Mom's Library

Merry Christmas

2010-10-23T18:17:00.001-07:00

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Chapter Nine: Drinking and Drugs

2008-06-10T13:38:00.000-07:00

I hate the way our society chooses to tackle the issue of drinking and drugs. It's nearly as bad as our abstinence programs. Ugh. This is particularly awful when you consider other industrialized nations that don't have the problems that we do with underage drinking and drugs because they have made them either legal or are less restrictive with drinking ages or the like. <insert me stepping down from my soapbox here>

Chapter takeaways:
Boys are anxious creatures. One side effect of alcohol is that is lessens anxiety.
When boys drink, they almost always drink to excess.
Use of alcohol at younger ages is associated with a double risk of HIV infections: these boys have more partners and are less likely to use condoms.

I suck and am behind in my reading

2008-04-21T20:12:00.000-07:00

Gentle readers,

I promise to continue on our Raising Cain journey and finish the last few chapters soon. I'm amazed at how fast time passes when there is a little one about. Babies and kids are extraordinary but they sure do suck up a lot of your time. In a good way, though. Lest anyone think I am upset with my son for demanding my attention.

I also promise to comment on entries of those who have posted before me. Despite my untimeliness, I do value your thoughts and interpretations of the material we are reviewing. It is why we started this book club adventure.

And so, having said that, I must ask: What are we reading next?

Best,

Christie

What A Boy Wants. What a Boy Needs. Romancing the Stone

2008-04-15T12:19:00.000-07:00

Let's talk about sex, baby.

An insight into a boy's sexual development:
(It appears that boys begin their sexual development around age 11 - so I will be using the term "boys" as opposed to "men" while discussing this chapter.)
Boys want three basic things when it comes to sex and romance.

Boys want to love and be loved.

Boys want to satisfy their sexual impulses. (Many have years of experience with this going "solo" before attempting to satisfy their needs with a partner.)

Boys want to be manly.

Although boys want to love and be loved many struggle and misread cues from girls and will choose simple sex over a true relationship with intimacy. Some just give up trying to figure out how to have any relationship (a true relationship or just sex relationship).

Boys want to satifsy their sexual impulses, but sex is a complicated process. There is potential for frustration and failure and rejection. If a boy does not know how to cope with these feelings there's a chance he might react with anger.

Boys want to be seen as manly. They fear dependence on a girl because they fear they will be devastated by that girl. Boys want to seem powerful and dominate over women (again for fear of being rejected).

Each boy is given a sexual script that is determined by their neighborhood, school, and ethnic/religious context. Since sexual development happens at the same time the culture of cruelty begins boys will push aside any "femine" feelings they may be having and instead try to make themselves appear manly.

What we can do!

Fathers can model respect for women.
Mothers can help their son understand a girl's point of view.
Everyone else in a boy's life can encourage connectedness to others.

Email?

2008-04-09T18:53:00.000-07:00

Hey-
I cannot find your email address, but what's the Second Shift about?

Drinking and Drugs

2008-04-08T18:15:00.000-07:00

A lot of this chapter really surprised me. Probably because the group of friends I hung out with the most through high school did not drink - boys and girls included. Or if they did drink it wasn't a regular thing at all. Anyway...here's what surprised me the most:

by the 10th grade it's likely that a boy has been drunk
the more educated parent's are = more likely for their son to smoke pot

And then some of the things i read in this chapter did not surprise me at all:

Boys drink because, "There's nothing else to do."
They like the feeling of, "being kind of indestructible."
alcohol seems to help reducte anxiety problems.
boys bond with each other while drinking - allows them to have an emotional connection that, when sober, would be frowned upon
boys who lack an emotional connect turn to alcohol and drugs (AGAIN - we need to teach our sons emotional literacy)

And then I learned something new! (not related much to drinking and drugs)

Tactile sense protects us from pain
Touch results in the release of natural painkillin opiates. (wow! So a hug after a kid falls actually does make them feel better physically as well as emotionally. Neat!)

Overall this chapter provided us with some scary facts of boys drinking and drug use. And once again, it seems that to prevent this downward spirial we need to provide our boys with an emotional education so that they do not feel the need to feel that void with alcohol or drugs.

Boys' Struggle With Depression and Suicide

2008-04-08T08:12:00.000-07:00

First of all, the thing that struck me the most in this chapter was the story of Keith and his suicide note - and how amazingly in denial his parents were. (at first I wanted to say "jerky parents" but then when I thought about it I think they just didn't want to admit he had a problem) His mother was angry for being bothered at work about this and his parents choose to send him to a different school the following year. (Where he did try commit suicide and finally was able to get the help and attention he was so desperately needing.)

With depression in boys, parents and teachers are usually so "caught up in reacting to the symptoms that they couldn't see what was behind them." So instead of always just punishing behaviors we need to stop and think "Why did he just do that?"

Boys face a psychological conflict trying to control their complex feelings. When they can't do this, their psyche surrendors - and that can lead to true depression.

Boys begin to undergo physical changes around age 12 (much earlier than 100 years ago) and there seems to be a huge gap between their physical and emotional maturity. Boys have a very difficult time keeping up emotionally with all of the physical changes happening to them.

There's a discrepancy between how you'd think boys feel about themselves and how they actually feel. Even the brightest students, best athletes, etc. feel inadequate in one way or another.

Again - we need to teach boys to use an emotional vocabulary - dialogue and relection can help a great deal.

When dealing with depression and suicide it's important to ask direct questions. "Have you thought about killing yourself?" "How?" If the boy has a quick answer for "how" then he has seriously considered suicide and needs help.

Depression can be seen as irritablity in boys and is often described as being a "cranky old man". Also, with true depression the boys (or anyone) can't simply choose to be some other way.

So Far Behind

2008-04-05T19:05:00.000-07:00

Christie - I'm soooo far behind on the book club thing. Not sure when I'm going to get to the next two chapters...by Tuesday. I will do it by Tuesday. That's about a week or so late. So sorry!!! I'm tired right now and we've got company coming tomorrow to discuss Disney plans! Then work on Monday - so yeah, Tuesday it is. Quinn will be back at school, Liam will nap (hopefully), and I will read and report.

Article: Can Sips at Home Prevent Binges?

2008-04-03T11:54:00.000-07:00

While reading the New York Times, I ran across another article.

Can Sips at Home Prevent Binges?

By ERIC ASIMOV

PARENTS always want to share their passions with their children. Whether you’re a fan of baseball or the blues, sailing or tinkering with old cars, few things are as rewarding as seeing a spark of receptivity in the eyes of the next generation.

It usually doesn’t take. Most of the time kids — teenagers, anyway — would as soon snicker at their old man’s obsessions as indulge him. Even so, I can’t help hoping that my sons might share my taste in music and food, books and movies, ball teams and politics. Why should wine be any different?

It’s the alcohol, of course, which makes wine not just tricky but potentially hazardous. Nonetheless, I would like to teach my sons — 16 and 17 — that wine is a wonderful part of a meal. I want to teach them to enjoy it while also drumming it into them that when abused, wine, like any other alcoholic beverage, can be a grave danger.

