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A Lack of Progress
2007-09-26 06:00:00
I cannot get my head around the general response to the No Child Left Behind Act.  I have yet to meet anyone not employed by the administration or the law's sponsors who actually really likes it.  Liberals, conservatives, parents, teachers . . . almost everyone finds something objectionable or frustrating about it.  Whether it has done any real good is debatable and difficult (if not impossible) to measure, and it’s not hard to find those who argue that it’s actively harmful.   It completely dominates the national conversation about education.  And yet, no one seems to be in any doubt that it is here to stay in some form or other.  (Well, that’s not exactly true.  There are quite a few groups who would like very much for it to go away, but there seems to be a general resignation to the fact that such laws may change over time, but they rarely disappear completely.) So when the most recent national assessments in reading and math came out...
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Heroic Play
2007-09-25 06:00:00
I am embarrassingly happy that Heroes is back on TV again.  Man, I love that show.  I have never really been a superhero person—I'm one of those annoying people who has trouble suspending disbelief during superhero movies.  (Why do X-Men always fight the X-Man with a complementary power?  If Magneto has the power to manipulate metal, why would he move the entire bridge instead of just flying across the water on a metal disc?  And so on.)  And I really hate the more recent trend of sulky, morose superheroes who resent their powers and wish they were normal.  If I suddenly had the ability to fly, shoot laser beams, or read minds, I’d be pretty psyched about it.  But Heroes, fortunately, includes people who are pretty darned thrilled about their new abilities, and as a bonus, contains no matchy spandex outfits.  Between the show and my sons’ boyish enthusiasm for superheroes, I’m starting to reevaluate my whole outlook on the genre. Because...
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But Don't You Want a Girl?
2007-09-21 06:00:00
I'm nine months pregnant and big as a house.  I seriously look like I'm attempting to smuggle a beach ball under my clothing.  I wasn't even jealous when my sister called me from Hawaii last night and mentioned that she was going to the beach, because I wouldn’t dare step on a beach for fear that someone might try to drag me back into the ocean or yell, “Don’t touch the native wildlife!” while dousing me with buckets of water, claiming, “we have to try to keep her skin wet and make sure she’s comfortable.”  Yeah, I’m that pregnant.  I’m just explaining, so that if I suddenly disappear for a few days in a row, you’ll know that it’s probably related to the professional kicker I’m currently carrying, and I’ll be back again as soon as I can. Speaking of the whole pregnancy-thing, one of the things that slightly bothers me in this pregnancy is the assumption that I must be happy and relieved that I’m apparently having a girl.  (I say “apparently” because the u...
More About: Girl , T A G

