Let them start school later and, yes, let them fight and play with toy guns.
Evidence shows that boys are more prone to school failure than ever before because there has been a profound change in the way we educate kids, beginning in kindergarten, with an acceleration of the early elementary curriculum. Thirty years ago, if you walked into just about any kindergarten in North America, you would've seen kids doing lots of different activities: singing, playing, dancing, fingerpainting. There was some didactic education, but it was a very small part of the day. Today, in just about any kindergarten, public or private, the primary activity is formal didactic education, with the kids sitting still and the teacher instructing. It's all about learning to read and write. That acceleration of the curriculum took place without any awareness of the hard-wired sex differences in the trajectories of brain development. People had no understanding of this because it only became known in the past five years.
As early as kindergarten teachers generally want order and conduct in the classroom, but there are huge differences in the ability of the average six-year-old girl and boy to sit still and be quiet. You should never ask a small child, especially not a boy, to sit down and stay quiet. Many find that very difficult, and it's not essential to learning. On the contrary, for many boys, the best classroom is one where they're jumping up and down.
Q: A lot of schools ban any kind of pretend gun play, sword fighting and so on. Is this bad for boys?
A: Policies which ban children from playing with pretend swords or toy guns are not grounded in any research findings demonstrating that those policies accomplish anything good. Prohibiting children from playing with toy swords or guns does not decrease the likelihood of any bad outcome, indeed it accomplishes no useful end. The school could have taken the opportunity to build imaginative play around concepts like teamwork and heroism. Instead, schools too often simply endorse traditional girls' activities while condemning traditional boys' activities.
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http://www.macleans.ca/culture/entertainment/article.jsp?content=20080109_70985_70985&page=1