As they were growing up I occasionally gave them tastes from my glass — an unusual wine, perhaps, or a taste of Champagne on New Year’s Eve. They’ve had sips at Seders and they see wine nightly at our dinner table. With both boys now in high school, I thought it was time to offer them the option of small tastes at dinner.

In European wine regions, a new parent might dip a finger in the local pride and wipe it lovingly across an infant’s lips — “just to give the taste.” A child at the family table might have a spoonful of wine added to the water, because it says, “You are one of us.” A teenager might have a small glass of wine, introducing an adult pleasure in a safe and supervised manner. This is how I imagined it in my house.

But about a year ago, my wife attended a gathering on the Upper East Side sponsored by several high schools addressing the topic of teenagers and alcohol.

The highly charged discussion centered on the real dangers of binge drinking and peer pressure, of brain damage and parental over-permissiveness, and of the law.

One authority disparaged the European model, saying that teenage drinking in Europe — never mind which part — is much worse than it is in the United States. The underlying message was that nothing good comes from mixing alcohol and teenagers.

My wife was shaken. We agreed to hold off on the tasting plan. But I decided to try to get some answers myself.

I found ample evidence of the dangers of abusive drinking. Recent studies have shown that heavy drinking does more damage to the teenage brain than previously suspected, while the part of the brain responsible for judgment is not even fully formed until the age of 25.

“If we were to argue that responsible drinking requires a responsible brain, theoretically we wouldn’t introduce alcohol until 25,” said Dr. Ralph I. Lopez, a clinical professor of pediatrics at Weill-Cornell Medical College who specializes in adolescents.

The law specifies 21 as the age when people can buy and drink alcohol. Bill Crowley, a spokesman for the New York State Liquor Authority, confirmed that it was illegal to give anyone underage a taste of an alcoholic beverage in a restaurant, cafe or bar. But in the home?

“We don’t have any jurisdiction over what happens in the home,” Mr. Crowley said. Of course, each state’s laws differ, and lack of jurisdiction doesn’t mean immunity. The police or social service agencies could intervene if underage bingeing were encouraged in the home. And when driving is a factor, everything changes. But inside the home, the law, at least, seems to permit the small tastes that I had in mind.

Even so, are small tastes justified? Abundant research shows the dangers of heavy drinking and the necessity of getting help with teenage alcohol abuse. But little guidance is offered on teaching teenagers about the pleasures of wine with a meal.

It would be easy to preach abstinence to children until they’re 21, but is it naive and even irresponsible to think that teenagers won’t experiment? Might forbidding even a taste of wine with a meal actually encourage secrecy and recklessness?

Some experts think so. Dr. Lopez began to offer his daughter a little wine at dinner when she was 13.

“You have to look at a family and decide where alcohol fits,” he said. “If you demonstrate the beauty of wine, just as you would Grandma’s special pie, then it augments a meal. However, if there is an issue about drinking within a family then it’s a different situation.”

If a family member had an alcohol problem, or if cocktails were served regularly for relaxation, he said, “That’s a different message than wine at the table.”

I called Dr. Paul Steinberg, a psychiatrist in Washington, who is the former director of counseling at Georgetown University.

“The best evidence shows that teaching kids to drink responsibly is better than shutting them off entirely from it,” he told me. “You want to introduce your kids to it, and get across the point that that this is to be enjoyed but not abused.”

He said that the most dangerous day of a young person’s life is the 21st birthday, when legality is celebrated all too fervently. Introducing wine as a part of a meal, he said, was a significant protection against bingeing behavior.

What is the evidence? In 1983, Dr. George E. Vaillant, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard University, published “The Natural History of Alcoholism,” a landmark work that drew on a 40-year survey of hundreds of men in Boston and Cambridge.

Dr. Vaillant compared 136 men who were alcoholics with men who were not. Those who grew up in families where alcohol was forbidden at the table, but was consumed away from the home, apart from food, were seven times more likely to be alcoholics that those who came from families where wine was served with meals but drunkenness was not tolerated.

He concluded that teenagers should be taught to enjoy wine with family meals, and 25 years later Dr. Vaillant stands by his recommendation. “The theoretical position is: driving a car, shooting a rifle, using alcohol are all dangerous activities,” he told me, “and the way you teach responsibility is to let parents teach appropriate use.”

“If you are taught to drink in a ceremonial way with food, then the purpose of alcohol is taste and celebration, not inebriation,” he added. “If you are forbidden to use it until college then you drink to get drunk.”

In a more recent study of 80 teenagers and 80 young adults in Italy, Lee Strunin, a professor at the Boston University School of Public Health, found that drinking wine in a family setting offered some protection against bingeing and may encourage moderate drinking. But she cautioned against extrapolating from Italy to the United States.

Her colleague, David Rosenbloom, director of the School of Public Health’s Youth Alcohol Prevention Center, emphasized that family context was crucial. “Does the kid see the parents drunk?” he asked. “Does the kid understand expectations? Is there violence in the family setting?”

“It is certainly possible that in some family contexts the introduction of wine at family dinners could have a mild protective factor,” he said, adding that he believes that expecting abstinence is a perfectly reasonable parental position.

In the best of all possible worlds, I suppose, young adults would not touch alcohol until they turn 25 and then would instantly understand the pleasures of moderate consumption. It seems to me as silly to imagine that as it is to expect the same at 21.

Although the issue is not settled in my household, my cautious opinion now is that my teenage sons have more to gain than to lose by having a taste of wine now and then with dinner. By taste, I mean just that: a couple of sips, perhaps, not a full glass, and decidedly not for any of their friends, whose own parents must make their own decisions.

The years between ages 15 and 25 are dangerous straits, and it doesn’t help to know that alcohol is associated with many of the hazards young adults face. Finding that sweet spot between sanctimony and self-centered frivolity is a parent’s job. I think I’m there, but it’s not quite comfortable.

Chapter Eight: Boys' Struggle with Depression and Suicide

2008-04-03T11:30:00.000-07:00

The title of this chapter pretty much sums up what it is about. Most of the information is stuff I had already read about or heard. Girls are more likely to attempt suicide, boys are more likely to be successful in their attempts. Both boys are girls start the biological changes associated with puberty at a younger age than they did in the past - beginning around twelve years of age or younger instead of around sixteen, as they did in 1850. Boys who appear to "have it all" can still be suffering from depression. Depression often rises out of a loss of something, whether it be a friendship that ends, a death, no longer playing a particular role, etc. And finally, substance abuse as a means for kids to avoid dealing with their depression. They use drugs and/or alcohol as a means to escape whatever it is that is making them feel bad. (I've seen this in folks I went to school with.)

