The Myth About Boys

By David Von Drehle, The Time, July 26, 2007 

http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1647452,00.html 

My son was born nearly 10 years ago, and I remember telling him that
morning that he was one lucky baby. Forget Dr. Spock or Dr. Brazelton -- I
took my cue from Dr. Pangloss. If this was not the best of all possible
worlds, it was certainly the best time and best place to be starting out
healthy and free in a land of vast possibilities. In the months and
years that followed, however, there came a steady stream of books and
essays warning that I had missed something ominous: our little guy had
entered a soul-crushing world of anti-boy influences.

There was, for example, Harvard psychologist William Pollack's Real Boys
(1998), which asserted that contemporary boys are "scared and
disconnected," "severely lagging" behind girls in both achievement and
self-confidence. The following year, journalist Susan Faludi argued in
Stiffed that the cold calculus of global economics was emasculating
American men. In 2000 philosopher Christina Hoff Sommers blamed
off-the-rails feminism for sparking The War Against Boys, and two years
later writer Elizabeth Gilbert found The Last American Man living in a
teepee in the Appalachian Mountains. By the time our boy was headed to
third grade, magazine editors were grinding out cover headlines like BOY
TROUBLE and THE BOY CRISIS, and I was getting worried. The voyage to
manhood had come to seem as perilous and flummoxing as the future of Iraq.

It's enough to make people long for the good old days. Sure enough, one
of the hot books of the summer is a zestfully nostalgic celebration of
boyhood past. The Dangerous Book for Boys, by brothers Hal and Conn
Iggulden, flits from fossils to tree houses, from secret codes to
go-carts, from the Battle of Gettysburg to the last voyage of Robert
Falcon Scott. A sensation last year in Britain, the book has been at or
near the top of the New York Times best-seller list since late spring.

The Dangerous Book, bound in an Edwardian red cover with marbled
endpapers, has many of the timeless qualities of an ideal young man:
curiosity, bravery and respectfulness; just enough rogue to leaven the
stoic; an appetite for any challenge, from hunting small game to
mastering the rules of grammar. It celebrates trial and error,
vindicates the noble failure. Rudyard Kipling would have loved it.

These charms alone can't explain the popularity of an amalgam of coin
tricks, constellations and homemade magnets, however. Clearly, The
Dangerous Book has tapped into a larger anxiety about how we're raising
young men. This is a subject worth digging into, because it reflects not
just on our sons but also on their sisters, on the kind of world these
kids might make together--and on the adults who love them, however
imperfect we prove to be. With fresh eyes on fresh facts, we might find
that an upbeat message to a newborn boy is not so misguided after all.

THE MYTH OF THE BOY CRISIS

"I don't think anyone will deny that girls are academically superior as
a group. Girls are more academically powerful. They make the grades,
they run the student activities, they are the valedictorians."

Christina Hoff Sommers, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute,
was explaining how she came to worry deeply about boys. In the
book-lined parlor of her suburban Washington home, she ticked through a
familiar but disturbing indictment: More boys than girls are in
special-education classes. More boys than girls are prescribed
mood-managing drugs. This suggests to her (and others) that today's
schools are built for girls, and boys are becoming misfits. As a result,
more boys than girls drop out of high school. Boys don't read as well as
girls. And America's prisons are packed with boys and former boys.

Meanwhile, fewer boys than girls take the SAT. Fewer boys than girls
apply to college. Fewer boys than girls, in annual surveys of college
freshmen, express a passion for learning. And fewer boys than girls are
earning college degrees. Even sperm counts are falling. "It's true at
every level of society" that boys are stumbling behind, Sommers continued.

Observers of the boy crisis contend that families, schools and popular
culture are failing our boys, leaving them restless bundles of
anxiety--misfits in the classroom and video-game junkies at home. They
suffer from an epidemic of "anomie," as Harvard psychologist William
Pollack told me, adrift in a world of change without the help they need
to find their way. Even in the youngest grades, test-oriented teachers
focus energy on conventional exercises in reading, writing and other
seatwork, areas in which girls tend to excel. 

At the same time, schools are cutting science labs, physical education and recess, where the experiential learning styles of boys come into play. No wonder, the theory goes, our boys get jittery, grow disruptive and eventually tune out. 

