My friend Oliver is 12 years old. I give his single mom a break every now and then, and he comes over to hang out. He's a whiz on a skateboard, has some killer dance moves, and radiates angelic sweetness. "You're a good person," he said to me once, apropos of nothing, getting me all choked up. He sees the best in everyone, though his own life has included years in a homeless shelter and an abusive dad. Recently, I saw Oliver on a sunny California day. We were outside at the pool, eating watermelon and relaxing. He loves to talk about his Xbox or Weird Al YouTube videos. Instead of going there, I asked Oliver, "Read any good books lately?" In response, he mumbled, "I guess." Books aren't Oliver's thing. I know he'd rather talk about basketball, or sneakers, but I wouldn't, and I was on a mission.

"What's your favorite book?" I asked.

"I don't know," he said, staring off into the distance.

Oliver reads only when absolutely required to. You'd never find Oliver sneaking a book under the blankets with a flashlight, as I did growing up. (The midnight glow from his bed would be an iPhone app.)

When I had this moment with him, I was in the midst of writing, "Swagger: 10 Urgent Rules for Raising Boys in an Era of Failing Schools, Mass Joblessness and Thug Culture." I had been researching all the cultural forces that are dumbing down our boys. So I needed to drill down to the root of the issue.

Labels: boys, childhood, children, culture, gender, girls

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Boys will be boys — but can they be raised to be men by single mothers?

That was the topic on everyone’s minds last Saturday afternoon at the Black Spectrum Theatre, where a debate, hosted by Councilman James Sanders Jr. (D-Laurelton) as part of a salute to Women’s History Month, at times worked the audience of more than 100 vested individuals into a near frenzy of emotions.

The time restrictions were not always observed, the panelists didn’t necessarily speak in turn, and the audience was talking back long before the public participation segment began, but the debate did what Sanders said it set out to accomplish: it educated, motivated and sent the spectators home with plenty of food for thought.

“We might as well start wrestling with this in a respectful, disciplined manner,” Sanders said prior to the discussion.

“Our job is to look at the whole thing, to explore it all. We’re going to bring thinking back,” he said.

According to Sanders, the debate was designed to “make us think about our children, our families and the structure of our society. What has happened to the positive male influence, and what happens to our sons if they don’t have one?”

Sanders asked the audience, “When was the last time our community thought? We used to play chess, a thinking game. For every move, 20 possibilities open up. Now we have strong thumbs and weak minds.

“There’s a lot going on in our community. Women are left with the burden of raising children,” he said.

The six panelists, representing a wide range of backgrounds, were divided into two even groups, based on their response to the debate’s premise, “Single mothers can’t raise boys to be men.” One side agreed, the other did not.

Cathleen Williams, whose book, “Single Mother The New Father,” raised considerable controversy because of its provocative title, opened the discussion by saying, “As a single woman, I was able to successfully raise my son,” currently a student at St. John’s University.

“As a people, we tell women you can’t do it, that you’re doomed to failure. Not only can you, but you must do it for the salvation of our race,” she said.

She indicated that there are “over 10 million single women in the United States raising their children successfully,” admitting that she “didn’t do it alone.”

Opening the discussion for the opposition, clinical social worker Rodney Pride, who serves as vice president of youth development at United Black Men of Queens, said, “Eight out of 10 boys are without a positive male role model in their families and that ain’t good. So many boys are walking around with a level of anger.” He suggested that their pent-up rage often leads to cases of teenage pregnancy, dropping out of high school, and black on black violence.

Labels: boys, children, culture, Fathers, gender, motherhood, out-of-wedlock births, parenting, single parenting

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What’s a “mama’s boy”? A wimp, of course, a child tied too tightly to his mother’s apron strings, overly sensitive, incapable of detaching, ready to “run to mama” at the slightest hint of adversity. Norman Bates. Oedipus. Robert, the awkward brother on “Everybody Loves Raymond.” The men are ineffectual, the “mamas” domineering — and if you’re looking for an analogous stereotype in the world of fathers and daughters (think father-daughter dances and “Daddy’s Girl”), you won’t find one.

It sounds like a myth of yesteryear, but Kate Stone Lombardi, frequent New York Times contributor and author of “The Mama’s Boy Myth,” says the hangover from generations of gender preconceptions affects us all, and that in many families and communities, mothers still find themselves urged to push their sons away at exactly the moments (like starting school and becoming a teenager) when our boys need us most — and that even when we don’t, we find it hard to talk about how close we are to our sons. ...