Chapter takeaways:

recovery from depression is more difficult for a boy who has been trained away from emotional interaction
depression has varying degrees - major depression (persistent feelings of sadness, emptiness, etc.) or "low-level" chronic depression (less pronounced depressed feelings, not necessarily experienced all day and night)

I liked that the authors finally gave us actual "to do" items. If you aren't sure whether or not your son is depressed ask the simple question outright: "Are you feeling bad about anything?" "Has something bad happened in your life?" Doing so can start the conversation that will help you help your son get back on track. Also, to get your son to examine his feelings, have him write a letter that explains his thoughts. Even if he never shows it to anyone, it allows him to express himself and by doing so, he can identify his feelings, making them available for examination and processing.

The NY Times had an interesting article on kids and drinking not too long ago. I'm not sure how much it relates to this since it is about parents introducing alcohol to their kids, not alcohol kids use as a treatment for depression but since it sort of fits, I'll post it next.

Chapter Seven: Inside the Fortress of Solitude

2008-03-29T11:49:00.000-07:00

Chapter takeaways:

withdrawal is one of the most common signs of emotional distress among boys in their early and midteens
[Girls] focus too much on their own and others' emotional responses...boys typically avoid discussing their feelings with anybody
red flags include a darker mood that persists, a withdrawal from friends, and declining grades
in many cases, a boy who is withdrawn needs only to be persuaded that it is safe to come out

"When there is a problem, a boy tends to look outward for the reasons."
In this example, the author is discussing a boy who can't recognize the connection between the anger at his dad and his declining grades, he just assumes he isn't trying hard enough. The kid is so busy hiding his emotions and building up a wall to protect himself, he doesn't have energy left to study. But getting good grades can also cause added stress because then there is the expectation that the boy needs to continue to get good grades. (I see this last part as true for both sexes, though.)

The section on offense as defense struck a chord with me as I've known people like this. Attack before you can be attacked, make fun of or belittle everything so folks can't/don't get a real sense of how hurt you are to be excluded or different or whatever. The two examples given in this section both had rather extreme sets of parents - alcoholic/abusive and militaristic/harshly regimented - and I read on wondering if the message I was supposed to take from this was one that included blaming the parents for this particular outcome in their children.

Boys can appreciate the direct approach when used in a non-threatening manner. As in the case of the boy with the father who was experiencing difficulty at work. I hadn't considered this until I read this part but it makes sense. While sometimes the soft approach is preferred, I can see how, particularly as the child ages, it can be more effective to just tell it like it is and move on from there. There is no need to coddle. If something is scary, let's call it as such and continue to work to figure out how to progress.

The examples in this chapter were a little over the top and I would think it nearly impossible for us to find us in any of the situations outlined but I understand they were probably the easiest way to explain how boys can become solitary figures and what we can do to bring them back if they start down this path.

Chapter Six: Mothers and Sons

2008-03-28T21:57:00.000-07:00

I've never been so glad to have a brother as I am after reading this chapter. Seems like having siblings of the opposite sex is a way to prep me to be better prepared for raising a son. (Not that I didn't love my brother before this.) I find it curious to learn boys rarely use the word "love" to describe how it is that they feel about their parents once they are of a certain age. One would think as they become mature adults, they'd be able to logically think about and express their feelings. I guess that is the point of this book - boys become accustomed to hiding those feelings and lack the ability to express themselves beyond the accepted norms.

For me, this chapter gave some good insight into how I can communicate effectively with H during the different phases. I wasn't aware the pulling away happened so early - I believe it said around eight or nine years old, yikes! I finished this chapter with a sense that just knowing he's processing his own stuff is a first step. I need to allow H the opportunity to succeed and fail. And, perhaps most importantly, I need to be available but not intrusive, and try not to project my own feelings onto him.

"Mothering any child comes to this delicate balance of closeness and distance."
Most things are about striking a balance to achieve the desired outcome. What I wish this book gave me more of is what that balance should look like, some more solid answers on what to do, expect, give, and hold back. Of course, we are talking about maturing human beings who cannot all be treated the same way because they are not the same people. They each have their own thoughts, feelings, emotions, reactions, expectations, etc. It appears being open to learning who your son is is the approach they are advocating. The rest follows from that.

"Boys become frustrated with the relationship when they feel that their mothers...- by being appalled or naive - overreact to what is normal for boys their age."
Got it. Keep my emotions in check and try to use the poker face. An overreaction can end all conversation. A balanced reaction, which conceivably could be no reaction at all, is an opportunity to explore the situation further in a non-threatening or judgmental manner.

"The real issue is his quest for autonomy - the right to make his own decisions."
I feel like I understand this better because I can pinpoint a time in my life when I was going through this - I call those years of transition "high school".

"A mother's attitude toward men also communicates to her son a message about her feelings toward him. If a woman is disappointed in her husband...and communicates this to her son...but is implicitly criticizing him." "...A mother's fears or expectations...will affect her son's feelings about himself and the quality of the mother-son bond."
I know I have to change this about myself. I often say things about men - usually conservative, far right-wing, evangelical men that are not very "nice" because they believe things that are usually very far away from my own life philosophies. I don't want my son to feel I lump him into that group or that he is in that group solely because he's male.

"A mother's simple physical affection, when it respects a boy's comfort level, carries no hidden dangers."
Do people still believe if they show outward affection to their boys it will "make" them gay? Are you kidding me?

"In most ways, it's better to let a boy fall on his face as an eighth or ninth grader and learn about consequences than to continue to arrange for success and leave him unprepared to be responsible for himself as he moves into adulthood."
Yep. No helicopter mothering from me. I believe in standing beside my son in the event he needs my assistance but not sheltering him from the consequences of his own choices.

"That willingness to learn from a child is the single strongest trait in a parent."
Okay. Cool. I think I have that. Time will tell.

Chapter takeaways:

avoid being critical
be aware of son's comfort level
look for signs of distress
question lovingly, not aggressively
instill a sense of trust
respect son's decisions
offer assistance but don't pressure
approach child-rearing as a practice

Raising Cain: Inside the Fortress of Solitude

2008-03-27T18:54:00.000-07:00

Aha - so boys who enter their teenage years after having spent prior years surpressing their emotions and struggling in the culture of cruelty often hide in their fortress of solitude (like the Bat Cave). The image of young men being loners seems to be everywhere and seems to be the norm.
Young men will often deal with their emotions by hiding them - either by totally being withdrawn or by putting up a defense using harsh words/attitudes to turn people off from liking them or wanting to help them.
What's important for us to remember in 12 years or so...
"Normal adolescent development does include some overt declarations of independence - closed doors, irreverent expressions of autonomy, and a preference for time with friends over time with family. A boy's desire for physical and emotional privacy at this time is keen, and his immersion in his own interests is natural. We can and do recommend that parents watch for 'red flags' that a boy is drifting deeper into emotional isolation: a darker mood that persists, a withdrawel from friends, declining grades. Any one of these should read as a warning sign, and parents should not hesitate to offer or seek help."

Another good thing to remember is that boys do not like to be alone - no matter what their behavior tells us - nobody really enjoys being a "loner".