"A boy will get a reputation as hell on wheels that follows him
from one teacher to the next, and soon they're coming down on him even before he screws up. So he learns to hate school," 

says Mike Miller, an elementary school teacher in North Carolina. Miller's principal has ordered every faculty member to read a book this summer titled Hear Our Cry: Boys in Crisis.

In short, society treats "boyhood as toxic, as a pathology," says
Sommers--who may have been guilty of this herself when she wrote several
years ago that the Columbine killers were emblematic of
turn-of-the-century boyhood. But she's right that it's not girls who are
shooting up their classrooms--and boys are at least five times as likely
as girls to die by suicide.

There are statistics to back up every point in that sad litany, but I
also found people eager to flay nearly every statistic. For instance: Is
it bad that more boys are in special education, or should we be pleased
that they are getting extra help from specially trained teachers? And
haven't boys always tended to be more restless than girls under the
discipline of high school and more likely to wind up in jail? 

A growing congregation of writers have begun to argue that the trouble with boys is mostly a myth. Sara Mead is one; she was until recently a senior policy analyst at Education Sector, a Washington think tank largely
funded by the Gates Foundation. Intrigued by the wave of books and
articles about failing boys, Mead crunched some numbers, focusing
narrowly on the question of school performance. The former Clinton
Administration official concluded that 

"with a few exceptions, American boys are scoring higher and achieving more than they ever have before."

In particular, Mead decided that boys from middle- and upper-income
families--especially white families--are doing just fine. 

"The biggest issue is not a gender gap. It is these gaps for minority and disadvantaged boys," 

she told me recently in the think tank's conference room. 

Boys overall are holding their own or even improving on
standardized tests, she said; they're just not improving as quickly as
girls. And their total numbers in college are rising, albeit not as
sharply as the numbers of girls. To Mead, a good-news story about the
achievements of girls and young women has been turned into a bad-news
story about laggard boys and young men.

The more I probed, the more I realized that the subject of boys is a bog
of sociology in which a clever researcher, given a little time, can
unearth evidence to support almost any point of view. I also came to the
sad realization that this field, like so many others, has been
infiltrated by our left-right political noise machine. Our boys have
become cannon fodder in the unresolved culture wars waged by their
parents and grandparents. On one side, concern for boys is waved off as
a mere "backlash against the women's movement," as two writers declared
dismissively in the Washington Post last year. The opposing side views
any divergence from the crisis theme as male-bashing feminism.

Then I came across a new report from the Federal Government: Uncle Sam's
annual attempt to paint a broad statistical portrait of the nation's
young people. In long rows of little numbers printed on page after page
of tables, this report told a different story from that of either the
woe bearers or the myth busters.

WHAT THE NUMBERS SAY

"America's Children: Key National Indicators of Well-Being, 2007" is the
work of many agencies, from the Department of Justice to the Department
of Education to the Bureau of the Census and beyond. It gathers a trove
of data, and as I made my way through it, I concluded that there's real
substance to the boy crisis, and there have been good-faith reasons for
sounding an alarm.

Statistics collected over two decades show an alarming decline in the
performance of America's boys--in some respects, a virtual free fall.
Boys were doing poorly in school, abusing drugs, committing violent
crimes and engaging in promiscuous sex. 

Young males lost ground by many behavioral indicators at some point in the 1980s and '90s: sharp plunges on some scales, long erosions on others. I was forced to confront a fact that I had secretly known all along: that teens of 30 years ago -- my generation -- were the leading edge of an epidemic of thugs, dolts and cads.

No wonder so many writers began calling for change in the late 1990s.
Reliable social-science data often lag a couple of years behind the
calendar; it takes time to gather and compile a nation's worth of
numbers. Stories about social trends that you read today may be
describing the reality of 2004 or 2005. The groundbreaking boy books
were a response to statistics portraying the worst of a physical, mental
and moral health crisis.

There's more to the story, however. That downward slide has leveled
off--and in many cases, turned around. Boys today look pretty good
compared with their dads and older cousins. By some measures, our boys
are doing better than ever.