That soundtrack, she says, is part of why mothers are so often told to go against their instincts with their boys, to tell a crying child to “man up” or “shake it off,” or to let a hurting teenager suffer in silence and “work it out on his own.” Even the most attached of mothers can find herself wondering if she’s doing the right thing when she babies her little boy, or pushes her teen to talk. “But both science and research tell us it really is a good thing to offer boys our emotional support, and maintain that connection.”

As the mother of two boys (and two girls), I was surprised by how often I recognized issues I’d run up against, even in our modern, feminist, equal-parenting household: the son who needs to talk after his team lost a game (it wasn’t the loss that was upsetting him); the need to staunchly squash the commentary people seem to feel the need to make about one son’s long hair, and the other’s pink hockey skate lace; and my own surprise (and extreme pleasure) that my 10-year-old son still seeks to hold my hand, even in public.

Labels: boys, childhood, children, culture, gender, motherhood, parenting

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In a moment of passionate texting, they decided it was time...to share their passwords.

A thoughtful New York Times article published yesterday speaks to an eerie new trend: In the digital era, teenagers in love want to share their most intimate secrets, ideas and, of course, their Facebook accounts. ...

A 2011 Pew Internet and American Life Project study revealed that 30% of all teen Internet users shared a password with a friend or significant other. Of that percentage, 38% of girls shared a password with a friend or significant other versus only 23% of boys.

Labels: adolescence, boys, culture, girls, relationships

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A recent study by the Yale University Child Study Center shows that Black children — especially boys — no matter their family income, receive less attention, harsher punishment and lower marks in school than their White counterparts from kindergarten all the way through college. A subsequent article published in “The Washington Post” reported that Black children in the Washington, D.C. area are suspended or expelled two to five times more often than White children. It’s a national trend that needs to be addressed.

Labels: boys, children, race, schools

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...Our Fathers, Ourselves: Daughters, Dads and the Changing American Family focuses on the generations that came of age after the 1970s, when power was, in a sense, being transferred from fathers to daughters. Daughters gradually emerged as the, on average, more tractable sex in school and in other settings that mattered to post-industrial skill acquisition. Our Fathers, Ourselves implies — and it should be said here that it is an implication lying at the edges of her book rather than a fleshed-out argument — that a generation and more of enabling fathers may have incited their daughters to this success. The end result has been as dramatic as it has been unexpected: the daughters are now out-professionalizing, out-earning, and academically outperforming their brothers in the competitive races of this century.

Drexler’s book uses a mix of quotations from her interviews with adult daughters who reflect on the roles their fathers have played in their success, scholarly material, and her own often folksy commentary. This mélange makes for a loose, sometimes rambling style, albeit with suggestive nuggets interspersed throughout. Chapters are divvied up according to fatherly patterns — fathers who listened and fathers who encouraged risk-taking, for example. She interviewed 75 women in total, adult daughters in their twenties and thirties, for the most part (some were older), whom she identified, by their sheen of confident savoir faire — in other words, their appearance of having the capacity to make life work out for themselves, to be resourceful, and to have their eye on some sort of ball. Drexler uses the word “sextant” to suggest navigational skills. A fair proportion of the women in her interview set were earning six-figure salaries at young ages.

One could quibble here interminably about Drexler’s selection criteria and methods; about the impossible-to-untangle entanglement of nature (innate disposition) and nurture (in this case, fatherly influence or lack thereof); or indeed about her definition of success, let alone her ability to identify it from the stuff of appearances. But, leaving such quibbles aside, as a human-interest story rather than as science, her study is worth considering for what it does have to say about power, gender, generational transfer, and the races we run. It flirts with tremendously timely issues — like why girls are outperforming boys at this historical moment.

Labels: boys, childhood, children, culture, Fathers, fathers and daughters, gender, gender differences, girls, motherhood, parenting

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During his first-period broadcast Monday, the Norwood High athletic director Brian McDonough congratulated Will Higgins for breaking the meet record in the 50-yard freestyle the previous day at the Massachusetts South Division fall swimming and diving championships.

McDonough chose not to mention that it was a girls swimming championship.

“I didn’t want to get into that,” he said.

Anthony Rodriguez, another boy on the Norwood girls team, heard a grace note in McDonough’s omission.

“If people hear that you set a record, they’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s awesome,’ ” Rodriguez said. “But if they knew you were competing against girls, they wouldn’t have as much respect for you.”

