Are today’s schools anti-boy? Increasing numbers of people, with various political orientations, seem to believe that the answer is yes. Thanks in large part to Richard Reeves, boys’ educational and other deficits are finally getting deserved attention. The consensus among thinkers from the center-left to the right seems to go something like this: Today’s schools, especially in the early grades, require too much sitting and too much focus for many boys to succeed. Boys, those in the mainstream discourse seem increasingly willing to acknowledge, are on average more physically restless, more competitive, less verbal, and less mature than girls the same age. Schools, then, need to do a better job of meeting boys where they are. Erica Komisar, for example, thinks that the sexes should be segregated in the early grades so that girls can have a calm environment free of male rowdiness, and boys can have short bursts of focus broken up by stretches of physical activity. Her perspective seems to be an extreme version of what is now the consensus on what would work best.
Meanwhile, those like the New York Times’ Jessica Grose, who argue in favor of the status quo (which amounts to girls racking up more academic accolades and college degrees while boys are increasingly falling behind and being diagnosed with autism, ADHD, and ODD [Oppositional Defiance Disorder]), tend to come from a misandrist-adjacent perspective that is very off-putting even to other self-identified mainstream feminists (i.e., Darby Saxbe et al). From Grose’s point of view, if boys are behind it’s mostly because they’re entitled and won’t put in the effort to be otherwise. If we’re lucky, in other words, “the future is female.”
Here is my alternative take: Modal 21st-century schooling is not uniquely anti-boy. But modal 21st century parenting is.
To be clear, my argument here is not about blaming individual parents for little boys behaving badly. On the contrary, it is predicated on the idea that most little boys are going to begin by behaving sub-optimally, in one way or another, no matter who their parents are. The problem is that most of us today (parents and non-parents alike) are in thrall to one of two incorrect ideas: (1) the still-dominant (left-coded) idea that boys are no different from girls and thus there’s something wrong when they aren’t as eager to follow parental suggestions or teacher directions as their female peers; or (2) the countercultural (erstwhile right-coded, but now more broadly accepted) idea that boys are indeed different from girls and thus we should not subject them to the strictures of civilization that are often difficult for them to meet.
There is a third possibility, and it happens to be the unpopular truth: We need to accept, as sure as we accept that 2+2=4, that training little boys to exist in a world with expectations, boundaries, and standards that are compatible with civilized modernity requires an untrendy reliance on presumptive and uncompromising adult authority. And then we need to do it anyway, without hesitation or apology.
Gentle parenting boys into crisis
The working assumption underlying the thesis that schools are anti-boy is that when far more boys than girls struggle to meet a given behavioral standard, there’s something wrong with the standard. This seems like a reasonable inference to many because, after all, what is the alternative? That there is something fundamentally wrong with boys? It seems like either we need to recognize that today’s schools are incapable of properly instructing and developing our sons, or we’re suddenly beholden to the ideology of a man-hating 1975 Women’s Studies department.
But maybe there’s nothing wrong with boys who struggle to meet schools’ behavioral standards and there’s nothing wrong with the standards themselves. Maybe what’s wrong is our failure to recognize that males have always needed and continue to need relentless training to mature into the capacity to meet appropriate standards. What if school comes more easily to girls because civilization itself does, too? What if gentle parenting—which is now so ubiquitous, regardless of the moniker, that it’s fair to term it “millennial parenting”—is giving girls a cold (it’s not like they’re doing better, it’s just that boys are doing worse in comparison) and boys pneumonia? What if training a little boy greatly resembles training a puppy, and our sons would be not only much better behaved, but also much happier, if they were routinely held to expectations no lower than we consider appropriate for canines? (“Sit,” anyone?)
See, the misandrists are right about one thing: Schools in earlier eras required boys to sit still far more than schools do now, and girls have long outperformed boys in the early grades, perhaps in part as a result. Moreover, standards for children’s behavior have been generally lowered, not raised, in recent decades. Yet earlier eras of boys were not presenting en masse with behavioral and neurological disorders such that their issues caused us to consider whether they need to be separated from same-age female peers.
Now, before I go any further, let me say this: I am not someone who disputes that autism and ADHD are real things that people really struggle with! There is a vast grey area between “totally fake news” and “always correctly diagnosed with proper rigor,” and that’s where I sit.
Nevertheless, as a mom of four boys, two of whom could easily have procured unnecessary diagnoses in their early years had their father and I been of a different turn of mind (more on this momentarily), I am half horrified and half bemused by the elephant in the room here: Teaching children in general, and boys in particular, only works if you can just tell them what to do and expect them to do it. And—in today’s world of institutional delegitimization, secularization, and atomization—that can only happen in the classroom if it is first happening in the home.