The juvenile crime rate in 2005 (the most recent year cited in the
report) was down by two-thirds from its peak in 1993. Other Justice
Department statistics show that the population of juvenile males in
prison is only half of its historic high. The number of high school
senior boys using illegal drugs has fallen by almost half compared with
the number in 1980. And the percentage of high school boys drinking
heavily is now the lowest on record. When I was in high school, more
than half of all senior boys told researchers they had downed five or
more drinks in a row within the previous two weeks--a number that I have
no trouble believing. By last year, that figure was fewer than 3 in 10.

Today's girls are also doing well by these measures, but their successes
in no way diminish the progress of the boys. In fact, together our kids
are reversing one of the direst problems of the previous generation: the
teen-pregnancy epidemic. According to the new report, fewer than half of
all high school boys and girls in 2005 were sexually active. For the
boys, that's a decrease of 10 percentage points from the early 1990s.
Boys who are having sex report that they are more responsible about it:
7 in 10 are using condoms, compared with about half in 1993. As a
result, teen pregnancy and abortion rates are now at their lowest
recorded levels.

What about school? Boys in the fourth, eighth and 12th grades all score
better--though not dramatically better--on math tests than did the
comparable boys of 1990. Reading, however, is a problem. The
standardized NAEP test, known as the nation's report card, indicates
that by the senior year of high school, boys have fallen nearly 20
points behind their female peers. That's bad, not because girls are
ahead but because too many boys are leaving school functionally
illiterate. 

Pollack told me of one study that found even the sons of
college-educated parents had a 1 in 4 chance of leaving school without
becoming proficient readers. In an economy increasingly geared toward
processing information, an inability to read becomes an inability to
earn. 

"You have to be literate in today's world," says Sommers. "We're
not going to get away with not teaching boys to read."

Even here, though, there may be grounds for a hopeful outlook. Boys at
the fourth- and eighth-grade levels are showing modest improvement in
reading and now trail their female classmates by slightly smaller
margins than before. If that's a sign of improved teaching and parental
focus on reading, then we ought to expect gains in the higher grades soon.

"I think it would be an error not to be optimistic," says Michael
Gurian, author of several books about raising boys. "But at the same time there is reason to worry." 

He sketches the sinking trajectory of undereducated males as blue-collar jobs move to low-wage countries. 

Though definitive data on the dropout rate are as elusive as Bigfoot,
there's little question that a worrisome gap is opening between boys who
finish high school and those who don't. Boys with diplomas are now far
more likely to go immediately to college than the boys of my era were.
Solution: we need more boys with diplomas.

And that can be done. A generation of enlightened teaching and robust
encouragement has awakened American girls to the need for higher
education. Women now outnumber men in college by a ratio of 4 to 3, and
admissions officers at liberal-arts colleges are struggling to find
enough males to keep their classes close to gender parity. 

"We've done wonderfully with girls. Now let's do the same for boys," says Gurian.

One way to start might be to gear advanced training to male-dominated
occupations--already the case in many female-oriented fields.
Schoolteachers and librarians (roughly 70% female) must go to college,
but firefighters and police officers (pushing 90% male)? Not
necessarily. Top executive secretaries are college educated; top
carpenters may not be.

About the only scale on which today's boys are faring dramatically worse
than the boys of my era is the bathroom scale. When I was in high school
in the late 1970s, roughly 1 boy in 20 was obese; today 1 boy in 5 is.

My favorite statistic seemed to sum up all the others: fewer boys today
are deadbeats. The percentage of young men between 16 and 19 who neither work nor attend school has fallen by about a quarter since 1984. The
greatest gains in this category have been made by black youths. In 1984,
1 out of 3 young black men ages 18 and 19 were neither in school nor
working. That proportion has been cut almost in half, to fewer than 1 in 5.

Today's boys may wear their pants too damned baggy and go around with
iPod buds in their ears. They know everything about Xbox 360 and nothing
about paper routes. I doubt that they slog to school through deep snow
as I recall doing back before the globe warmed up. But judging from the
numbers, they are pulling themselves up from the handbasket to hell. 

SO WHERE DID WE GO RIGHT?

