Reply to Does your girls-school high schooler interact at all with boys (or even date/have a boyfriend?)

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The problem is that there are lots of kids at these schools who truly have zero interaction with the other sex.

I was shocked when I realized my friend's son (HS senior) has zero female friends or even acquaintances. He doesn't follow any female friends on Instagram, and he doesn't have a single teen girl's cell phone number. He literally has no interactions with teen girls either online or IRL. His dad insists that the boy is interested in meeting girls and says that he talks about how much he'd like to have a girlfriend, so it's not as if he isn't wanting that. The sad fact is that he lost all touch with the girls he knew from middle school, he has no activities through which to meet girls outside of school in a casual way, and he has no practice talking with girls as just normal people and potential friends. Without that, it's pretty difficult to make the leap all the way to initiating a romantic relationship with a perfect stranger. Yes, he has a sister, but she's much older than him. He has a few female cousins who live in California. Those female interactions are pretty useless to him when it comes to helping him feel comfortable forming friendships with teen girls who are his age.

For normal teen boys who aren't especially attractive to teen girls or really confident and outgoing, the all boys setting can present serious pitfalls when it comes to normal adolescent social development if you're not careful as a parent. For the "popular" guys it's much easier because girls will usually have no qualms about approaching them while out and about even if they don't know them. I see this all the time with my own daughter and her friends. [/quote]

Yes I agree. There are always going to be popular kids, the normal kids and the shy kids in terms of interacting with the opposite sex. [b]What happens at single sex school is there is less chance to interact with the same age opposite sex. It’s like everyone drops a category- the popular kids are more like normal kids, the normal kids are shy kids and the shy kids are very shy. Many of the boys and girls just do not interact with the same age opposite sex for weeks or months. Really hard to “date” in those situations.[/b] [/quote]

OP here.  This is very insightful and exactly what I observe.  There are girls who have a lot of contact with boys through an outside activity but outside of those...

The popular girls have the popular boys contacting them through social media, etc.  once you get invited to a few things you're likely to get invited to more. 
The shy girls can go weeks or months with no boy interaction.

My daughter and friends are in the middle ground (typed the "normal kids" above).  In a coed school they would have (and had) guy classmates, friends, boyfriends.  They're not the popular girls who are fielding all sorts of attention online and in-person but they would have a regular amount of attention and interaction with boys. 
Now all those normal interactions are removed.  They're not popular enough or outgoing enough or whatever to garner attention (mostly via social media) from the popular boys and the normal or shy boys aren't reaching out either.  Some do have regular contact with boys from coed sports but many (my daughter included) do not
(she does not swim or run track)

Of course, none of this should come as a surprise--we signed up for a single gender school.  But it's interesting to observe. 
And it has helped with grades.  This group gets fantastic grades with some significant distractions removed.    
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