Bravo for Boyhood
2007-09-20 06:00:00
I can't be the only one who is enjoying the commercials for the Tonka "Scoot and Scoop 3-in-1 Ride On," especially their new tagline, "Built for Boyhood."  I’ll be honest, I just love the flat-out acceptance that little boys are different from little girls, tend to have different interests, and tend to play differently.  Sometimes it seems like I’m competing with other moms to demonstrate how enlightened or progressive we are as parents via our children’s play.  But my sons have no interest in validating my mommier-than-thou-ness by showing an interest in flash cards, learning puzzles, or ethnically diverse dolls.  They like to play with cars, trains, and balls.  They like to destroy and throw things and make a lot of noise.  They jump and run and pretend to sword fight.  At this very moment, Andy is upstairs (where he is supposed to be napping) playing with a toy car and making the appropriate engine-revving and tire squealing sound effects. ...
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Hmmm . . . Big Subject Change Here
2007-09-18 06:00:00
I suppose I should consider myself lucky that children's music has expanded beyond twee nursery songs about animals and hugs and such.  Not that my family would be listening to such stuff even if there were no other options.  In fact, I must admit that my husband and I generally listen to our own music and do our best to forward past any songs with inappropriate content.  Unfortunately, my husband recently taught Andy (the 3-year-old) how to yell, “Freebird!” during songs he doesn’t care for, so now my opportunities to listen to my “chick music” without any grumbling from my husband are interrupted by constant requests for “Freebird!”  The worst of it is that he actually knows the song, so it doesn’t stop until I actually play it.  (I tend to wonder whether this is some kind of ingrained male response to certain kinds of music, or if my husband is slyly trying to prevent me from further corrupting his sons by making them listen to Tori Amos and Kate Bush.&n...
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Different Drummers
2007-09-17 06:00:00
Evidently, I am something of a masochist, because this weekend my husband and I bought our boys a toy drum set that included a harmonica, a pair of maracas, and a tambourine.  I did at least have the sense to keep them on top of the bookcase, as a "special request" toy, and I have to admit that I’m enjoying my sons’ attempts to make music/noise—though many of those attempts seem to involve variations on the lyrics to Cheap Trick’s “Surrender” (this probably has to do with my husband’s proficiency with the Guitar Hero 2 video game).  Of course, what made me give in on the whole drum thing to begin with were my thoughts on its probable educational value, and I still feel like these “creative expression” toys and games (like musical instruments, play-dough, paints, blocks, and so on) are of more educational value than all of the little electronic alphabet “learning” toys that are so popular.  (Not that I’m opposed to such toys—we have a few of them around the house as we...
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Fear and Loathing and Men
2007-09-14 06:00:00
Hrmm.  (That's the sound of me being mildly frustrated with my news choices today.)  Tomorrow is my two-year-old son's actual second birthday, so I'm feeling atypically lighthearted and optimistic today.  I was hoping to find a similarly lighthearted and optimistic story about boys to blog on as well--something to fit the mood and a nice Friday picker-upper.  Unfortunately, all of my recent news alerts are decidedly of the downer category.  More people denying that there’s anything to worry about in boys’ stagnating college attendance, rising drop-out rates, etc.  It gets a little frustrating at times.  I can’t help but feel that if the same problems were being experienced by young women, we’d have an endless cacophony of calls that, “something must be done.”  (Like we do every once in awhile when someone points out that fewer women follow careers in the hard sciences.)  With boys . . . well, I can practically hear the crickets ch...
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Superpowers!! Also, Public School Single-Sex Efforts Continue.
2007-09-13 06:00:00
I don't like to brag or anything, but lately I've noticed that I have the power to get people eliminated from reality television shows, merely by deciding that so-and-so is now my new favorite contestant.  As soon as I choose this favorite, *poof*,  they have a bad day, offend their peers, alienate the judges, or otherwise guarantee their elimination.  So to Tre and the most recent eliminee on Top Chef, you have my apologies.  I will now strive to use my powers for good instead of evil.  Though, I do wonder whether the force that gave me these powers will be able to see through my attempts to foil it by claiming my least favorite character is now my favorite and still eliminate my real favorite anyway.  As you can see, I’m trapped in quite the metaphysical quandary here. Moving on to good news (which seems called for, based on the depressing results of my new superpower), the number of public schools experimenting with single-sex groups, classes, etc....
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Study Claims That Boys Hinder Girls' Education
2007-09-11 06:00:00
I believe I speak for everyone concerned about the plight of boys when I say that the fourth-quarter offensive pass interference call on Todd Heap last night during the Ravens-Bengals game was total garbage.  And let's not even pretend that the make-good “holding” penalty on the Bengals that immediately followed even remotely makes things even since the first bogus penalty denied Baltimore the game-tying touchdown.  Because . . . uh . . . you see . . . how can we claim to be forging a better world for our children when these kind of grave injustices go on unchecked? Speaking of offensive interference, I can’t say that I love the tone of Tim Harford’s article in Slate about a recent study of co-ed schooling in Israel that found that boys benefit from being in class with girls, but that girls do not benefit from being in a class with boys.  Yes, yes, I get that the attitude is supposed to be tongue-in-cheek and biased from a father of girls.  I still found myself ...
More About: Education , Girls , Study , Hinder , Claims

