"What was he thinking?" It's the familiar cry of bewildered parents trying to understand why their teenagers act the way they do.

How does the boy who can thoughtfully explain the reasons never to drink and drive end up in a drunken crash? Why does the girl who knows all about birth control find herself pregnant by a boy she doesn't even like? What happened to the gifted, imaginative child who excelled through high school but then dropped out of college, drifted from job to job and now lives in his parents' basement?

Adolescence has always been troubled, but for reasons that are somewhat mysterious, puberty is now kicking in at an earlier and earlier age. A leading theory points to changes in energy balance as children eat more and move less.

At the same time, first with the industrial revolution and then even more dramatically with the information revolution, children have come to take on adult roles later and later. Five hundred years ago, Shakespeare knew that the emotionally intense combination of teenage sexuality and peer-induced risk could be tragic—witness "Romeo and Juliet." But, on the other hand, if not for fate, 13-year-old Juliet would have become a wife and mother within a year or two.

Our Juliets (as parents longing for grandchildren will recognize with a sigh) may experience the tumult of love for 20 years before they settle down into motherhood. And our Romeos may be poetic lunatics under the influence of Queen Mab until they are well into graduate school.

What happens when children reach puberty earlier and adulthood later? The answer is: a good deal of teenage weirdness. Fortunately, developmental psychologists and neuroscientists are starting to explain the foundations of that weirdness.

Labels: "emerging adulthood", adolescence, age at first marriage, childhood, children, culture, parenting, schools, work/family policy

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If you’ve been anywhere near an airport bookstore in the last five years, you’ve probably seen the face of Tucker Max leering out at you from one of his two uber-bestselling books. ...

The books recount Tucker’s endlessly repetitive nights throughout his twenties (he’s 35 now), drinking extreme amounts of alcohol, having utterly drunken, meaningless, uninspired (and uninspiring) sex with a parade of random strangers, acting in a cocky, testosterone-fueled, belligerent way to those who come across his drunken glare, and saying the most insulting, vile, vicious, mean, sexually-degrading things you could possibly imagine to everyone around him, both men and women.

The narrator seems to be doing everything possible to ensure that his photo appears not only in mugshots, but under the dictionary definition of the word “prick.”

But, love Tucker Max or hate him—it is very likely someone you know has paid money for his writing. His books have sold a staggering 2 million copies combined—around 1.6 million for the first one, and around 400,000 for the second. ...

Perhaps more interesting, Tucker is not just retiring from writing about his hard-drinking, hard-partying, and hard-womanizing, whose recounting made him famous and earned him millions. He is also retiring entirely from that lifestyle of his twenties.

Or, I should say, he already has. Unbeknownst to his legions of fans, his legions of critics, or the legions of publishing professionals who want a piece of him, this most public of “I-don’t-wanna-grow-up” males is in fact now in the midst of a serious, intentional and devoted period of cleaning up and growing up.

He is changing his ways of the past, and—gasp!—becoming a mature adult male, one is who seeking a committed, long-term relationship, leading to marriage, with an intelligent, substantive, accomplished woman.

What you are about to read is the most in-depth and personal profile of this bestselling and infamous author ever written, based on the most access he has ever given a fellow writer.

It should be abundantly clear from what follows that I’m not a fan of Tucker Max’s writing, nor of his behavior in his twenties.

So why am I writing this? I felt Tucker had an interesting story to tell here, and I wanted to help tell it (no, it’s not another drinking story.) I also have my own personal interest in this story, having to do with how I spent my own twenties. I’ll reveal that towards the end.

Labels: "emerging adulthood", childhood, culture, divorce, gender, heterosexual couples, hooking up, Marriage, men, mental health, parenting, premarital sex, sex, women

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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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Spanking has declined precipitously in American society, particularly among the educated. Darshak Sanghavi explores why:

Several experts with whom I spoke pointed to tougher laws on child abuse (that is, fear of prosecution), greater use of no-spanking day-care centers and nannies by two profession couples, or beliefs that spanking causes long-term psychological harm. But these don't necessarily support the personal experience of many parents. At my medical center, for example, I recently interviewed dozens of pediatricians and subspecialists about their own experience, and many recalled being whipped with belts, slapped in the face, or hit in other ways as children. (I once went to preschool with a bruised cheek from being hit.) Yet not a single one hit his or her own children today as a routine method of discipline. None of the above explanations seemed on target to them. Instead, they chose not to spank for an entirely practical reason: They had, they said, learned more effective ways of disciplining children.