Boy obedience school
When my oldest son was young, he went to daycare two days a week. When he was almost three, his teacher presented a list of concerns at his parent-teacher conference: He is highly verbal but won’t answer direct questions. He doesn’t come when he is called. He wanders off during circle time to play with puzzles. She thought that he should be evaluated for sensory processing issues, expressive language delays, and various other pathologies. She intimated that she thought he might have Asperger’s, though “they don’t diagnose that this young.” She suggested that I bring these concerns up with his pediatrician. I made his three-year-old check-up—and I made sure it was with the oldest doctor in the practice, a Jewish man who could’ve easily been my father, and possibly my grandfather.
He evaluated my healthy son then listened to my recitation of what the teacher had said. His diagnosis was as follows: “He’s very intelligent, and a little stubborn. Also, he’s spacey.”
The only prescription he offered was for me: “Teach him to come when you call him.” In other words: “You’re the problem, Mom.” Noted. My husband and I got the message, and we shaped up.
When we arrived home, I spent 25 minutes in the driveway with my son, teaching him to come when called. We repeated the lesson the next day. And for several weeks thereafter, if my son failed to come immediately when called, he had to “redo” it five times. As in, come as he should have, and then do it four more times. Within weeks, the teacher pulled me aside: “He’s doing so well! I notice him interacting in a much more sustained way with others. Maybe he just needed a little time.” Little did she know. It wasn’t, of course, that he was just coming when called. It was also that the uncompromising expectation that he come when called (and, around the same time, that he potty train despite not evincing “readiness”) matured him. Which made him more interactive and more capable, creating a virtuous cycle of civilization.
When he was in kindergarten (a young kindergartener, with a May birthday), this same son was completing all his worksheets correctly, but often failing to put said worksheets in the “finished work” bin. He was forgetting folders in his desk, losing crayons, and neglecting to eat lunch because he was too busy talking.
Was our Catholic school too structured? No, it surely wasn’t as structured as in past eras. (Honestly, I would bet a whole lot that excess structure really isn’t the issue…anywhere).
Was he not getting enough physical activity? No, they had 1–2 recesses a day, plus “brain breaks” where they’d dance to videos, and he spent a lot of time after school in the back yard or at a park, playing rowdily and loudly, as happy little boys do. (Yes, lack of exercise is an issue some places; but I think not nearly as many as we want to believe can account for the behavioral hellscape driving ever more teachers out of the profession).
Did he need to be held back and repeat kindergarten? Well, he was reading Magic Treehouse and teaching himself multiplication, so that didn’t seem like a great idea. (There are definitely boys for whom this makes perfect sense, but he wasn’t one of them).
Besides, it’s not like every kindergarten boy was stuffing his completed worksheets in his desk. My son was one of just a few who did that. Clearly, he—not the environment—required reform. After all, actual parenting (as opposed to gentle parenting) is about fitting the child for the world, not the world for the child.
My husband and I came up with consequences (think loss of toys or “music picks” in the car) for failing to turn in worksheets, and gave our son morning mantras to repeat about turning work in—along with ongoing mantras about the worth of academic and intellectual achievement without organization and follow-through (hint: zero). Then, in first grade, we had him write increasing numbers of short sentences every time he forgot a book or folder (it got up to 70). By two-thirds of the way through first grade, we let up because we could—just as we had once upon a time stopped asking him every 20 minutes if he had to use the bathroom. He was, at long last, school-trained.
Meanwhile, we were relentlessly civilizing our willful, aggressive second-born, whose early formation I’ve written about at some length. More attuned to outright defiance than to spaciness, we intuitively gave his endless power struggles and tantrums no quarter. We understood that we had to provide him with boundaries of steel and zero dialogic indulgence, along with lots of affection. After all, a strong-willed little boy high in physicality and aggressiveness is like a German Shepherd puppy: adorable, until he grows big enough to be dangerous to himself and others, at which point there will be no hope of civilizing him as deeply or thoroughly as one might have sooner. At that juncture, the line between “needs structure” and “let’s see about having him evaluated for ‘oppositional defiance disorder’” (otherwise known as, being disagreeable and male, with a high energy level that no one has effectively disciplined you into controlling) becomes very thin indeed.
But, of course, 95 percent of the time (which, indeed, is not 100 percent of the time, granted!), there is nothing wrong with such a boy. Nor is there anything wrong with civilization, without which neither schools nor society writ large can operate. There is something wrong with us, for having forgotten three things: First, that human children are born knowing nothing and must be authoritatively socialized, not reactively deferred to. Second, in some very basic ways that show up very early in childhood (not to a person, but on average) boys are far harder so socialize than girls. And third, because of the way that overlapping bell curves work, nearly all of the most difficult people to socialize are boys.
