One of the most widely accepted beliefs about the differences between troubled boys and girls may need to be revised, according to new research.
Experts have long believed that girls tend to internalize their problems, becoming depressed or anxious, while boys externalize, turning to violence against people or property.
But a new study found that this oft-repeated idea didn’t hold true for African-American youth who were in the juvenile justice system. For them, whether they internalized or externalized depended not on gender, but on what was happening within their families.
The results suggest more attention needs to be paid to the intersection of race, gender and family when it comes to dealing with troubled youth, said Stephen Gavazzi, co-author of the study and professor of human development and family science at Ohio State University.
“If you look at most studies involving internalizing and externalizing among youth, they generally look at white, middle-class samples,” Gavazzi said.
“Most research has not paid attention to race. And when studies do look at race, they are not likely to look at family and gender as well.”
In this study, the results showed that Black girls and boys showed similar levels of externalizing and internalizing behavior, once family dysfunction was taken into account. In these families, boys and girls were more likely to show outward aggression if they lived in families with higher levels of dysfunction. Such a relationship was not found in white families.
“Family issues affect children in African-American families differently than they do in white families,” Gavazzi said. “That hasn’t been really hasn’t been found before.”Â
Source: Ohio State University: This study, published in the July 2008 issue of the Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, involved 2,549 youth who appeared before a juvenile court in five counties in Ohio.
