Children may not always welcome their parents’ supervision and protective attitude as it feels restrictive to their sense of autonomy. However, if parental supervision is taken out of the picture, do they turn out to be any better? Between 2002 and 2009, a reality TV show conducted a social experiment to analyze this. They placed ten boys and ten girls, all aged 11 or 12, in two separate houses, to live without adult supervision for five days. The footages of both the houses were broadcasted on the UK Channel 4 documentary “Boys and Girls Alone.”
None of the children had met each other beforehand. Parents, guardians, and adults were not allowed in the houses. The houses were stocked with toys, books, paints, food, and cleaning equipment. There was a camera crew inside the house, but they didn’t engage or interact with the children. They were just there to intervene in case of safety issues. There was a bell the children could ring at any time to speak to the nurse, production team, their parents, or a child psychiatrist they all met beforehand. They were also free to leave the house at any time. There were cameras inside the bedrooms of the house that filmed the children – their routines, behaviors, and activities. The observers of the experiment concluded that boys and girls behaved quite differently in this circumstance.
As the respective footage shows, the moment the boys stepped inside their house, chaos unfolded. It seemed, at first, that they couldn’t believe the freedom they had been given. Soon enough, they started trashing the house and squirting water at each other with water pistols. A boy named Michael smattered sticky popcorn kernels all over the carpet. They dirtied the walls by writing, drawing, painting, and daubing them with paint tubes. They fought with cushions and pillows.
After a while, the boys realized that no one was going to clean the trash they had made. “We never expected to be like this, but I’m really upset that we trashed it so badly. We were trying to explore everything at once and got too carried away in ourselves,” one boy was heard saying in the footage. Upon the realization, they started by scraping the paint off the walls but it didn’t come off. One boy was seen vacuum-cleaning the window frame. Another was mopping the floor by messily squeezing a cloth under his foot. Even though they were trying to restore the order, it seemed they were ill-equipped to take care of themselves.
All the children had completed a cooking course before this experiment, but when it came to boys, none seemed to utilize their skills. Instead, they mostly snacked on sugar and cereal for meals, and at most, they snacked on a frozen pizza by heating it in the oven. On top of everything, they soon got into arguments about who was going to do all the cleaning work. The lush green garden outside the house was badly littered with trash and the garbage bin was spilling out garbage.
Even more so, the boys divided into two groups and even started teasing each other. At one point, the atmosphere became hysterical and aggressive. They started making loud noises, and one of the boy’s t-shirts was smudged in shaving cream, although nobody was hurt. By the end of the week, they had completely trashed their house.
In stark contrast, the footage of the ten girls demonstrated an altogether different picture. Unlike the boys, the girls seemed to depict skills of organization, cooking, compassion, and “just having fun.” They quickly bonded with each other and set out to cook, do activities, and delegate responsibilities. A girl named Sherry took charge of the cooking and prepared their first meal. They had fun and took proper care of themselves, even organizing a fashion show and later baking cakes. They penned down a chores list organizing scrupulously, who would do what. Although the girls’ party wasn’t devoid of drama, they proved themselves to be better organizers and caretakers when left alone.