My older two sons are now in fifth and third grade. They are excellent, curious students; solid, enthusiastic athletes; and well-rounded people with lots of interests. They have good friends and they navigate well socially. Yes, the one still forgets things occasionally and often has trouble tempering his bluntness with tact; and yes, the other still has a temper and often struggles with patience. Believe me, we are under no illusions here: They both still have a very long way to go, and the little brothers after them have even longer. Indeed, all of the real challenges in our family lie squarely ahead.
But for now, things are straightforward: My sons are happy and well-behaved kids with lots of energy, who can be pushed and can push themselves because they are secure in the knowledge that, in their little world, order reigns.
There is a common misapprehension that discipline tempers vibrance and personality. Actually, it’s the opposite: Kids who know where the boundaries are, and that adults expect them to bump into those boundaries but will hold them without discussion regardless, are kids who are free and independent within an age-appropriate sphere. By contrast, kids who bump a perceived boundary only to find that it folds (or who perceive none in the first place) become jaded and restless, unable to focus enough for their own optimal achievement or even enjoyment because the world around them has no reliable shape.
When I reflect on my boys’ relationships to daycare and then school, I am most grateful for two things: First, that my full-time job in my older sons’ early years could be done in part in off hours (I taught collegiate writing), which allowed me to take the uppermost hand in their early formation. And second, that we surrounded ourselves with institutions (conservative synagogue daycare, neighborhood Protestant church daycare, and then parochial grade school) that still have standards—even if they can no longer claim the authority to enforce them and therein must rely on parents to do so. Without these safeguards, things could have gone quite differently.
As they do, sadly, for thousands of perfectly normal boys just like mine.
Anomic infantilization
Many reading to this point might well say: “Good for you that you could train your kids like that. There is simply no room in many people’s lives as working parents for two-hour tantrums. People give the kid the cookie or the iPad for the sake of survival. Even if you accept the premise that boys need more structure at home rather than less at school, people don’t have the bandwidth for all this rigamarole! Plus, at many daycares, they don’t even try circle time; all the kids just do whatever, whenever. There is no one with the bandwidth to do any of this!”
The person who says this is right! She’s also inadvertently making an argument for far more structure, discipline, and authority in our schools and in society generally, not less.
See, that old doctor who made the implicit separation between my son’s neurology (obviously normal) and his behavior (obviously in need of reform) was relying on an authority that almost no one who isn’t 70+ years old will claim. Most of the teachers at the daycare would not have felt comfortable saying the same, even if they thought it, because we have stripped society of norms around everything, including around what three-year-olds should and shouldn’t be doing. So, everything is on individual parents. This is both presently indisputable and ultimately untenable.
But in an anomic world where adult authority itself is no longer a norm, the wider society (teachers and medical experts included) can only pathologize and diagnose the antisocial behavior that gentle parenting ideology encourages us to simply accept.
So, more parents need to be both liberated from gentle parenting zeitgeist and supported (economically and culturally) in their desire to have the kind of workplace flexibility and/or stay-at-home parent arrangement that enables the optimal formation of sons. Especially in the continued absence of anything approaching the enforcement of adequate behavioral standards anywhere outside the home (most schools included).
If we want to help boys at scale, though, we all need to recover a nuanced recognition that the average differences between girls and boys are: (A) real and biological; (B) not a reason to pathologize normal males for not being female; and (C) not a reason to excuse males from civilized behavior.
It has often occurred to me that if I had four girls instead of four boys, I might have maintained a more ambitious career trajectory. After all, daughters would likely have needed me less in the early years. Not because they can contend better with too much structure in daycares and schools, but because they can develop well enough with too little. (And yes, I understand that they might have needed me more in the tween and teen years—I’m not saying and would never say that girls don’t need their parents!)
Yet I stay home as much as I do with my young sons in part because I intuited from early on that other caregivers and institutions today will, at best, request obedience (and we were and are blessed to have caregivers and institutions that did and do this!) But no one, other than my husband and me, was going to deftly, uniformly, and automatically require obedience. And that—more than anything else—is what little boys need.
More physical activity is good. More academic competition is great. More challenge and less boredom is ideal. But to have a prayer of facilitating any, let alone all, of the above, behavioral non-negotiables have to be, well, non-negotiable—in homes and in schools alike.
Editor’s note: This was first published on the author’s Substack.
