ABSTRACT
When children are very young, in nursery and kindergarten classes, boys and girls play together and invite each other to their birthday parties. This tends to last until about the end of the first term of primary school: thereafter having a girl to a boy’s birthday party or vice versa becomes exceptional and the cause of much comment. Parents often regret the passing of this stage and wistfully remember when their children innocently played across sex boundaries. This voluntary sex-segregation gets more pronounced as children grow older and pass through the school system. Friendship groups are largely single-sex by the end of primary schooling and remain so throughout the secondary school years until, in adolescence, individual cross-sex friendships become viable once more. At this point individual attachments with a different, romantic or sexual basis are made and group dynamics recede in importance. The question is why does this occur? Why is there a largely voluntary process of single-sex grouping? Schools, after all, have become rather sensitive to the issue and avoid practices such as dividing the register into boys’ names and girls’ names or lining the sexes up separately.
