When the bell rings for games period, the boys rush onto the field in eager anticipation of enjoying a game. Most girls though, fall back, standing at the edge of the field, overwhelmed, not sure if they can ‘match up’. It doesn’t surprise the pros though.
“Girls study and do household chores; boys study and play,” says Preeti Arora, a junior-school sports teacher at a prominent school in Delhi. Preeti has been a referee at the Incheon Asiad and a junior-school physical education teacher. She says every year it is a challenge to explain to parents that their daughters need to just get onto the field and play recreationally. In her conversation with parents, she coaxes them to send their daughters for training. “I ask them to see how much more confident their daughters are,” she says.
What’s changed?
Unfortunately, not much. It’s not just that parents don’t see daily physical activity for girls as a necessity. Sometimes, they’d just rather not have them go outdoors, even if it’s to a park to play, because they’re scared for their security. Girls are chaperoned, monitored, tracked, and their independent mobility often curbed, limiting access to any kind of outdoor spaces, let alone playgrounds. “If you don’t send your daughter out anywhere, how will she ever have the confidence to walk onto a games field?” asks Mandeep Kaur, national-level cricket player and physical education teacher in a school in Delhi.
Worse, many feel their daughters will get ‘tanned’, looping the very reason a girl is born, back to marriage and the ‘demand’ for fair brides. “At some point in his life, a boy will be told to get out of the house and play, but the way a girl is socialised, she receives approval for being home, for being quiet,” says Nupur Dhingra Paiva, a Delhi-based psychologist, and author of Love & Rage: The Inner Worlds of Children .
New Delhi,18/09/2012: School girls playing at the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan in New Delhi on September 18, 2012. Photo:R_V_Moorthy
As girls enter puberty and some awkwardness creeps in, rather than dispelling it by encouraging them to go out and play, adults may reinforce the idea of staying out of a mixed-gender recreational play.
It’s not just parents. Some schools, for instance, will send girls for a dance class and boys for games. Field events may see boys marching and girls dancing. “We give them dolls to play with, call them ‘Angel’, and they become dolls and believe they must act like angels,” says Preeti. “You’ll often see fathers taking their sons for a game. How many fathers have you seen take their daughters to play or even to watch a match?”
Ideas of how a girl should act or be, often stem from the patriarch, says Jhunu Behera, mother to Tripta Behera, a 16-year-old national-level football player. This trickles down with the rest of the family endorsing it, some — a brother, a grandmother — more vocally than the others.
- Nupur Dhingra Paiva and Richard Paiva are co-founders, The Art of Sport, a training company that looks at the overall development of young girls (6-11 years) through sport. Here are a few strategies that they employ to get girls out of their wallflower moments.
- Going outdoors rather than to the mall for family entertainment
- Getting a sports complex membership for the family
- Providing access to girls to go out and play regularly
- Encouraging shouting, so girls learn to be loud
Nupur teaches Infant Observation to MPhil students in Ambedkar University in Delhi. She says the way in which infants’ bodies are treated differs depending on whether it’s a male or female child. A paper on ‘Sex Stereotyping of Infants’ examines individual behavioural measures and the effects. For instance, encouraging activity in an infant is more likely if it’s a boy. The engagement of ‘nurturance play’ is more likely with a girl.
It’s subtle, but is embedded in the nurture. While gender-labelling studies have their limitations, Nupur says the nature-nurture interaction is so intertwined, it’s hard to tell them apart or separate them.
Mothers are role models for their daughters. “What does a girl observe the other women in the family do with their bodies? Children learn from observation, not instruction,” she says.
Play and sport is a great form of getting anger, aggression, and anxiety out of the system. The less girls play, the more they internalise it, only to end up in their teenage years with eating disorders or self-harm patterns, and in later years, in depression, much more common in women than in men.
What must change?
“We must cultivate an overall culture of sports,” says VS Jaggi, Assistant Professor, Department of Physical Education and Sports, Shyam Lal College, University of Delhi. He wants people to know that only play can give children the kind of neuromuscular development needed for overall growth. Once you grow the culture, everyone will be out playing.
It’s habit-forming, says Preeti. “Once you get it into their blood, they will demand it.” Let everyone wear the same uniform, so that a skirt, for instance, does not become a barrier to play. Let girls yell, talk loudly, get angry, express excitement, so they’re not intimidated by the aggression of boys, either on the playground, or in life itself.