Bill Cosby's "Little" Show
2007-09-10 06:00:00
It was, I swear, purely for you all (and not in any way an effort to distract my boys for a few minutes) that I checked out today's premiere of Bill Cosby's new children's program, Litt le Bill, on the Noggin channel today.  As you may know, Cosby has made frequent comments of late expressing his concerns about education and the anti-achievement culture.  This series, based on the “Little Bill” book series, revolves around 5-year-old Little Bill and his friendships, family, and kid-type problems.  The episode we watched today included two stories—one where Little Bill learns how to frustrate the insult game that one of his classmates introduces, and one where Little Bill shows his friend around school. This is, of course, a kid’s program, so it’s actually high praise when I say that it didn’t make me want to run screaming from the room.  Actually, I thought the show was quite charming, and included some very nice details that I would love to see more of in chil...
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Short Kindergarteners Got Nobody
2007-09-06 06:00:00
There are certain sentences that bring on dread in a mother when you hear them from your children, and I just got hit with #256: "Baby has to take the lego out of his mouth."  (For the curious, I believe that #1 is simply, "Uh-oh.")  Sure enough, my almost-two-year-old had managed to stuff a long, flat lego into his mouth, and I had to go pry it out.  If I understand correctly, it was meant to be the “french fry” that would compliment the plastic toy hamburger he had been gnawing on only minutes before. So it has been a long day.  I can always tell that it has been a long day when more than one person looks at my 9-months-pregnant self, wrestling two toddler boys into some semblance of publicly acceptable behavior, and says, “Boy, you really have your hands full, don’t you?”  Ha!  It’s funny ‘cause it’s true.  Anyway, I can hear the legos being clinked around upstairs again, so I’m going to haul myself up there to forestall further disaster.  ...
More About: Short , Nobody , Kindergarten

Are Standards All They're Cut Out to Be?
2007-09-05 06:00:00
I'm not sure if I've mentioned it here before, but one of my younger sisters is a teacher.  Currently, she's teaching third grade in Hawaii (lucky dog), but she also taught in Virginia for awhile, as well as in a special camp for at-risk youth.  As you may guess, I constantly bombard her with information about boys’ learning styles and different techniques to help boys, and to her credit, she is generally very interested in the subject.  So, when she, of all people, went on a rant about national standards, tests, and “teaching to the test”, I thought it might be time to start listening to such criticisms. Like many parents, I find the idea of national standards and testing to be comforting—at least I know that some basic level of knowledge is being met.  The problem is that federal laws (such as the No Child Left Behind Act) that seek to establish such standards do so very loosely, with so many loopholes as to make the standards meaningless.  (For example...
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Historically Dull
2007-08-31 06:00:00
I am so sick of the mill girls of Lowell, Massachusetts.  This is not their fault.  But, way back in the mists of time, when I was a college undergraduate, I was also a history major.  Unfortunately for my own taste in historical study, I took up history long after it became unfashionable to study battles and military actions at length.  By the time I was in college, the trend had turned toward studying the history of ordinary life and the stories of the oppressed and voiceless, etc., etc.  (And I didn’t even go to a very liberal college.)  This meant making a big, fat, hairy deal about quilting and folk music and the stories of the darned girls who worked in the textile factories of Lowell, Massachusetts.  Trust me; there are a lot of books about them. Now, there’s nothing wrong with studying any of this stuff, and if that is your bag, have at it.  I, however, was deeply, deeply jealous when my boyfriend (now husband) told me about his histor...
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Shrugging Off College
2007-08-30 06:00:00
Ok, I talk about developments in the UK regarding boys a lot.  But I do have a defense for that.  The fact of the matter is that when it comes to recognizing that there is a problem regarding boys’ education and achievement and wanting to do something about it, the UK is way ahead of America.  We’re still debating if it’s an issue worthy of our attention—they have entire government programs and foundations dedicated to dealing with the issue.  Am I jealous?  You betcha. So while it’s impossible to make direct connections between research in the US and Great Britain (their schooling system is certainly very different), I think it is still worth looking at their findings.  The one that I noticed today links into some of the issues we talked about last week regarding boys’ lack of motivation and disengagement from their futures.   This article more or less speaks for itself, so please forgive me for quoting it at some length: Boys don't re...
More About: College , Coll

