negative feedback in the classroom to try to control boys' behaviors (Jones and Dindia, 2004).
Despite the plethora of research consistently documenting sex differences in play from birth through adolescence (Hughes, 2010), the literature investigating differences between boys and girls in their magnitude, scope, or expression of playfulness is sparse. The few studies of global playfulness with preschool and kindergarten-aged children have generally not detected any sex differences (Lieberman, 1977; Barnett, 1990, 1991a). However, some sex differences have been detected among the component playfulness dimensions (Barnett, 1991b). Boys were shown to exhibit heighted physical spontaneity, while girls surpassed them in social spontaneity, however, in the three other playfulness components no differences were observed. The high prevalence of boys, and not girls, among children labeled “class clown” (Yarrow et al., 1971; Damico and Purkey, 1978; Ruch et al., 2014; Platt et al., 2016) would also portend that sex differences would be evident in assigning this label to playful children. The presence of sex differences was thus a pervasive inquiry throughout the study in each of the different outcome variables and their relationships with playfulness.