Unfortunately, it's one thing to observe human behavior -- count the crime
reports and the teen births and the diplomas awarded and so on -- but
quite another to explain it. Popular science and the best-seller lists
skip eagerly from one theory to the next, lingering with delight on the
most provocative if not always the most plausible. A recent paper
suggested that falling crime rates can be explained almost entirely by
reduced lead exposure in childhood. Which was odd, because last year
economist Steven Levitt's best seller Freakonomics chalked up the
improvement to legalized abortion, which, he theorized, cut the number
of unwanted children prone to wind up as criminals.

Or take the teen-pregnancy numbers. It's not enough to credit the
virtues of responsibility and better sex education. Something racier is
desired. According to some writers, fewer teens are getting pregnant
because they've all switched to oral sex. Or maybe the phenomenon is due
to a still unexplained decline in sperm counts.

But before we go dizzy on cleverness, let's pull out Occam's razor and
consider a simple possibility: maybe our boys are doing better because
we're paying them more attention. We're providing for them better; the
proportion of children living in poverty is down roughly 2% from a spike
in 1993. And we're giving them more time. Parents--both fathers and
mothers--are reordering their priorities to focus on caring for their
kids. Several studies confirm this. 

Sociologists at the University of Michigan have tracked a sharp increase in the amount of time men spend with their children since the 1970s. Another long-range survey, reported by University of Maryland researchers, has asked parents since the 1960s to keep detailed diaries of their daily activities. 

In 1965 child-focused care occupied about 13 hours per week, the vast majority of it done by moms. By 1985 that had dropped to 11 hours per week as moms entered the workforce. The 2005 study found parents spending 20 hours a week focused on their kids--by far the highest number in the history of the survey. Both moms and dads had dramatically shifted their energies toward their kids.

Are there risks of overparenting boys? Sure. And here's where the
success of The Dangerous Book gets interesting, because it suggests that
as parents spend more time with their sons, we may be reconnecting with
the fact that the differences between boys and girls need not be
threatening and that not all the lore of the past about how to raise
boys was wrong.

Gregory Hodge is a good example of this return to tradition. He is
principal at the Frederick Douglass Academy, a public school in Harlem.
His school was one of three recently honored by the Schott Foundation
for excellence in educating black male students--the most troubled
cohort but also the group making the greatest progress in many areas.
Hodge told me that when he arrived at the combination middle school and
high school 11 years ago, the academy was already a great success -- but
the student body was 80% female. The new principal made it his business
to recruit more boys. Today, of the academy's 1,450 mostly poor and
minority students, half are male. Yet the dropout rate remains virtually
zero, and this year (like most years) every member of the senior class
graduated and was college-bound. Every one.

Hodge says the secret is to reach boys before they get into trouble--he
uses the academy's basketball facilities to lure youngsters still in
grade school. Once you have their attention, you must show them a world
of possibilities that you genuinely believe they can achieve.  

"Young people are looking for validation," he says. "You are important. You will be successful. We don't talk about 'if' you go to college. Around here it's 'when' you go to college."

Frederick Douglass Academy students adhere to a strict dress code and
accept rigid discipline. Many of them virtually live at the school, even
on Saturdays, doing hours of homework, attending required tutorials if
they lag behind, participating in dozens of sports and activities, from
basketball to lacrosse and ballet to botany. 

"Everything a private school would offer a rich kid," Hodge explains. 

But within this highly structured setting, the school recognizes that many boys need room to learn in their own way. 

"Some of the kids are hardheaded," Hodge says in
a gravelly Bronx roar. "That's what makes a boy. They've gotta
experiment, learn the hard way that his head won't break concrete. Male students tend to want to find things out for themselves--so why don't you use that as a teacher?

"I once had about 15 boys very close to dropping out," the principal continues. "They weren't into sports. I had to find something for them to get into. Finally I made a recording studio for the little meatheads, and they ran with that. All of them made it through to graduation. I'll try anything -- dance, chess, hydroponics, robotics -- anything to let these kids know that this is a world they can fit into, where they can be successful."

THE BASICS OF BOYHOOD

Nothing Hodge says is remotely ground-breaking or experimental--and
that's precisely the point. Only in recent decades have societies
seriously begun to unlock the full potential of girls, but the
cultivation of boys has been an obsession for thousands of years. 