Raising Cain: Mothers and Sons

2008-03-27T12:16:00.000-07:00

Okay - so I'm way behind this week. Easter and planning a vacation have taken over my life. That and I find that I'm way less productive when I'm not working part-time. I go into the, "Oh, I'm home tomorrow I can do it then" mode.

Anyway...so I just finished up chapter 6 and figured I should post my comments soon and then dive into chapter 7.

I feel that the most important point made by the authors during this chapter is the fact that in order to have a good relationship with their sons mothers need to know when to step in, step back, and sway. A sort of dance if you will - mothers need to be able to find a nice balance and know when to let their sons go off on their own - and hopefully the sons will know they can always come back to their mothers.

Quotes from the chapter that struck me:
"Certainly, there comes a point in his young life when a boy must shift his central attachment from his mother to his father and begin to identify himself as a man-on-the-making. However, there is no point - not at age four, or nine, or thirteen, when a boy must "give up" his mother, or when a mother must "give up" her son."
Amen to that.

"Every mother of a boy faces the task of trying to understand aspects of boy life and boy thought that she cannot experience: Why can't boys sit still? Why do they bite their toast into gun and dagger shapes? Why don't they think more often about the consequences of an action before they do it?"
Goodness. That whole thing about why do they bite their toast into gun shapes...I swear a boy can turn anything into a gun, or some type of weapon. And then the shooting noises come. Why or why do they have to make shooting noises?

The authors were discussing the different types of mothering that they can observe at the park (I'm pretty much the one sitting attentively and watching from a distance) - and they say this about all the different types of mothering, "Most of these mothers are motivated by the same desire to see their boys grow up to be happy, successful men. There is no one right way to be a mother..."
Yeah, yeah, we all want happy successful sons, but come on, tell us what Is The Right Way???

Off to read Chapter 7 - or yeah - maybe do some more research for vacation. =)

Toys for feelings

2008-03-20T22:48:00.000-07:00

Since we're reading about how to give our sons an emotional language that will help them grow into healthy, happy children and adults, I thought I'd share what I found - Kimochi from Zolo.

"Kimochi is the Japanese word for “feeling,” and our felt dolls help kids communicate just that. Based on the concept of using puppetry and play to share emotions, these dolls provide an interactive way for children to learn about emotions, colors and social skills. Ask your child a question and they can place the answer in the doll’s mouth. Each doll comes with a story describing their personal interests."

Now I just have to decide which one to get.

Chapter Five: Fathers and Sons

2008-03-18T10:48:00.000-07:00

This is my favorite quote and idea from this chapter: "The willingness to try is, itself, the start of a new pattern that can replace the disappointment of emotional distance with a legacy of love." It can apply to both the relationship between fathers and sons and the relationship between parents and children. The fact that we are concerned about nurturing our boys in a manner that provides them with more than the traditional stoic emotions is another form of that willingness to try. There's a recognition on our parts, that we want to create good and happy humans, and a willingness to try whatever it takes in order to reach that goal. (Not to pat ourselves on the back too thoroughly but OH MY GOD we are such good moms!) ;)

And my next favorite tip is the story of how the father turned an event that could have led to a closing of emotional doors into a learning and growing experience. The summary - the dad and boy are driving through the storm and dad asks the question in a way that doesn't give the boy the opportunity to deny his feelings but rather express them. "You weren't scared were you?" becomes "That was scary, eh?" I guess as a parent the trick is recognizing these moments.

Quotes about fathers:
"Men want be better than their own fathers, they want to do a "good job" but they are aggravated with or disappointed with their sons."
Hopefully, we won't be dealing with these types of feelings too often because we'll work to ensure we have open lines of communication. In the event we do become aggravated and/or disappointed, I'm hoping we'll be able to admit our thoughts (to ourselves, not to H) and work through them.

"...most men have limited awareness or understanding of their feelings or the feelings of others"
This isn't all that surprising given these men were not raised with the expanded emotional language. Should we expect our husbands to suddenly develop one of their own? Or just be aware of what we are trying to do with our boys and help us so that the cycle doesn't continue.

"Father's ultimate psychological weapon - criticism."
Yep. And it seems like this is the easiest one to let loose, particularly when you are feeling stressed, impatient, tested, etc. I'm hoping that besides just stopping the criticism from being spoken, we can change our behaviors in such a way that we don't even think of them. We'll be better people for it if we can be successful in this endeavor, as will our son.

Quotes about mothers:
Mothers are "mostly relegated to the role of referee or nurse, soothing tempers or mending hurt feelings"
I can see how this would happen. Although when I was growing up there weren't too many times when my mom had to fill this role. My dad was always working so hard away from the house to try and provide for us that most of the family responsibility fell on my mom. If there was a problem, you'd go to mom. We all got along fairly well. That is, until I was old enough to form political opinions opposite those of my parents.

Many women feel "that they don't fully trust their husbands to care for their infants"
I feel this way quite a bit. My husband is just a touch rougher with our son than I care for him to be. I mention this to him and his response is like, "Really?" but nothing really changes. Don't get me wrong, he's very careful. I determined at one point that part of this feeling stems from me projecting my own fears on to him. For instance, when I carry H in a sling, I'm constantly afraid I'm going to trip and fall on him. This fear is heightened when D is carrying him because I don't control whether or not D will fall. (Does this make sense?) Also, D is much more comfortable letting H cry. It's not that he likes it by any stretch, but rather if he is crying and nothing seems to quiet him, there comes a point when he will just sit with H while he cries.

"When a mother "protects" a son by routinely correcting his father's style to match her own, she diminishes the opportunity for a genuine and uniquely valuable quality of parenting"
I told this to D, about how I didn't want to continue to share too much about what I do to settle H when/if he's fussy because I had read dads should find their own method and D's response was like "Are you going to do what the books say or give me what I ask for?" (in this instance, he was looking for suggestions regarding taking care of H). That gave me pause to think about it. I don't try to correct him - at least I don't think I do - but I do try to point out things I try. And I have now drafted up a note on my computer, which he can access, that explains the things to check for and what I do with H when he's fussy.

[Summary] "Mothers try to repair the relationships, fathers try to control the relationship. - Differences in how fathers respond to their son versus their daughters - competitive with one, protective of the other."
I'm worried about this. I fear the 'boys will be boys' attitude means we have to be vigilant about not letting ourselves fall back into the normal routine with boys so that they don't learn the emotional language but rather become like their fathers and continue the cycle. I will try to help my husband be protective of his son.

Interesting facts and tidbits:
"...the most emotionally resourceful and resilient boys are those whose fathers are part of the emotional fabric of the family"
No surprise here.

"Of the dozens of factors they considered, father attendance at PTA meetings was the most influential in terms of the child's income at age twenty-seven."
While I don't think having money is the key to being emotionally aware and therefore happy, I do think our son will be a happier individual if he is successful, confident, and can take care of himself. For this reason, I will definitely push D to be involved in the PTA.

"Children whose fathers were both emotionally close and highly involved had greater educational attainment"
No surprise here, either.

