2 No Country for Young MenRead more at location 625
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Boys make adults nervous. As a group, they are noisy, rowdy, and hard to manage. Many are messy, disorganized, and won’t sit still. Boys tend to like action, risk, and competition. When researchers asked a sample of boys why they did not spend a lot of time talking about their problems, most of them said it was “weird” and a waste of time.Read more at location 626
When my son David was a high school senior in 2003, his graduating class went on a camping trip in the desert. A creative writing educator visited the camp and led the group through an exercise designed to develop their sensitivity and imaginations. Each student was given a pen, a notebook, a candle, and matches. They were told to walk a short distance into the desert, sit down alone, and “discover themselves.” The girls followed instructions. The boys, baffled by the assignment, gathered together, threw the notebooks into a pile, lit them with the matches, and made a little bonfire.Read more at location 629
boyishness is seen as aberrational, toxic—a pathology in need of a cure.Read more at location 635
Boys today bear the burden of several powerful cultural trends: a therapeutic approach to education that valorizes feelings and denigrates competition and risk, zero-tolerance policies that punish normal antics of young males, and a gender equity movement that views masculinity as predatory. Natural male exuberance is no longer tolerated.Read more at location 636
At some elementary schools, tug-of-war is being replaced with “tug-of-peace.”Read more at location 639
Tag is under a cloud—schools across the country have either banned itRead more at location 641
we want to encourage a game that may lead to more injuries and confrontation among students?”Read more at location 642
“The running part of this activity is healthy and encouraged; however, in this game there is a ‘victim’ or ‘it,’ which creates a self-esteem issue.”Read more at location 646
Texas, Maryland, New York, and Virginia “have banned, limited, or discouraged” dodgeball.5 “Any time you throw an object at somebody,” said an elementary school coach in Cambridge, Massachusetts, “it creates an environment of retaliation and resentment.”Read more at location 648
The new therapeutic sensibility rejects almost all forms of competition in favor of a gentle and nurturing climate of cooperation. It is also a surefire way to bore and alienate boys. From the earliest age, boys show a distinct preference for active outdoor play, with a strong predilection for games with body contact, conflict, and clearly defined winners and losers.Read more at location 657
Deborah Tannen, professor of linguistics at Georgetown University and author of You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation, sums up the research on male/female play differences: Boys tend to play outside, in large groups that are hierarchically structured. . . . Girls, on the other hand, play in small groups or in pairs: the center of a girl’s social life is a best friend. Within the group intimacy is the key.Read more at location 662
“laughing, running, smiling, jumping, open-hand beating, wrestling, play fighting, chasing and fleeing.”Read more at location 667
Rough-and-tumble play brings boys together, makes them happy, and is a critical part of their socialization.Read more at location 670
“Children who engaged in R&T, typically boys, also tended to be liked and to be good social problem solvers,”Read more at location 671
Aggressive children, on the other hand, tend not to be liked by their peers and are not good at solving problems.Read more at location 672
Increasingly, however, those in charge of little boys, including parents, teachers, and school officials, are blurring the distinction and interpreting R&T as aggression. This confusion threatens boys’ welfare and normal development.Read more at location 675
when two researchers, Mary Ellin Logue and Hattie Harvey, studied the classroom practices of 98 teachers of four-year-olds, they found that this style of play was the least tolerated. Nearly half (48 percent) of teachers stopped or redirected boys’ dramatic play daily or several times a week, whereas less than a third (29 percent) reported stopping or redirecting girls’ dramatic play weekly.Read more at location 682
Such attitudes may help explain why boys are 4.5 times more likely to be expelled from preschool than girls.Read more at location 693
One Boston teacher, Barbara Wilder-Smith, spent a year observing elementary school classrooms. She reports that an increasing number of mothers and teachers “believe that the key to producing a nonviolent adult is to remove all conflict—toy weapons, wrestling, shoving and imaginary explosions and crashes—from a boy’s life.”Read more at location 706
“Since the 1970s, children have lost about 12 hours per week in free time, including a 25 percent decrease in play and a 50 percent decrease in unstructured outdoor activities, according to another study.”Read more at location 712
“Recess,” reported the New York Times, “has become so anachronistic in Atlanta that the Cleveland Avenue Grammar School, a handsome brick building, was built two years ago without a playground.”Read more at location 717
Of course, if it could be shown that sex segregation on the playground or rambunctious competitive games were having harmful social consequences, efforts to curb them would be justified. But that has never been shown.Read more at location 727
Obesity has become a serious problem for both boys and girls, but rather more so for boys.Read more at location 731
On February 2, 2010, nine-year-old Patrick Timoney was marched to the principal’s office and threatened with suspension when he was caught in the cafeteria with a weapon. More precisely, he was found playing with a tiny LEGO soldier armed with a two-inch rifle.Read more at location 738