Once More (With a Little Bit of Feeling)
2007-08-29 06:00:00
First, I want to say that for all of you currently frustrated by how the "comments" section of the blog works, believe me you are not alone.  We've been rather frustrated with it ourselves.  (And I'm not speaking in the royal "we"--I mean me, my bosses and co-workers, and the very smart and helpful guy who has taken it upon himself to fix our various website problems.)  So, sometime soon, we should be switching to a different blog software, and hopefully all of these problems—the unformatted and hidden comments section, the log-in problems, the lack of a blog roll, the run-on sentences, the occasionally tepid writing—will be a thing of the past. Ok, now onto some actual content . . . I feel like I left some things unfinished in my series last week, and that the thoughtful comments that were made (despite the irritating comments section features) deserve more response than I’ve been able to give.  So here goes. The essence of the objection to some of my points ...
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Competition, Harry Potter-style
2007-08-27 06:00:00
I will freely admit right now that I have a bad case of the Mondays.  There, I said it.  There have been some interesting comments to come out of last week's discussion, and I would like to take the time to address some of them.  But please forgive me for putting that off until tomorrow. In the meantime, I'd like to just do a little meditation on competition and schooling.  Boys can be competitive.  This should come as no surprise to anyone.  Girls can thrive on competition as well, which I think sometimes gets overlooked.  So why then are my niece's youth soccer games unscored?  The kids know what the score is.  The parents are themselves silently keeping track of goals and assists.  And there is a lot to be learned in good sportsmanship while winning and losing.  But, for whatever reason, the wiser heads at my niece's youth soccer league have determined that it will be better for kids to play for the joy of running pointle...
More About: Harry Potter , Competition , Style , Potter , Harry

Boy Crisis Interview On KNBC Los Angeles
2007-08-25 06:00:00
Just to give you a heads up--this weekend, KNBC Los Angeles will be featuring an interview with a local teacher/Gurian Insititute trainer about the boy crisis and gender gap. The show (Newsconference) will air on Sunday, August 25th at 9am PT.  If you're not in the LA area, you can still see the program segment on their website here. Though necessarily short, it's a well-done and unbiased exploration of boys' learning differences, and a good introduction/overview of the issue.
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And Then There's The Rest of It . . .
2007-08-24 06:00:00
I'm a little late to the party today--just one of those days, I'm afraid.  I'm about two minutes away from giving in to my three-year-old and letting him eat waffles for dinner.  If only I weren't afraid that by doing so, I would be setting into motion a chain of events that ends with me being chastised on one of those “lousy mom” shows, where someone with a bunch of degrees and a British accent uses video and computer technology to demonstrate how all of my child’s problems can be traced back to the Friday evening when I felt tired and lazy and decided to let the kids eat waffles for dinner.  And all over America, other moms will be shaking their heads and saying to themselves, “Sheesh.  I’d never do anything like that.  What’s wrong with her?” But I digress.  I wanted to spend today’s entry considering a few other possible contributors to the failure to launch/disengaged young men issue.  In Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing E...
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A Full-On Plethora of Social Issues
2007-08-23 06:00:00
It is a truth insufficiently acknowledged in my household that being in the third trimester of pregnancy makes one very grouchy and uncomfortable, and that others should bring one lots of chocolate treats, if they know what’s good for them.  Unfortunately, with a lack of sweets at hand, I will have to refrain from exercising my spleen too unreservedly as I turn to the further exploration of what might be behind the growing numbers of unmotivated, disengaged young men.  (If I get too harsh, please e-mail me and I can let you know where to send more chocolate.) Reading the chapter that deals with this issue in Dr. Leonard Sax’s new book, Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men, I came across a defensive e-mail from the type of young man described, asking, in essence, what is so wrong with living that way if he can get away with it.  And reader, I confess that it did floor me a bit. I couldn’t really com...
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So Why Are There Unmotivated Boys?
2007-08-22 06:00:00
This has been the kind of day where my boys kept taking off their pants and jumping down the stairs (not necessarily at the same time).  So in light of all that draining toddler action, it seems a little strange to be returning to the issue of unmotivated, drifting young men.  After a morning spent trying to direct huge amounts of energy into productive (or at least less destructive) channels, I’m finding it hard to even imagine an unmotivated young man.  This can’t possibly be the natural state of most boys, can it?  Which brings us to the question of what the causes may be. Whenever I find myself wading into a sticky cause-of-social-change kind of question, I’m always seized by the desire to qualify everything I say.  It must be the lawyer in me.  Or the history major.  No matter, one of those two dueling personality traits recognizes that, when examining social trends, it’s almost never as easy as saying, “Oh, such-and-such clearly leads to this...
More About: Boys

