Sex Differences in the Complexity of Children's Play and Games

Aside from Mead and Piaget, little attention has been paid to the world of play and games in the study of childhood socialization. This chapter discusses the Mead and Piaget tradition by focusing on play and games as situations in which crucial learning takes place, but it goes beyond Mead's and Piaget's work in three important ways. A central concern of this study is to explore sex differences in the organization of children's play and to speculate on the sources as well as the potential effects of those differences. Greater attention is given to girls' games as they are less familiar to adults. In contrast, this analysis focused on the peer group as the agent of socialization, children's play as the activity of socialization, and social skills as the product of socialization. One implication of this research is that boys' greater exposure to complex games may give them an advantage in occupational milieus that share structural features with those games.