"...the most influential factor - more important than all the maternal factors combined - was whether the father was involved in the child's care" -- This was the only one that made me stop and say "what?!" I'd like to know a little more about what they mean by "involved in the child's care". How involved? What type of care was the father providing? I found it shocking, of course, because it said this was more important that "all the maternal factors combined". If it is true, than what? If my husband isn't involved in our son's care, our kid is doomed because no matter what I do or how successful a mom I am, it still won't be enough? Did this catch anyone else's attention?

Should do:

Establish a pattern for sharing.
Do stuff together.
Listen and talk to each other.
Be respectful.

Um, did this occur to anyone else?

2008-03-18T10:06:00.000-07:00

That it might have been easier to either watch the documentary or give ourselves half a year to finish the book?

I promise, though. I'm almost through chapter five (again). I found that I can make time to read the chapter but then the little guy wakes up and I have to put the book up. By the time I find time to write about it, I've lost all of my thoughts and have to then reread the chapter. You can see how this might perpetuate the cycle.

Chapter Four: The Culture of Cruelty

2008-03-17T13:42:00.000-07:00

Things that stood out to me:

All boys "live with fear in this culture of cruelty" yet they "adhere to its code and are loyal to its tenets"
Boys lose trust, empathy, and relationship and learn "emotional guardedness"
There is a "standard for masculinity" that is distinctly antifeminine; traits that might be defined as feminine must be "consciously and deliberately" attacked. [No small task to change the current culture to one that accepts tenderness, empathy, and compassion as acceptable emotions for both genders.]

Things we can do include replacing their fears with a "greater understanding of their own emotional struggle and...diminish their need for cruelty and their tolerance of it" and taking "the time to...find out what they're feeling and track their troubles to a source". The more boys we teach to be emotionally aware and empathetic, the more likely we are to change the culture of cruelty. This should be the goal.

I'm reading most of this chapter thinking to myself this almost sounds like the pack mentality of dogs. Particularly the section that discusses how boys place allegiance to the group over everything else, including personal friendships, which are often lost when one member does not stand up for another member when the teasing/bullying is turned on him.

So, the father disavows the uncool son because of his own painful past, the mother isn't sure if she should intervene (what her instinct tells her to do) or leave it alone (as her son wishes) when bullying becomes an issue. Open lines of communication seem very important. Whatever the case may be with my own son, I hope he always feels he can come to us when he has a problem.

On a side note: I just have to say, and I hope I'm not repeating myself, as far as boys maturing to the age where sex becomes one of the focal points in their lives, there is an excellent scene in Weeds (second season but I can't remember the exact episode) where the mother tries and fails miserably to speak with her son about masturbation. She then passes the job to her dead husband's brother to handle. He does an excellent job. As Darr and I were watching it, and laughing are a--es off, we agreed that in the event we have a boy, we'll have to put this in and park his butt in front of the t.v. to watch it, when the time comes and we feel he's ready for the information. Right now, I'm wishing the authors of the book inserted some levity. It is all so gloom and doom.

Raising Cain: Fathers and Sons

2008-03-16T12:21:00.000-07:00

Clearly, fathers play an important role in their son's lives - if those fathers are involved both physically and emotionally. The authors site many studies proving various postive correlations for children who have had meaningful relationships with their fathers.
Building such relationships should start at the beginning. Mothers need to trust their husbands to help take care of newborns, babies, and children. Fathers need those early months to bond - it's just as important for a father to bond with the baby as it is for the mother to bond; it's usually more difficult for a mother to step back and allow that to happen. As the child ages it's important for the father to continue to build a relationship. This seems to be best accomplished through physical activities that a father and son can do together on a consistent basis. Fathers and sons do not need to sit down and talk to have an emotional bond - often this bond is formed through wrestling, playing catch, fixing things together, etc.

Raising Cain: The Culture of Cruelty

2008-03-16T12:05:00.000-07:00

This chapter discusses the varying degrees in which boys (after age 10) suffer through cruel acts by other boys. Some see this as a coming-of-age, something that most be tolerated (ignored by adults). Older boys pick on younger boys, bigger (stronger) boys pick on smaller (weaker) boys, rich boys pick on poor boys, etc. The stress of this culture phenomenon affects all the boys – even the popular ones who are on top. ”Everybody thinks you’ve got it so easy when you’re on top, but being on top just means that you have to worry all the time about slipping or somebody gaining on you…” Of course life is much harder if you’re on the bottom of the pecking order. This chapter stresses the importance of helping boys understand their emotional resources. ”A boy’s ability to survive in the culture of cruelty has everything to do with his emotional resources – his ability to recognize and understand his feelings and those of others. Boys fortified by emotional awareness and empathy are less likely to inflict hurt on others and more resilient under the pressure of cruelty that comes their way.” These emotional resources are much more important than friendships. Boys tend to drop friendships if it means that they will have to defend their friend or put up with teasing because of who they are friends with. It seems like an every man for himself philosophy.

Important for us to remember:
· Again – help your child develop the emotional resources.
· Even if the child answers that everything is fine, or nothing is wrong, it’s important to do more research to find out the truth.
Questions:
· How much do you (allow your child to) put up with before stepping in and contacting school officials or other parents? Do you ever go straight to the source of the problem? What if it's your own son doing most of the teasing?

Chapter Three: The High Cost of Harsh Discipline

2008-03-09T21:05:00.000-07:00

Things that resonated with me:

Harsh discipline is presumed to help make a man out of a boy...The assumption is that boys are impervious to subtle suggestion and more resistant to abuse.
Wife and husband at bath time "Take a good look, because someday you're gonna miss this." But too many parents do not appreciate this exuberance.

I hadn't considered one explanation for boys receiving harsher punishment is because they are more likely to commit transgressions of a physical nature, rather than girls who are more likely to whine. As annoying as whining may be, it is unlikely this type of behavior pushes parents to use corporeal punishment.

Who doesn't like the idea of using "teachable moments" to consult with their children so that they learn the appropriate way to behave? (See question 1 in the Questions section below.)

I found the part that describes the two methods of learning very interesting. Episodic learning means we, as parents, need to be very aware at all times of how we respond to our children and their actions. So what do you do when your child is pushing all of your buttons? Walk away? Hand the kid to the other parent to deal with until you gain control and can approach the situation in a non-threatening way? My childhood was very good but to hear it from some of my siblings, there were many things that were less than desirable. Two kids, vastly different experiences. The same, I think, can be said about my husband and his younger brother. It seems you really have to tailor your response to the individual, which isn't entirely surprising, and yet I know many who hold the notion that to be treated fairly everyone needs to be treated the same. Episodic learning is how much of my childhood is ingrained in my head. I can remember the warm sand at the faux beach at my parents' cabin, the cold water of the lake, the smell of my mom's fried potatoes for breakfast.

I'm not surprised by the notion that our children basically record everything once that hit the stage where memories can form. And knowing that we need to be present and aware at all times that what we say and/or do has an impact. It doesn't erase the pain, hurt, shame, etc. to go back later and apologize for an outburst that never should have happened in the first place. I'm not eager to see how I'll respond when my patience is stretched to the max. I hope I don't fail so much or so often that I end up permanently damaging H.