Higgins, a senior, and Rodriguez, a sophomore, are among roughly two dozen boys competing on girls teams in Massachusetts because their schools do not have boys swimming programs. They are able to do so because of the open access amendment to the state constitution, which was voted into law in the 1970s and mandates that boys and girls must be afforded equal access to athletics.

Boys have been members of girls swim teams since the 1980s, but until recently they were mostly a sideshow. It has only been in the last year or two that boys have swum well enough to draw attention — and people’s ire. The epicenter of the debate is the 50-yard freestyle, an event in which strength can trump talent or technique.

At the Division I state championships on Saturday at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, there are eight boys in the 28-swimmer field in the 50 freestyle. Although Norwood’s Higgins was ruled academically ineligible Friday and will not compete at the state meet, two of the top four seeds in the 50 freestyle are boys, giving rise to the possibility that a boy could be the girls state champion. ...

Paul Wetzel, a spokesman for the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association, said the state’s swimming committee would meet after the season, and among the topics on the table would be Higgins’s record swim.

Labels: adolescence, boys, culture, gender, gender differences, girls, schools

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Things actually said to real families with internationally adopted kids, collected on adoption forums:

Are they REALLY brother and sister?
I guess their mom/dad is Ory Ental, huh?
Did their mother die in that big war they had down there?
Are you SURE she’s [ethnicity]?
How could you love [adopted child] as much as [biological child]?
I adopted a dog once.
[Upon a post-adoption pregnancy] What are you going to do with the other one, keep him or send him back?
You get what you pay for.
Is he a real orphan?
What’s wrong? You can’t have one of your own?

Labels: adoption, boys, children, culture, girls, infertility, race

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A 3 ½-year-old named Harry was playing at home in Los Angeles recently when his father walked in with a Target shopping bag. Inside was a special gift for the little boy: a sparkly princess Barbie doll.

“You could hear the gasp of excitement,” recounted Harry’s mother, Lee. “It just made his whole world.” ...

In general, researchers say, the behavior of very young children may not be a strong predictor of their adult sexual orientation. “Even when the child has extremely gender variant behavior at 4, it doesn’t necessarily mean the child will be gender variant at 10 or 15,” said Dr. Edgardo J. Menvielle, who directs the Gender and Sexuality Psychosocial Programs at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, D.C. “It’s possible they will remain who they are and they may also change in a variety of ways.”

In other words, parents have to wait, a limbo that many find unbearable. Some rush to aggressive advocacy. Diane Ehrensaft, a therapist in Oakland, Calif., said that a parent might say to her, “ ‘I know my child is transgender and I’m ready to go with hormone blockers.’ ”

Her response? “Whoa, not so fast.”

Labels: boys, children, culture, gender, girls, homosexuality, parenting, schools, transgender issues

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...That's according to a new report, Good Intentions: The Beliefs and Values of Teens and Tweens Today, by the Girl Scout Research Institute. They surveyed over 3,000 3rd through 12th grade boys and girls, painting a picture of a generation that, contrary to the media doomsday hype, is "civic minded and responsible to themselves and others, and even more committed to these values than their predecessors were 20 years ago." ...

* 13% of youth do what God or scripture tells them to do ...

* 7% of girls and 20% of boys would end a friendship with a gay/lesbian friend

* fewer youth today (25%) than in 1989 (33%) believe that "abortion is all right if having a baby will change you life plans in away you find hard to live with

* Boys are more likely than girls to agree that abortion is all right (29% compared to 20%)

Get your own copy of the report or read more about it here.

Labels: abortion, adolescence, boys, childhood, children, culture, girls, homosexuality, religion

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...These are the kinds of questions asked by anxious parents and, increasingly, academic researchers. Boyhood studies—virtually unheard of a few years ago—has taken off, with a shelf full of books already published, more on the way, and a new journal devoted to the subject. Much of the focus so far has been on boys falling behind academically, paired with the notion that school is not conducive to the way boys learn. What motivates boys, the argument goes, is different from what motivates girls, and society should adjust accordingly.

Not everyone buys the boy talk. Some critics, in particular the American Association of University Women, contend that much of what passes for research about boyhood only reinforces stereotypes and arrives at simplistic conclusions: Boys are competitive! Boys like action! Boys hate books! They argue that this line of thinking miscasts boys as victims and ignores the very real problems faced by girls.

But while this debate is far from settled, the field has expanded to include how marketers target boys, the nature of boys' friendships, and a host of deeper, more philosophical issues, all of which can be boiled down, more or less, to a single question: Just what are boys, anyway?

Labels: adolescence, boys, childhood, children, culture, gender, gender differences

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