Zero-tolerance policies became popular in the 1990s as youth crime seemed to be surging and schools were coping with a rash of shootings. These policies mandate severe punishments—often suspension or expulsion—for any student who brings weapons or drugs to school, or who threatens others. Sanctions apply to all violations—regardless of the student’s motives, the seriousness of the offense, or extenuating circumstances. School officials embraced zero tolerance because it seemed like the best way to make schools safe,Read more at location 745
2011: Ten-year-old Nicholas Taylor, a fifth grader at the David Youree Elementary School in Smyrna, Tennessee, was sentenced to sit alone at lunch for six days. His crime? Waving around a slice of pizza that had been chewed to resemble a gun. • 2010: David Morales, an eight-year-old in Providence, Rhode Island, ran afoul of zero tolerance when, for a special class project, he brought in a camouflage hat with little plastic army men glued on the flap. • 2009: Zachary Christie, six, of Newark, Delaware, excited to be a new Cub Scout, packed his camping utensil in his lunch box. The gadget, which can be used as a knife, fork, or spoon, prompted school officials to charge him with possession of a weapon. Zachary faced forty-five days in the district’s reform school but was later granted a reprieve by the school board and suspended for five days.Read more at location 752
Under the zero-tolerance regime, suspension rates have increased dramatically. In 1974, 1.7 million children in grades K–12 were suspended from the nation’s schools. By 2007, when the K–12 population had increased by 5 percent, the number of suspensions had nearly doubled to 3.3 million—nearly 70 percent of them boys.Read more at location 765
if students perceive a punishment to be excessive, capricious, and unjust, this weakens the bond between them and the adults who are supposed to be their mentors. According to psychologists James Comer and Alvin Poussaint, suspensions can make it “more difficult for you to work with the child in school—Read more at location 772
“We observe a negative relationship between school suspension and future educational outcomes.”Read more at location 778
On January 15, 1996, Time magazine ran a cover story about a “teenage time bomb.” Said Time, “They are just four, five, and six years old right now, but already they are making criminologists nervous.”46 The “they” were little boys who would soon grow into cold-blooded killers capable of “remorseless brutality.” The story was based on alarming findings by several eminent criminologists, including James Q. Wilson (then at UCLA). Wilson had extrapolated from a famous 1972 study of the juvenile delinquency rate among young people born in Philadelphia in 1945 and estimated that within five years—by 2010—the nation would be plagued by “30,000 more muggers, killers and thieves.”Read more at location 806
Suspicion of the masculine gender quickly went generic, extending to all boys. “The carnage committed by two boys in Littleton, Colorado,” said the Congressional Quarterly Researcher, “has forced the nation to reexamine the nature of boyhood in America.”52 Michael Kimmel, professor of sociology at Stony Brook University, explained that the Littleton shooters were “not deviants at all,” but “over-conformists . . . to traditional notions of masculinity.”Read more at location 831
Compared with the prior twenty years, the juvenile murder arrest rate between 2000 and 2009 has been historically low and relatively stable. • The 2009 rape arrest rate was at its lowest level in three decades. • The 2009 juvenile arrest rate for aggravated assault was at its lowest since the mid-1980s.Read more at location 842
Rates of juvenile crimes in states with high arrests were not significantly different from those with low arrests.56 What about school violence?Read more at location 846
the damage was done. The public would remain anxious about the specter of youth violence. Although Wilson and DiIulio renounced their theory about young male superpredators, a large group of activist gender scholars immediately took their place. Their theories were even more extravagant and far less empirically grounded. But the outraged criminologists, law professors, and child welfare activists who stood up to the superpredator myth left the new mythmakers alone.Read more at location 876
Boys would be spending most of the day learning about “violence prevention and how to be allies to the girls and women in their lives.” When a reporter from the San Francisco Chronicle questioned the logic behind this plan, the director, Amy Levine, explained, “It’s about dealing with effects of sexism on both boys and girls and how it can damage them.”66 As Levine sees it, boys are potential predators in need of remedial socialization.Read more at location 883
From its beginnings in the 1990s, the gender equity movement has been leery of boys and has looked for ways to reimagine their masculinity.Read more at location 890
Take your son—or “son for a day”—to an event that focuses on . . . ending men’s violence against women. Call the Family Violence Prevention Fund at 800 END-ABUSE for information. • Plan a game or sport in which the contest specifically does not keep score or declare a winner. Invite the community to watch and celebrate boys playing on teams for the sheer joy of playing. • Since Son’s Day is on SUNDAY, make sure your son is involved in preparing the family for the work and school week ahead. This means: helping lay out clothes for siblings and making lunches.Read more at location 896
Take your son grocery shopping, then help him plan and prepare the family’s evening meal on Son’s Day.Read more at location 903
“We view teasing and bullying as the precursors to adolescent sexual harassment, and believe that the roots of this behavior are to be found in early childhood socialization practices.”Read more at location 917
It is not that “boys are bad,” the authors assure us, “but rather that we must all do a much better job of addressing aggressive behavior of young boys to counteract the prevailing messages they receive from the media and society in general.”Read more at location 920