Questions that I have from the third chapter:
1. When I can start using good discipline by consulting with my kid?

2. At what age will this type of response to unwanted behavior be effective?

The High Cost Of Harsh Discipline

2008-03-08T17:46:00.000-08:00

Oh boy. This was not an easy chapter to read. I'm trying a new form or review for this chapter.

My childhood experiences in regards to discipline
I was basically the "golden" child. I tried so very hard to never do wrong. Why? Because I watched my sister and brother (each at least 9 years older than me) be the victims of verbal abuse - yelling, screaming, door slamming, etc. were all considered "normal" in my house. I did not want to go through the aftermath that I saw my sister suffer - locked in her room, crying coming from the door. No thank you. So I seriously worked my butt off to be good. All. the. time. (until college, but hey, I was no longer living at home.)

Summary of Chapter Three
Basically the authors use various different personal stories of men who had been the victims of physical punishment, or harsh discipline. The main points include:

a child often remembers more the actual discipline - not the behavior that he was doing at the time. "I don't remember what we did wrong...it must have been pretty bad."
a physical action (slap, spank, etc) will usually stop the behavior right away, but closes the door to any actual learning coming from the event.
stress = harsher discipline (parents have a much more difficult time keeping their cool when they themselves are feeling stressed)
kids have no idea why an adult has outbursts and even if that outburst lasts just a few seconds - the memory lives on for a long time within the child
good discipline needs to be consistent, and the behavior you expect needs to be modeled by the adults

Our experiences with our own children

The second to last one really struck me. Part of the reason there was so much yelling and screaming at our house is because of the fact that my dad cannot control his anger. And it's worse when he's had some beers. This past Thanksgiving we were at the house and Quinn and his cousin went upstairs. All of a sudden the roar of my father's voice was heard throughout the house. "GET DOWN STAIRS. YOU DO NOT PLAY UP HERE." and it continued and continued. I ran to the stairs to help Quinn down and in between the yells you could hear Quinn just bawling. It was awful. Really awful. And this is the first time I'm writing about it. My dad went outside to cool off and I tried to calm Quinn down. We stayed through dinner and then left soon after trying our best to keep Quinn's behavior in unrealistic lines. Anyway...in January we were going to my parent's house (the first visit since Thanksgiving) and Quinn said. "I don't want to go see Grandpa George. I don't want to mommy. He yells too loud and gets mad at me." So yeah, the memory does live for a long time. (I've learned that my dad is worse at family gatherings, fine when it's just one of his kid's families, but not so well with all of us. We haven't been back there for a large family gathering. I hosted Christmas so we could avoid that - he's also better at someone else's house. I'm thinking we will have to turn down any invites for large family gatherings over there. It's totally our job to protect our boys from any type of verbal abuse.)

Besides that - I struggle so hard to keep my cool, my patience, through the day. We've got plenty of discipline "methods" we use on the daily basis. Our favorite seems to be 1. 2. 3. After 3 we either help him (sit down, stand up, move off of that, etc.) or a time out. After a time out we remind him of why he was told to go there and ask him what he can do to "make it okay now." It's very SuperNannish - God I love that show. But what I enjoy most about working with Quinn is all the loving and cuddling we do with him. That child knows he is loved and he knows what he does that we love the most - and he does those behaviors over and over again!

Article: Ban the television

2008-03-07T10:39:00.000-08:00

Again while reading the New York Times I cam across an article I thought worthy of sharing.

A One-Eyed Invader in the Bedroom

By TARA PARKER-POPE

Here’s one simple way to keep your children healthy: Ban the bedroom TV.

By some estimates, half of American children have a television in their bedroom; one study of third graders put the number at 70 percent. And a growing body of research shows strong associations between TV in the bedroom and numerous health and educational problems.

Children with bedroom TVs score lower on school tests and are more likely to have sleep problems. Having a television in the bedroom is strongly associated with being overweight and a higher risk for smoking.

One of the most obvious consequences is that the child will simply end up watching far more television — and many parents won’t even know.

In a study of 80 children in Buffalo, ages 4 to 7, the presence of a television in the bedroom increased average viewing time by nearly nine hours a week, to 30 hours from 21. And parents of those children were more likely to underestimate their child’s viewing time.

“If it’s in the bedroom, the parents don’t even really know what the kids are watching,” said Leonard H. Epstein, professor of pediatrics and social and preventive medicine at the School of Medicine and Biomedical Science at the State University of New York at Buffalo. “Oftentimes, parents who have a TV in the kids’ bedrooms have TVs in their bedrooms.”

Moreover, once the set is in the child’s room, it is very likely to stay. “In our experience, it is often hard for parents to remove a television set from a child’s bedroom,” Dr. Epstein said.

Dr. Epstein and his colleagues put monitoring devices on bedroom TVs and all the other sets in the house. In one two-year study, the devices in half the homes were programmed to reduce children’s overall viewing time by half. (Children had to use a code to turn on any TV in the home, and the code stopped working once the allocated TV time for the week had been reached.)

Although all the children in the study gained weight as they grew, relative body mass index dropped among those with mandatory time limits. The researchers found that cutting into TV time did not increase exercise levels. Instead, the children snacked less, lowering their consumption more than 100 calories a day. The study, published Monday in The Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, did not break down the data by bedroom television viewing.

But in 2002, the journal Pediatrics reported that preschool children with bedroom TVs were more likely to be overweight. In October, the journal Obesity suggested that the risk might be highest for boys. In a study among French adolescents, boys with a bedroom television were more likely than their peers to have a larger waist size and higher body fat and body mass index.

The French study also showed, not surprisingly, that boys and girls with bedroom TVs spent less time reading than others.

Other data suggest that bedroom television affects a child’s schoolwork. In a 2005 study in The Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, researchers looked at the television, computer and video game habits of almost 400 children in six Northern California schools for a year. About 70 percent of the children in the study had their own TV in the bedroom; they scored significantly and consistently lower on math, reading and language-arts tests. Students who said they had computers in their homes scored higher.

Why a bedroom television appears to have such a pronounced impact is unclear. It may be that it’s a distraction during homework time or that it interferes with sleep, resulting in poorer performance at school. It could also suggest less overall parental involvement.

Another October study, published in Pediatrics, showed that kindergartners with bedroom TVs had more sleep problems. Those kids were also less “emotionally reactive,” meaning that they weren’t as moody or as bothered by changes in routine. While that sounds like a good thing, the researchers speculated that having a TV in the bedroom dampened the intensity with which a child responded to stimulation.

Another study of more than 700 middle-school students, ages 12 to 14, found that those with bedroom TVs were twice as likely to start smoking — even after controlling for such risk factors as having a parent or friend who smokes or low parental engagement. Among kids who had a TV in the bedroom 42 percent smoked; among the others, the figure was 16 percent.

