Q. One thing that bothers me about some of the boys in my middle school classes is that when I ask them a question, they don’t look at me when they answer. I think that they would give more focused answers if they were paying closer attention to me. I said this to one of the boys who replied that he found it easier to pay attention when he wasn’t looking at me. Surely that can’t be true?
A. For some boys, it is true. We have known for a long time that boys in general are not as good as girls at reading body language or getting information from subtle voice cues. There are several explanations for this, but one study pointed out that day-old baby girls preferred to look at faces and day-old baby boys preferred to look at moving shiny objects! A new area of interest is called mirror neurons. These are parts of your brain which are active when you are trying to figure out what emotions other people are experiencing. The mirror neurons in many boys are not as active as those in most girls. What this all means is that a boy may not get any information from your facial expression and in fact, it may confuse him. If you discipline a boy and try to be encouraging at the same time by smiling, a boy may have no idea which message to pay attention to. Just because a boy does not look at you when you ask a question does not mean that he doesn’t know the answer, it may be that he needs to look at something else while he frames his answer.