As parent to two boys who are just now entering adolescence, I find myself concerned with and befuddled by this emerging man-to-be. This (lengthy) article, which a friend brought to my attention raises many of the issues that plague my mind as I drift off to sleep or observe my sons with their friends. I'd love to hear the comments of other men, women, and parents. What is it about boys that makes them different and how should the adults around them respond?
Here's an excerpt from the article...Sandy Descourouez worries about her sons. The eldest, 18-year-old Greg, was never the chatty type, but he became positively withdrawn following his parents' nasty divorce a decade ago. Last year, Greg's
problems erupted into the open: He was arrested for stealing a golf cart and caught smoking marijuana. David, 13--loving, messy, and disorganized- -struggles with borderline grades and attention deficit
disorder. Sandy's baby, 2 1/2-year-old Luke, is a one-boy demolition derby. But his reckless energy isn't her main cause of concern. While the toddler strings together sound effects with reasonably good
results, he rarely utters a word.
Sandy initially took Greg's silence for male reserve--that is, until she happened on his journal. The teenager's diary roiled with frustration and pain. Perhaps to positive effect: Greg wrote a letter to his absent father and reached out for help. "I don't know how to talk about these things," he wrote, "and I know you don't either,
so maybe we can help each other."
Sandy's "boys will be boys" sighs gave way to bewilderment--and fear. The Aurora, Ill., real-estate broker realized that all three sons had problems very distinct from those she had encountered in her daughter, a champion speller; problems that needed attention.
The travails of the Descourouez family mirror America's struggle with its sons. "We are experiencing a crisis of the boy next door," says William Pollack, a clinical psychologist at Harvard University and author of Real Boys. Across the country, boys have never been in more trouble: They earn 70 percent of the D's and F's that teachers dole out. They make up two thirds of students labeled "learning disabled." They are the culprits in a whopping 9 of 10 alcohol and drug violations and the suspected perpetrators in 4 out of 5 crimes that end up in juvenile court. They account for 80 percent of high school dropouts and attention deficit disorder diagnoses. And they are less likely to go to college than ever before. By 2007, universities are projected to
enroll 9.2 million women to 6.9 million men.
Truth to power. That's not what America expects from its boys. "Maybe because men enjoy so much power and prestige in society, there is a tendency to see boys as shoo-ins for success," says child psychologist Michael Thompson, coauthor of Raising Cain. "So people see in boys signs of strength where there are none, and they ignore all of the evidence that they are in trouble."
But that evidence is getting tougher than ever to overlook. Today, scientists are discovering very real biological differences that can make boys more impulsive, more vulnerable to benign neglect, less efficient classroom learners--in sum, the weaker sex. "The notion of male vulnerability is so novel, but the biological facts support it," says Sebastian Kraemer, a child psychiatrist in London and author of a recent British Medical Journal article on male fragility. "We're only just now beginning to understand the underlying weakness of men, for so many centuries almost universally projected onto women."
The remainder of the article can be found here.
― ragnfild (ragnfild), Sunday, 20 October 2002 18:44 (twenty-two years ago)