“I think it matters quite a lot,” Dr. Epstein said. “There are all kinds of problems that occur when kids have TVs in their bedroom.”

So while many parents try to limit how much television and what type of shows their children watch, that may be less than half the battle. Where a child watches is important too.

Testosterone

2008-03-06T07:47:00.000-08:00

So remember back in Chapter 1 or 2 where we read that boys and girls have the same level of testosterone up until age 10?
Well...yesterday I attended a Literacy conference given by Tom Hunter and was so excited when he started talking about educating boys! Most importantly he said that boys need more activity, more moving around, fewer directions, and more things to manipulate. However, he also said, "boys experience 5 spikes in testosterone within 1 hour." What? So - what do you think? Did the study that was sited in Raising Cain take blood from boys and girls and compare the levels of testosterone without taking into consideration that maybe the testosterone spikes? Unfortunately, I didn't stop to argue (I'm not that type) and by the end of the day I forgot about that small detail and left. I may email him to find out his source of information for this. He did provide a very extensive list of books for research and ideas. Including the following that I will probably look into in the near future:
Parenting Well in a Media Age Gloria DeGaetano
Last Child in the Woods Richard Louv
Radical Reflections Mem Fox
Literacy with an Attitude Patrick Finn
A is for Ox Barry Sanders
Hothouse Kids Alissa Quart (the cover of this one really struck me - it showed a little girl, maybe 3 or 4, standing with a voilin - this book discusses the pressure to make "gifted" kids)

Article: Teaching Boys and Girls Separately

2008-02-29T17:53:00.000-08:00

I'm probably not supposed to do this but here's an article from the NY Times that discusses separate classrooms for boys and girls. It references a book by Michael Gurian called “Boys and Girls Learn Differently!” - Perhaps this can be our next book?

Teaching Boys and Girls Separately

By ELIZABETH WEIL

On an unseasonably cold day last November in Foley, Ala., Colby Royster and Michael Peterson, two students in William Bender’s fourth-grade public-school class, informed me that the class corn snake could eat a rat faster than the class boa constrictor. Bender teaches 26 fourth graders, all boys. Down the hall and around the corner, Michelle Gay teaches 26 fourth-grade girls. The boys like being on their own, they say, because girls don’t appreciate their jokes and think boys are too messy, and are also scared of snakes. The walls of the boys’ classroom are painted blue, the light bulbs emit a cool white light and the thermostat is set to 69 degrees. In the girls’ room, by contrast, the walls are yellow, the light bulbs emit a warm yellow light and the temperature is kept six degrees warmer, as per the instructions of Leonard Sax, a family physician turned author and advocate who this May will quit his medical practice to devote himself full time to promoting single-sex public education.

Foley Intermediate School began offering separate classes for boys and girls a few years ago, after the school’s principal, Lee Mansell, read a book by Michael Gurian called “Boys and Girls Learn Differently!” After that, she read a magazine article by Sax and thought that his insights would help improve the test scores of Foley’s lowest-achieving cohort, minority boys. Sax went on to publish those ideas in “Why Gender Matters: What Parents and Teachers Need to Know About the Emerging Science of Sex Differences.” Both books feature conversion stories of children, particularly boys, failing and on Ritalin in coeducational settings and then pulling themselves together in single-sex schools. Sax’s book and lectures also include neurological diagrams and scores of citations of obscure scientific studies, like one by a Swedish researcher who found, in a study of 96 adults, that males and females have different emotional and cognitive responses to different kinds of light. Sax refers to a few other studies that he says show that girls and boys draw differently, including one from a group of Japanese researchers who found girls’ drawings typically depict still lifes of people, pets or flowers, using 10 or more crayons, favoring warm colors like red, green, beige and brown; boys, on the other hand, draw action, using 6 or fewer colors, mostly cool hues like gray, blue, silver and black. This apparent difference, which Sax argues is hard-wired, causes teachers to praise girls’ artwork and make boys feel that they’re drawing incorrectly. Under Sax’s leadership, teachers learn to say things like, “Damien, take your green crayon and draw some sparks and take your black crayon and draw some black lines coming out from the back of the vehicle, to make it look like it’s going faster.” “Now Damien feels encouraged,” Sax explained to me when I first met him last spring in San Francisco. “To say: ‘Why don’t you use more colors? Why don’t you put someone in the vehicle?’ is as discouraging as if you say to Emily, ‘Well, this is nice, but why don’t you have one of them kick the other one — give us some action.’ ”

During the fall of 2003, Principal Mansell asked her entire faculty to read “Boys and Girls Learn Differently!” and, in the spring of 2004, to attend a one-day seminar led by Sax at the school, explaining boys’ and girls’ innate differences and how to teach to them. She also invited all Foley Intermediate School parents to a meeting extolling the virtues of single-sex public education. Enough parents were impressed that when Foley Intermediate, a school of 322 fourth and fifth graders, reopened after summer recess, the school had four single-sex classrooms: a girls’ and a boys’ class in both the fourth and fifth grades. Four classrooms in each grade remained coed.

Separating schoolboys from schoolgirls has long been a staple of private and parochial education. But the idea is now gaining traction in American public schools, in response to both the desire of parents to have more choice in their children’s public education and the separate education crises girls and boys have been widely reported to experience. The girls’ crisis was cited in the 1990s, when the American Association of University Women published “Shortchanging Girls, Shortchanging America,” which described how girls’ self-esteem plummets during puberty and how girls are subtly discouraged from careers in math and science. More recently, in what Sara Mead, an education expert at the New America Foundation, calls a “man bites dog” sensation, public and parental concerns have shifted to boys. Boys are currently behind their sisters in high-school and college graduation rates. School, the boy-crisis argument goes, is shaped by females to match the abilities of girls (or, as Sax puts it, is taught “by soft-spoken women who bore” boys). In 2006, Doug Anglin, a 17-year-old in Milton, Mass., filed a civil rights complaint with the United States Department of Education, claiming that his high school — where there are twice as many girls on the honor roll as there are boys — discriminated against males. His case did not prevail in the courts, but his sentiment found support in the Legislature and the press. That same year, as part of No Child Left Behind, the federal law that authorizes programs aimed at improving accountability and test scores in public schools, the Department of Education passed new regulations making it easier for districts to create single-sex classrooms and schools.

In part because of these regulations and in part because of a mix of cultural and technological forces — ranging from the growth of brain-scan research to the increased academic pressures on kindergarteners and a chronic achievement gap between richer and poorer students and between white and minority students — new single-sex public schools and classrooms are opening at an accelerating pace. In 1995, there were two single-sex public schools operating in this country. Currently, there are 49, and 65 percent of those have opened in the last three years. Nobody is keeping exact count of the number of schools offering single-sex classrooms, but Sax estimates that in the fall of 2002, only about a dozen public schools in the United States offered any kind of single-sex educational options (excluding schools which offered single-sex classrooms only in health or physical education). By this past fall, Sax says, that number had soared to more than 360, with boys- and girls-only classrooms now established in Cleveland; Detroit; Albany; Gary, Ind.; Philadelphia; Dallas; and Nashville, among other places. A disproportionate number of the schools are in the South (where attitudes toward gender roles tend to be more conservative) or serve disadvantaged kids. Sax claims that “many more are in the pipeline for 2008-2009.”