That knowledge didn't come from their health-care providers. As with many pediatrics residencies, mine included nothing on the practical aspects of parenting. And studies show that pediatricians spend only a few seconds during checkups talking about how to discipline a child. Instead, modern practices of child discipline are conveyed through books, television shows, and other forms of popular culture that have shifted parenting norms. When my wife was pregnant with our first child, we sought out books like How To Talk so Kids Will Listen & Listen so Kids Will Talk that followed the path first blazed by Benjamin Spock and T. Berry Brazelton. Mass-marketed child care guides, along with popular shows like ABC's Supernanny (praised even in the august pages of the journal Pediatrics), offered an immersive curriculum on disciplining children without hitting them.

Without really realizing it, we zeroed in on a style of parenting that sociologist Annette Lareau calls "concerted cultivation." This is, I think, what separates those who hit kids from those who don't, and divides largely along socioeconomic fault lines. As popularized in Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, Lareau tried to document how these differences emerged. The issue wasn't that one group was more or less lenient with bad behavior. Instead, middle- and upper-class parents tended to treat children as peers, with the pint-sized ability to make choices, respond to reason, and have valid emotions. It's not a huge leap then to see children as having nascent civil rights that conflict with regular corporal punishment.

Such a view underlies the approach of Supernanny or How To Talk, where parents make behavior charts or create token economies for rewards, answer questions with explanations, and encourage kids to accept and express their feelings. According to Lareau, such discipline tends to be self-reinforcing, and part of a broader ecology of parenting. As a result, these children who experience it develop an "emerging sense of entitlement"--a trait that may carry some negative connotations but generally correlates with better verbal skills, school performance, and a sense that they can actively shape the world around them.

Sanghavi goes on to link this to gains in IQ and other good things.

I wonder, however, if "better" is quite the right word. It seems to me that what parents have discovered is a much, much more intensive form of parenting than their grandparents employed. The elaborate charts and systems of incentives are enabled by the fact that modern children are effectively monitored by adults every waking hour until they become quite old.

As Valerie Ramey points out in a recent essay, one of the enduring mysteries of the 20th century is that in America, at least, labor saving appliances don't seem to have saved much labor. Adults spend less time on certain "home production" tasks--like cooking--but more on others, particularly childcare.

Labels: childhood, children, class, culture, parenting

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I recently discovered that my chances of getting divorced are over 400 percent. While a sane person might be a little apprehensive about tying the knot when confronted with this information, I've only continued to cultivate an insatiable desire to get married one day.

Here's how I arrived at that dooming number. According to research published by Cambridge University in 2005, having divorced parents gives me a 40 percent chance of getting divorced myself. My parents then remarried -- which statistically gives me a 91 chance of divorce -- and then my dad and my stepmom divorced each other, then remarried each other again.

By my calculations, that's 40 percent, plus 91 (times two, to account for both parents), plus another 40 and 91, plus 50 -- to account for the percent chance of failure that's become the tagline for modern American marriage -- and I arrive at this: a 443 percent change of divorce.

Okay, I admit that I never made it past high school pre-calculus, so my math could be a little, well, off. ...

Yet, even after seeing the aftermath of my parents' failed marriage, getting hitched myself has always been -- and remains -- my foremost romantic goal. Every relationship I've been in -- even some non-relationships I've been in -- had me optimistic that this would be the guy I'd marry. In the sense that I'd use my zone-out moments, like while I blow-dried my hair, to ponder just how I'd phrase the "how we met and fell madly in love" story for the wedding toast. Yes, I'm that kind of girl.

But, while I'll habitually (and happily) tune in to "Say Yes To the Dress," the wedding part of getting married isn't actually what I look forward to. In fact, when I think about the logistics of the event a familiar discomfort creeps in -- the same one that washes over me any time both my sets of parents are forced to be in the same place at the same time because of their one common denominator, yours truly. There are looming questions that I just don't want to have to answer: Will both my dad and my stepdad walk me down the aisle? Will I have two father-daughter dances? Will everyone just wish I'd eloped instead -- including me?

What I do want is everything I've decided that marriage stands for: not just love and partnership, but security, even refuge. I'm hoping for someone to choose me instead of having to be the one who does the choosing. Marriage means no longer having to gravitate between my two parental poles, but establishing my own home base. And while I know that, rationally, having a happy and satisfying relationship should be enough in itself, my marriage-mindedness won't turn off.