early intervention in the male “socialization process” is critical if we are to stem the tide of male violence.Read more at location 945
Every year nearly four million women are beaten to death by men.80 • Violence is the leading cause of death among women.81 • The leading cause of injury among women is being beaten by a man at home.82 • There was a 59 percent increase in rapes between 1990 and 1991.83 This “culture of violence,” says Hanson, “stem[s] from cultural norms that socialize malesRead more at location 948
“One of the most overlooked arenas of violence training within schools may be the environment that surrounds athletics and sports. Beginning with Little League games where parents and friends sit on the sidelines and encourage aggressive, violent behavior.”Read more at location 957
History is one long lesson in the dangers of combining moral fervor with misinformation.Read more at location 960
If Hanson were right, the United States would be the site of an atrocity unparalleled in the twentieth century. Four million women beaten to death by men! Every year! In fact, the total number of annual female deaths from all causes is approximately one million.87 Only a minuscule fraction are caused by violence, and an even tinier fraction are caused by battery. According to the FBI, the total number of women who died by murder in 1996 was 3,631.88 In contrast, Director Hanson calculates that 11,000 American women are beaten to death every day.Read more at location 964
Hanson is convinced that “our educational system is a primary carrier of the dominant culture’s assumptions,”93 and that that “dominant culture”—Western, patriarchal, sexist, and violent—is sick. Since the best cure is prevention, reeducating boys is a moral imperative.Read more at location 980
Haki Madhubuti: “The liberation of the male psyche from preoccupation with domination, power hunger, control, and absolute rightness requires . . . a willingness for painful, uncomfortable and often shocking change.”Read more at location 983
Jessie Klein, assistant professor of sociology and criminal justice at Adelphi University.Read more at location 991
The school shooters picked up guns to conform to the expected ethos dictating that boys dominate girls and take revenge against other boys who threatened their relationships with particular girls: their actions were incubated in a culture of violence that is largely accepted and allowed to fester every day. Transforming these hyper-masculine school cultures [is] essential to preventing . . . school shootings.Read more at location 996
She says, for example, that “in 1998, the FBI declared violent attacks by men to be the number one threat to the health of American women.”99 According to the Mayo Clinic, in reality the most serious threats are heart disease, cancer, stroke, chronic lower respiratory disease, and Alzheimer’s disease.100 Where did Professor Klein get her facts?Read more at location 1001
The fear of ruinous lawsuits is forcing schools to treat normal boys as sexist culprits. The climate of anxiety helps explain why, in 2004, Stephen Fogelman from Branson, Missouri, was suspended for sexual harassment for kissing a classmate on the cheek.Read more at location 1020
Sex differences in physical aggression are real.109 Cross-cultural studies confirm the obvious: boys are universally more combative. In a classic 1973 study of the research on male-female differences, Eleanor Maccoby and Carol Jacklin conclude that, compared to girls, boys engage in more mock fighting and more aggressive fantasies. They insult and hit one another and retaliate more quickly when attacked: “The sex difference [in aggression] is found as early as social play begins—at 2 or 21/2.”110Read more at location 1047
There is an all-important difference between healthy and aberrational masculinity. Criminologists distinguish between “hypermasculinity” (or “protest masculinity”) and the normal masculinity of healthy young males. Hypermasculine young men do indeed express their maleness through antisocial behavior—mostly against other males, but also through violent aggression toward and exploitation of women. Healthy young men express their manhood in competitive endeavors that are often physical. As they mature, they take on responsibility, strive for excellence, and achieve and “win.”Read more at location 1053
Unfortunately, many educators have become persuaded that there is truth in the relentlessly repeated proposition that masculinity per se is the cause of violence. Beginning with the premise that most violence is perpetrated by men, they move hastily, and fallaciously, to the proposition that maleness is the leading cause of violence. By this logic, every boy is a proto-predator.Read more at location 1059
My message is not to “let boys be boys.” Boys should not be left to their boyishness but should rather be guided and civilized. It has been said that every year civilization is invaded by millions of tiny barbarians; they’re called children. All societies confront the problem of civilizing children—both boys and girls, but particularly boys. History teaches us that masculinity without morality is lethal. But masculinity constrained by morality is powerful and constructive, and a gift to women. Boys need to be shown how to grow into respectful human beings. They must be shown, in ways that leave them in no doubt,Read more at location 1066
The traditional approach is through character education: to develop a boy’s sense of honor and to help him become considerate, conscientious, and gentlemanly. This approach respects boys’ masculinity and does not require that they sit in sedate circles playing tug-of-peace or run around aimlessly playing tag where no one is ever out. And it does not include making seven-year-old boys feel ashamed for playing with toy soldiers.Read more at location 1074
Boys do need discipline, but in today’s educational environment they also need protection—from self-esteem promoters, roughhouse prohibitionists, zero-tolerance enforcers, and gender equity activists who are at war with their very natures.Read more at location 1077