(Failure to) Launch Numbers
2007-08-21 06:00:00
So yesterday, I raised the question of whether the "failure to launch" phenomenon--where young men seem unmotivated to achieve, either in school or professionally, but are content to be supported by someone else and focus their energies on recreation--is a growing trend and something that we should be concerned about.  Certainly, Dr. Sax and Michael Gurian were each concerned enough about it to spend a significant amount of space discussing it in their latest books.  And it must be a fairly familiar situation if it can be described with a common slang phrase be the subject of a major motion picture.  Granted, it was a movie that starred Matthew McConaughey and Sarah Jessica Parker, so we’re not talking Oscar material here, but a movie nonetheless.  There certainly is plenty of anecdotal evidence to go around.  And really, who among a certain age group, has not known a couple where the underemployed male was primarily supported by his harder-working girlfrie...
More About: Failure , Launch , Numbers , Lure , Number

Slacker Chic
2007-08-20 06:00:00
I hesitate to write something that will so easily date me, but when I was in high school and college, the whole "slacker" thing was big.  Really big.  We were inundated with grunge music, all that Generation X analysis, and endless movies and TV shows celebrating ironic detachment and checking-out of the meaningless and phony race of life.  I can’t speak for all of the wannabe slackers of my generation, but I know that my teens and early twenties were a time when I realized that the easiest route to appearing “cool” was by being irritatingly cynical about achievement, sincerity, idealism, success, and so on. Of course eventually, I grew up and got a real job, had to deal with actual bills, and realized the merits of achievement and believing in something bigger than myself.  Not to mention that when my sons were born, I noticed the hollowness of hip irony in the face of life’s greatest (and most sincere) moments.  So I hadn’t really thought about the slacker...
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TIME Mag's Swing and a "Myth." Also, New Content!
2007-08-17 06:00:00
If you don't ever get around to other parts of the site, believe me, you're missing out.  Not only are there good resources, information, a message board, a donation page (hint, hint), but we also add new stuff . . . well, maybe not all the time, but fairly frequently.  And more than often, it’s pretty interesting, if I say so myself.  (Granted, I’m slightly biased, but still . . .)  I especially wanted to bring attention to our two newest features—both of them responses to the recent TIME Magazine article attempting to debunk the boy crisis. The article in question briefly acknowledged some of the problems boys face, but largely ignored some of the more serious indicators in favor of arguing that things are actually going well for boys.  I’m not much of a doom-and-gloom-sayer myself, and I found the article well-intentioned, but myopic and overly-optimistic to the point of ignoring reality.  You can read the response we sent to the editors of TIME he...
More About: Time , Content , Swing , Myth , Tent

Update on the Oregon "Spanking" Case
2007-08-16 06:00:00
Just wanted to post an update to that notorious case about the two 13-year-old-boys facing criminal charges for "spanking" classmates in the school hallways.  (I blogged about it a few weeks ago here.)  There is, as always, good news and bad news.  The bad news is that they are still going to have to stand trial for sexual harassment.  The good news is that the sex abuse charges have been dropped (so that even if found guilty, they will no longer be required to register as sexual offenders).  Moreover, a judge has suppressed the statements the boys made to the police, determining that they did not truly understand that choosing to remain silent (the boys had been given their Miranda warning)  would not be used against them. In the community where this has all taken place, McMinnville, Oregon , there is apparently a great deal of disbelief that this has gone as far as it has—and nationally, there has been a great deal of sympathy and outrage on beha...
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Boxing, Fire, & Knives--What's Not to Like?
2007-08-15 06:00:00
Ok, I actually addressed this article in more general terms last time, but there was one small quote (toward the end) that I thought was worthy of bringing up separately.  In discussing a recent study of boys' plummeting achievement in the UK, one of the spokespersons for the group behind the study, the Bow Group, briefly mentioned a possible response to the growing disengagement with school among boys: Bow Group officer Charlotte Leslie said: "The shocking truth is that immense educational underachievement is taking place among boys. "We have to get to the root of the problem. "They are not getting the grades because many find the classroom environment impossible." She suggested extra competitive sport such as boxing as well as freeing science lessons from health and safety red tape. I cannot tell you how much it blew my mind (in a good way) to hear someone suggest letting boys take boxing lessons or allowing more leeway in science experiments.  Believe me, I c...
More About: Boxing , Fire , Xing , Knives