Labels: childhood, children, culture, divorce, Marriage

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Labels: childhood, children, culture, parenting

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Labels: adultery, childhood, children, culture, custody, divorce, economics, Marriage, men, poverty, women

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..."The message to our girls (with these costumes) is that they can't be too sexy, and they can't be sexy too soon," says Melissa Wardy, founder of Pigtail Pals, a clothing line for adventurous girls, who has blogged about sexy Halloween costumes. "It's disgusting. She just potty trained. There's nothing sexual about her."

It can also be dangerous.

"Dressing girls like grown women for Halloween communicates that they have the sexuality of adults, in the bodies of children," says Teresa Downing-Matibag, an assistant professor of sociology at Iowa State University. "While little girls themselves likely have very little awareness of adult or even adolescent sexuality, or what sex is really about, the adults who are seeing them on the streets do. We are also communicating to adults that little girls are sexually appealing, and this message has tragic implications for their vulnerability to sexual abuse."

The sexualizing of Halloween costumes for young girls is part of a larger marketing trend emphasizing girls' outsides over their insides, says Michele Yulo, founder of the Princess Free Zone, featuring superhero Super Tool Lula on T-shirts and in a new book. ...

What girls hear is who they are is how they look, and how they have to look is "hot," which is creating problems for girls at an ever-younger age, says Peggy Orenstein, author of "Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girly-Girl Culture."

Labels: childhood, children, gender, girls, parenting

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”There’s no place like home.” It’s been over seven decades since Dorothy Gale murmured those reassuring words, ruby-slippered heels clicking beneath her. “Home” evokes associations of safety and security, whether in baseball, hide-and-seek, or board games like Sorry—but even in 1939 “home” wasn’t always the ideal picture of father, mother, and children safely under one roof. Dorothy was an orphan, to start with, and home was a place she started out running away from. Even when she returned, she wasn’t safe; a twister blew in a window, knocking her cold, and seemingly uprooted the house itself, carrying it far away—though in the end she found her house on its foundations and all as it should be.

With respect to the uncertainties of home life, what was already a reality for Dorothy looms much larger for family film audiences today. Starting with Steven Spielberg’s ET the Extraterrestrial, what might be called broken-family films—films about broken families, made by and for a culture in which half of all marriages end in divorce and fewer children than ever are being raised by both parents under one roof—have become increasingly common. Such films may be no less fantastic and escapist than The Wizard of Oz, with imaginary creatures and unearthly goings-on of all sorts, but the underlying reality is a world in which marriage and family are far less permanent than they once were.

In a number of recent broken-family films, “broken home” is not just a metaphor. Like Dorothy’s, uprooted in fairy-tale response to her running away, physical houses in one family film after another are displaced, torn asunder, and undergo fantastic, traumatic crises and transformations in visionary mirroring of the upheaval in the characters’ lives. Among the more striking examples of this poetic linking of house and household are Jon Favreau’s intriguing 2005 fantasy Zathura, Gil Kenan’s 2006 Halloween tale Monster House, Mark Waters’s smart, scary 2008 thriller The Spiderwick Chronicles, and Pete Docter’s 2009 Pixar fantasy Up.

All four films touch in one way or another on themes of death and marital dissolution, events that rock families to their foundations. Two—Zathura and The Spiderwick Chronicles—are live-action adventures, based on children’s books, and focus on families broken apart by marital division; the other two—Monster House and Up—are original computer-animated fantasies, and focus on childless unions ending in death. Connective threads run in other directions as well.

Labels: childhood, children, culture, divorce, Marriage, parenting

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Labels: childhood, children, motherhood, parenting, Russia

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Labels: aging, childhood, children, culture, daughters, Marriage, men, motherhood, women

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...Paradoxically, the kind of parents who follow debates about parenting — typically more affluent and educated — are those who may have the least to worry about. But there is a group for whom the debate is really important: low-income parents. Differences in parenting can matter a lot to poor, underprivileged children, and research shows that better parenting could help improve their opportunities in many ways.

“In one sense you can say parenting doesn’t matter very much if you’re looking at a bunch of upper-middle-class parents who are all basically good parents,” said Janet Currie, an economist at Columbia University. “Then variations don’t matter. But if you’re looking at people who are in difficult situations and aren’t able to be good parents, then improvements in parenting would make a huge difference. That’s part of the problem with the discussion.”

Research has found that lifestyle differences — discipline, consistent mealtimes, reading and television watching — account for some differences between lower- and middle-income children in their readiness for school. But does a wealthier parent who forces a child to practice piano 20 hours a week make a huge difference to her overall well-being? “We don’t really know,” said Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, a professor of child development at Columbia.