"How shall we find a gentle nature which also has a great spirit?" Socrates asked some 2,500 years ago--essentially the same question parents ask today.

Ours is far from the first society to fear for its sons. 

Leo Braudy of the University of Southern California, in his 2003 book From Chivalry to Terrorism, noted recurring waves of anxiety. Europeans of the 18th century imagined that free trade and the death of feudalism would spell the end of honor and chivalry. Then, with the dawn of the Industrial
Age, writers like John Stuart Mill worried that progress itself -- with
its speed and stress and short attention spans -- would cause a sort of
"moral effeminacy" and "inaptitude for every kind of struggle." 

By the end of the 19th century, a manhood malaise permeated the entire Western world: in France it inspired Pierre de Coubertin to create the Olympic movement; in Britain it moved Robert Baden-Powell to found the Boy Scouts; in the U.S. it fueled a passion for the new sport of football
and helped make a hero of rough-riding Theodore Roosevelt.

All these reforms shared a common impulse to return to the basics of
boyhood--quests, competitions, tribal brotherhoods and self-discovery.
There was a recognition that the keys to building a successful boy have
remained remarkably consistent, whether a tribal chieftain is preparing
a young warrior or a knight is training a squire or a craftsman is
guiding an apprentice--or Gregory Hodge is teaching his students. Boys
need mentors and structure but also some freedom to experiment. They
need a group to belong to and an opponent to confront. As Gurian put it
in The Wonder of Boys, they must "compete and perform well to feel worthy."

The success of The Dangerous Book for Boys is one sign of a society
getting in touch with these venerable truths. Nothing in the book
suggests that boys are better than girls, nor does the book license
destructive aggression. But it does exude the confidence of ages past
that boys are to be treasured, not cured. 

"Is it old-fashioned?" the authors ask themselves about their book. "Well, that depends. Men and boys today are the same as they always were ... You want to be self-sufficient and find your way by the stars."

A TRIP TO BOY HEAVEN

If The Dangerous Book were a place, it would look like the Falling Creek
Camp for Boys in North Carolina--a rustic paradise complete with a rifle
range, nearby mountains to climb and a lake complete with swimming dock and rope swing. The choice of activities at the camp is dizzying, from
soccer to blacksmithing, from kayaking to watercolors, but no pastime is
more popular than building forts of fallen tree limbs and poking at
turtles in the creek. Leave your cell phones, laptops and iPods at home.

There I met Margaret Anderson, a pediatric nurse from Nashville and a
member of the faculty at Vanderbilt University. She works in the
infirmary while her 11-year-old son Gage discovers the woods on
multi-day pack trips. "I call this place Boy Heaven," she says.

Falling Creek subscribes to a philosophy of "structured freedom," which
is essentially the same philosophy paying dividends among boys at the
opposite end of the economic ladder at the Frederick Douglass Academy.
It works across the board, says Anderson, and she wishes more of the
boys she sees in her busy Nashville practice lived lives of structured
freedom too.

"Whether it's urban kids who can't go outside because it's too dangerous or the overscheduled, overparented kids at the other end of the spectrum - -I'm worried that boys have lost the chance to play and to explore," Anderson told me. 

Our society takes a dim view of idle time and casts a skeptical eye on free play--play driven by a boy's curiosity rather than the league schedule or the folks at Nintendo. But listen to Anderson as she lists the virtues of letting boys run themselves occasionally.

"When no one's looming over them, they begin making choices of their own," she says. "They discover consequences and learn to take responsibility for themselves and their emotions. They start learning self-discipline, self-confidence, team building. If we don't let kids work through their own problems, we get a generation of whiners."

That made sense to me. As I watched the boys at Falling Creek do things
that would scare me to death if my own son were doing them--hammering
white-hot pieces of metal, clinging to a zip line two stories above a
lake, examining native rattlesnakes -- I didn't notice many whining boys.
Yates Pharr, director of Falling Creek, seemed to read my mind. 

"It's the parents who have the anxieties nowadays, far more than the boys," he said. "We've started posting photographs of each day's activity on our website, and still I'll get complaints if we don't have a picture of every camper every day."