So What's the Problem?
2007-08-13 06:00:00
The boy crisis can be a frustrating topic for researchers.  Maybe because it's so simple to see the trends, but so difficult to feel like one is really getting to the causes behind it.  Or maybe it's because it’s so simple to see the trends, and yet so hard to get some people to concede that this is a serious problem with serious consequences for young men and for our culture.  Or both. Anyway, yet more research has been released demonstrating the problems boys face—this time from an organization called the Bow Group, which recently did a study of boys in the UK, finding that white, working class boys are at the most risk of under-performing: Boys received 248,950 suspensions lasting at least a day during the 2005/2006 academic year, compared with 94,750 for girls. At the same time 7,280 boys were expelled, compared with 1,860 girls. The result is that, at 14, one in five boys has a reading ability of a pupil half his age and at 16 a quarter of boys - almost...
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Must Role Models Be "Cool"?
2007-08-10 06:00:00
I'm a firm believer in role models.  Not that they're necessary for everyone, but that a good role model can make a huge difference to the right child.  (And that poor role models can have a negative effect on children’s expectations and aspirations.)  Admittedly, my position comes more from “gut feeling” than from examining sociological and psychological research, but you don’t have to look too hard to find evidence that mentors and role models can make a difference.  The problem with role models in our modern culture, however, seems to revolve more around where to find good ones than anything else.  So, I shouldn’t have been surprised to find an article in The Times (UK) discussing a government report concerned with the proliferation of role models who glamorize violence and calling for the creation of more positive role models for young men.  The problem, however, is whether  one can really “create” role models through government fia...
More About: Models , Cool , Role , Must , Role Model

Is Bullying a Sickness?
2007-08-09 06:00:00
Bullying and boys can be a difficult subject to negotiate, since it's fraught with questions of how one is defining bullying and what the best approach to dealing with bullying may be.  Then there are also the extreme cases, where it seems like boys are considered (or treated like) bullies almost on principle because of their gender—such as in the notorious situation in Oregon, where the two middle-school boys were facing criminal charges for their participation in a school-wide game in which they smacked female classmates on the rear.  (As I mentioned in an earlier entry—it’s not that the boys’ behavior wasn’t deserving of punishment, just that the discipline levied in this case was far in excess of the crime.)  But if we can put aside the questions of what should constitute serious bullying and how it should be handled, the fact of the matter is that bullying tends to have a greater impact on boys than girls—even with the developing understanding of the ways that g...
More About: Bullying , Sickness

Slightly Off-Topic Sling Bleg
2007-08-08 06:00:00
So . . . um . . .does anyone know anything about babywearing?  Hold on, I'm going to bring it back around to boys if you give me a chance. I believe I have mentioned before that I'm expecting a little girl this October.  And it seems as though October is slowly creeping up on me.  I tried various front carriers with my two sons, but never liked the way they felt.  Not to mention that both boys were pretty heavy at birth, and lugging them around that way was really uncomfortable.  Plus, I'm not exactly the most coordinated person on the planet, so getting all of the straps and buckles and such on right was a pain, and the thought of detaching them safely again later was terrifying.  (I won't even go into how I kept forgetting that I couldn't bend at the waist when I was carrying them that way.) Anyway, I gave up on the whole carrier-thing pretty quickly the first two times, but now I have two little boys to chase around.  Toddlers who can go fr...
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The Possible Perils of Early Schooling
2007-08-07 06:00:00
I find it very interesting that as a general rule, we take it for granted that earlier schooling is, in fact, a good thing for children.  Now, to be fair, there is a good amount of research indicating that the early childhood years are essential in developing the skills and abilities that predict future academic success, and preschool and kindergarten do not necessarily have to be structured with all of the pressures and demands of formal schooling.  (Even countries that start school later may have quality pre-school options available.)  However, when you find yourself deep in the competition to provide your children with the “best” possible education, it does become a question worth asking: do children really benefit from starting school early?  There is a reasonable argument to be made that they don’t, or that starting formal schooling too early may actually be harmful, as this article from The Telegraph explains: Very young children's brains are program...
More About: Early , Peri , Ossi , Earl