Labels: adoption, childhood, children, class, culture, economics, parenting, poverty

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When studying relationships, psychological scientists have often focused on how couples fight. But how they recover from a fight is important, too. According to a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, couples' abilities to bounce back from conflict may depend on what both partners were like as infants.

Researchers at the University of Minnesota have been following a cohort of people since before they were born, in the mid-1970s. When the subjects were about 20 years old, they visited the lab with their romantic partners for testing. This included a conflict discussion, when they were asked to talk about an issue they disagreed on, followed by a "cool-down" period, when the couples spent a few minutes talking about something they saw eye to eye about. ...

With Sally I-Chun Kuo, Ryan D. Steele, Jeffry A. Simpson, and W. Andrew Collins, all from the University of Minnesota, Salvatore embarked on a closer look at what happens after a conflict supposedly ends. By looking back at observations of the participants and their caregivers from the 1970s, when they were between 12 and 18 months old, the researchers discovered a link between the couples' conflict recovery behaviors and the quality of their attachment relationship with their caregivers. People who were more securely attached to their caregivers as infants were better at recovering from conflict 20 years later. This means that if your caregiver is better at regulating your negative emotions as an infant, you tend to do a better job of regulating your own negative emotions in the moments following a conflict as an adult.

Labels: childhood, parenting, relationships

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The cover of "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother" was catnip to this average parent's soul. The memoir, the text says, was supposed to have proved that Chinese parents are better at raising children than Western ones - but instead it portrays "a bitter clash of cultures, a fleeting taste of glory" and the Tiger Mother's humbling by a 13-year-old. As a hopelessly Western mother married into a Chinese family, living in an area that generates immigrant prodigies as reliably as clouds produce rain, I was eager to observe the comeuppance of a parent who thought she had all the answers.

And, in many ways, "Tiger Mother" did not disappoint. At night, I would nudge my husband awake to read him some of its more revealing passages, such as when author Amy Chua threatened to burn her older daughter's stuffed animals if the child didn't improve her piano playing. "What Chinese parents understand," Chua writes, "is that nothing is fun until you're good at it." By day, I would tell my own two daughters about how Chua threw unimpressive birthday cards back at her young girls and ordered them to make better ones. For a mother whose half-Chinese children played outside while the kids of stricter immigrant neighbors could be heard laboring over the violin and piano, the book could be wickedly gratifying. Reading it was like secretly peering into the home of a controlling, obsessive, yet compulsively honest mother - one who sometimes makes the rest of us look good, if less remarkable and with less impressive offspring. Does becoming super-accomplished make up for years of stress? That's something my daughters and I will never find out. ...

In Chinese parenting theory, hard work produces accomplishment, which produces confidence and yet more accomplishment. As Chua notes, this style of parenting is found among other immigrant cultures, too, and I'm sure many Washington area readers have seen it, if they don't employ it themselves. Chua's older daughter, Sophia, a pianist, went along with, and blossomed under, this approach. The younger daughter, Lulu, whose instrument of Chua's choice was the violin, was a different story. The turning point came when, after years of practicing and performing, Lulu expressed her hatred of the violin, her mother and of being Chinese. Chua imagined a Western parent's take on Lulu's rebellion: "Why torture yourself and your child? What's the point? . . . I knew as a Chinese mother I could never give in to that way of thinking."

Labels: Asia, childhood, children, China, motherhood, parenting

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A lot of people wonder how Chinese parents raise such stereotypically successful kids. They wonder what these parents do to produce so many math whizzes and music prodigies, what it's like inside the family, and whether they could do it too. Well, I can tell them, because I've done it. Here are some things my daughters, Sophia and Louisa, were never allowed to do:

• attend a sleepover

• have a playdate

• be in a school play

• complain about not being in a school play

• watch TV or play computer games

• choose their own extracurricular activities

• get any grade less than an A

• not be the No. 1 student in every subject except gym and drama

• play any instrument other than the piano or violin

• not play the piano or violin.

I'm using the term "Chinese mother" loosely. I know some Korean, Indian, Jamaican, Irish and Ghanaian parents who qualify too. Conversely, I know some mothers of Chinese heritage, almost always born in the West, who are not Chinese mothers, by choice or otherwise. I'm also using the term "Western parents" loosely. Western parents come in all varieties.

