Adolescent boys are interesting. As a parent of girls, I have no personal experience with boys other than through work. The decision was made to trial programming older kids and younger kids separately on the unit. This required switching kids between units on our floor. This also meant that some kids were not familiar with other kids once they were mixed. Our unit was all boys. The mixing involved sending a few of our boys and receiving a few girls to program for the day. I stayed on the unit with the older children and observed them interact throughout the day.
The boys were definitely "being boys" and were doing their normal acting up, disrupting group activities and being rude to the girls. Many of the boys were sent to their rooms to calm down and regroup before returning to the group activity. After this occurred a few times, my nursing sense knew what was going on, but I wanted to hear from these adolescent boys themselves.
When asked, each boy would state that they just did not like the girls in the group. After further conversation and questioning by me (and squirming by the boys), they had no idea why they were acting up. Once they calmed down, they returned to the group. Some made it through to the end, some did not. Oh the perils of being a teenager!
Our younger boys transitioned back to their "home" unit before group was over and before the girls were transitioned back to their "home" unit. One of our hyperactive younger boys interrupted group, started posturing and acting as though he was going to throw a chair, which promptly got him sent to his room. When asked why he did this, he was confidently able to state what the other boys did not. "I wanted to impress those girls."
