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Distracted teens - The dreamboat next door

2015-08-11 11:59:27

It s official: having friends of the opposite sex is bad for children s grades

DO FRIENDS of the opposite gender distract teenagers, hampering their academic

performance? It may seem obvious, at least to paranoid parents, and yet it is

hard to prove. Simple analysis of a survey of American schoolchildren conducted

in 1995, for example, suggests no link between the proportion of a girl s

friends who were boys and her grades. Boys with lots of female friends actually

achieved better results than those with fewer.

A new paper* by Andrew Hill of the University of South Carolina, however, digs

deeper into the data, and comes to a different result. Friendship groups are

not random, which makes it tricky to isolate the effect of fraternising with

the opposite sex on school performance. Pushy parents, for instance, may both

encourage after-school activities (hotbeds of hobnobbing across the gender

divide) and help out with homework. By the same token, the sort of boys who do

not find it embarrassing to join a clique composed mainly of girls may also be

more studious.

Mr Hill gets around this by looking at the proportion of schoolmates of either

sex living near each student. He reasons that parents do not choose where to

live based on the sex of their neighbours children. The gender mix of

near-neighbours should therefore be unrelated to the invisible factors that

influence both friends and grades. But the mix of neighbours does influence

friendship groups in school, since children are much more likely to befriend

other children who live close by.

Mr Hill calculates the share of boys and girls among each child s 20 closest

neighbours and uses this to identify random differences in friendship groups.

He can then isolate the effect of having more friends of the opposite gender on

school performance. He finds that for every 10% more children of the opposite

sex among a student s friends, his or her grade-point average (GPA) declines by

0.1 (GPAs range from 0 to 4).

Below the age of 16, the effects are restricted to science and maths, but

beyond 16 they spill over to English and history as well. Girls seem to be more

prone to distraction, though Mr Hill cannot muster the statistical power to be

certain. This tentative result is consistent with other studies that find that

girls gain more from moving to single-sex schools.

Readers rushing to remove their children from co-ed schools should know,

however, that Mr Hill s results came with a twist. Having more friends of the

opposite sex may be bad for grades, but it has other effects, too. Among the

children from the original survey who were successfully re-interviewed 14 years

later, those whose grades had been dragged down by friends of the opposite

gender were more likely to be (or have been) married. Traditionalists worried

about a child mooning over the heartthrob next door may comfort themselves with

that.

achievement , American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2015.