All the same, even when Western parents think they're being strict, they usually don't come close to being Chinese mothers. For example, my Western friends who consider themselves strict make their children practice their instruments 30 minutes every day. An hour at most. For a Chinese mother, the first hour is the easy part. It's hours two and three that get tough. ...

Western parents try to respect their children's individuality, encouraging them to pursue their true passions, supporting their choices, and providing positive reinforcement and a nurturing environment. By contrast, the Chinese believe that the best way to protect their children is by preparing them for the future, letting them see what they're capable of, and arming them with skills, work habits and inner confidence that no one can ever take away.

Labels: Asia, childhood, children, China, culture, motherhood, parenting

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...No one has done more to disprove Hall's stereotype than Toni Falbo, a professor of educational psychology and sociology at the University of Texas at Austin. Falbo began investigating the only-child experience in the 1970s, both in the U.S. and in China, drawing on the experience of tens of thousands of subjects. Twenty-five years ago, she and colleague Denise Polit conducted a meta-analysis of 115 studies of only children from 1925 onward that considered developmental outcomes of adjustment, character, sociability, achievement and intelligence.

Generally, those studies showed that singletons aren't measurably different from other kids — except that they, along with firstborns and people who have only one sibling, score higher in measures of intelligence and achievement. Of course, part of the reason we assume only children are spoiled is that whatever parents have to give, the only child gets it all. The argument Judith Blake makes in Family Size and Achievement as to why onlies are higher achievers across socioeconomic lines can be stated simply: there's no "dilution of resources," as she terms it, between siblings. No matter their income or occupation, parents of only children have more time, energy and money to invest in their kid. ...

"Most people are saying, I can't divide myself anymore," says social psychologist Susan Newman. Before technology made the office a 24-hour presence, we actually spent less time actively parenting, she explains. "We no longer send a child out to play for three hours and have those three hours to ourselves," she says. "Now you take them to the next practice, the next class. We've been consumed by our children. But we're moving back slowly to parents wanting to have a life too. And people are realizing that's simply easier with one."

Labels: childhood, children, culture, family size, parenting

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... After all, from Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn to Harry Potter and Ron Weasley, the childhood “best friend” has long been romanticized in literature and pop culture — not to mention in the sentimental memories of countless adults.

But increasingly, some educators and other professionals who work with children are asking a question that might surprise their parents: Should a child really have a best friend?

Most children naturally seek close friends. In a survey of nearly 3,000 Americans ages 8 to 24 conducted last year by Harris Interactive, 94 percent said they had at least one close friend. But the classic best-friend bond — the two special pals who share secrets and exploits, who gravitate to each other on the playground and who head out the door together every day after school — signals potential trouble for school officials intent on discouraging anything that hints of exclusivity, in part because of concerns about cliques and bullying.

“I think it is kids’ preference to pair up and have that one best friend. As adults — teachers and counselors — we try to encourage them not to do that,” said Christine Laycob, director of counseling at Mary Institute and St. Louis Country Day School in St. Louis. “We try to talk to kids and work with them to get them to have big groups of friends and not be so possessive about friends.”

Labels: childhood, children, culture, schools

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A new study has found that fathers give toddlers more leeway and that allows them to actively explore their environments, according to a new study on parent-child attachment published in Early Child Development and Care.

Daniel Paquette, a professor at the Université de Montréal School of Psychoeducation, says the 'activation theory' is just as important as the 'attachment theory.' The latter was the prevailing 20th-Century notion that children usually connect with their primary caregiver since they fulfill their emotional needs and guarantee their survival. ...

As part of the investigations, kids aged 12 to 18 months (accompanied by a parent) were placed in three different risky situations: social risk (a strange adult entered his or her environment), physical risk (toys were placed at the top of a stairway), and a forbidden activity (parents were forbidden to climb the stairs after the child succeeded the first time).

"We found fathers are more inclined than mothers to activate exploratory behavior by being less protective," says Paquette. "The less the parent is protective, the more activated is the exploratory behavior in the child. Children who were optimally stimulated, meaning they were exploratory yet respective of the rules, were 71 percent boys. Meanwhile, 70 percent of children who were risk averse were girls." ...

Paquette is convinced that mothers and fathers intervene differently in the education of a child and these complementarities benefit a child. "Even if both parents change diapers and give the bottle, they don't do it the same way," says Paquette. "By stimulating exploration, controlled risk-taking and competition, fathers provide something different to the child who will benefit greatly from this singular contribution."

Labels: childhood, Fathers, gender, gender differences

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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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