Among advocates of single-sex public education, there are two camps: those who favor separating boys from girls because they are essentially different and those who favor separating boys from girls because they have different social experiences and social needs. Leonard Sax represents the essential-difference view, arguing that boys and girls should be educated separately for reasons of biology: for example, Sax asserts that boys don’t hear as well as girls, which means that an instructor needs to speak louder in order for the boys in the room to hear her; and that boys’ visual systems are better at seeing action, while girls are better at seeing the nuance of color and texture. The social view is represented by teachers like Emily Wylie, who works at the Young Women’s Leadership School of East Harlem (T.Y.W.L.S.), an all-girls school for Grades 7-12. Wylie described her job to me by saying, “It’s my subversive mission to create all these strong girls who will then go out into the world and be astonished when people try to oppress them.” Sax calls schools like T.Y.W.L.S. “anachronisms” — because, he says, they’re stuck in 1970s-era feminist ideology and they don’t base their pedagogy on the latest research. Few on the other side want to disparage Sax publicly, though T.Y.W.L.S.’s founder, Ann Tisch, did tell me pointedly, “Nobody is planning the days of our girls around a photograph of a brain.”

The two camps face a common enemy in the A.C.L.U., which opposes all single-sex public education. (When I asked a lawyer at the A.C.L.U.’s Women’s Rights Project why, she said, “Have you ever heard of Title IX?” referring to the 1972 Education Amendments that outlaw all discrimination in educational programs on the basis of sex.) But that hasn’t brought the two sides together. “What kind of message does it give when you tell a group of kids that boys and girls need to be separated because they don’t even see or hear alike?” asks Rosemary Salomone, a legal scholar at St. John’s University School of Law. Salomone is especially invested in the debate, as she provided support to T.Y.W.L.S. before it opened in 1996 and was subsequently tapped by the United States Department of Education to draft the revised regulations that made it easier for districts to separate boys from girls. Those regulations now require that a district “provide a rationale,” review its program every two years and ensure that enrollment in single-sex classrooms is voluntary. When Salomone revised the regulations, she thought they would usher in a flurry of schools of the T.Y.W.L.S. — not the Sax — variety. She was wrong. “As one of the people who let the horse out the barn, I’m now feeling like I really need to watch that horse,” Salomone told me over lunch near her home in Rye, N.Y., last month. “Every time I hear of school officials selling single-sex programs to parents based on brain research, my heart sinks.”

On that November day in Foley, Ala., William Bender pulled a stool up to a lectern and began reading to his fourth-grade boys from Gary Paulsen’s young-adult novel “Hatchet.” Bender’s voice is deep and calm, a balm to many of his students who lack father figures or else have parents who, Bender says, “don’t want to be parents. They want to be their kids’ friends.” Bender paused to ask one of his boys, who said he was feeling sick, “Are you going to make it, brother?” Then he kept reading. “ ‘The pain in his forehead seemed to be abating. . . .’ What’s abating, gentlemen?” The protagonist of “Hatchet” survives a plane crash and finds himself alone by an insect-infested lake. Bender encouraged his boys to empathize. They discussed how annoying it is, when you’re out hunting, to be swarmed by yellow flies.

Meanwhile, in Michelle Gay’s fourth-grade class, the girls sang a vigorous rendition of “Always Sisters” and then did a tidy science experiment: pouring red water, blue oil and clear syrup into a plastic cup to test which has the greatest density, then confirming their results with the firsthand knowledge that when you’re doing the dishes after your mother makes fried chicken, the oil always settles on top of the water in the sink.

Foley, population 11,300, is 10 miles from the Gulf Coast. Fifty-seven percent of Foley Intermediate’s students are white, 24 percent are black and 17 percent are Latino; 70 percent receive free or reduced-price lunches each day. In the first year of Foley’s single-sex program, a third of the kids enrolled. The next year, two-thirds signed up, and in its third year 87 percent of parents requested the program. Principal Mansell reports that her single-sex classes produce fewer discipline problems, more parental support and better scores in writing, reading and math. She does, however, acknowledge that her data are compromised, as her highest-performing teachers and her most-motivated students have chosen single-sex.

In his books and frequent media appearances, Sax holds up Foley Intermediate as an example of his theories put to good use. In his second book, “Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men,” Sax credits Bender for helping focus a boy who was given a wrong diagnosis of attention-deficit disorder by telling him that his father, who had left the family, would be even less likely to return if all his mother had to report was the boy misbehaving in school. Sax also goes out of his way to note that Bender had this conversation with the boy “shoulder to shoulder,” not “face to face.” “Just remember this rule of thumb,” Sax tells readers: “A good place to talk with your son is in your car, with you driving and your son in the passenger seat.”

Sax used to say that he was “uniquely unqualified to lead the single-sex public education movement,” since, for among other reasons, he had never been a teacher. Now, he no longer says that, and he maintains that a school’s teachers and staff need only 14 hours of training — two 7-hour days with him — to prepare to switch from coeducation to single-sex. Sax is 48, square-jawed and sturdily built, with a thick shag of side-parted brown hair and a relentless intellect and tireless charisma that leave even his critics exhausted and impressed. In the 1980s he earned an M.D. and Ph.D. (in psychology) from the University of Pennsylvania. Last year, he gave about 50 seminars and lectures on sex differences in children. The first time I met him, he was swinging through San Francisco to give a series of such talks at the Katherine Delmar Burke School, a private all-girls school. Speaking to a group of sixth graders, Sax explained his theory that girls’ hearing ability is much better than boys’, as is girls’ sense of smell. The girls, just on the edge of puberty, sat utterly rapt, seeming to want to understand why their brothers, boy cousins, cute skater-dude neighbors and fathers were so weird. A few weeks after the lecture, Sax sent me a packet of color photocopies of thank-you notes he had received from the girls. One, from a girl with two fathers, read: “Dr. Sax, Thank you so much for coming to Burkes. . . . I had a smell in my room and my Dads couldn’t smell it but I could. I thought I was going crazy. It ends up there was a dead rat in the wall. Hope you come back soon.”

Sax comes off as a true believer and describes his conversion experience like this: In 2000, one of his patients, a 12-year-old boy, came to his medical office. For several years before then, the boy had been withdrawn, uninspired and on multiple medications, but he had recently made a big turnaround, which his parents credited to having enrolled him in an all-boys school. Upon hearing this, Sax said to the boy’s mother, “With all due respect, I regard single-sex education as an antiquated relic of the Victorian Era.” To which he says she replied, “With all due respect, Dr. Sax, you have no idea what you’re talking about.” After visiting a handful of single-sex schools, Sax threw himself into studying neurological differences between males and females, eventually focusing on how to protect boys from a syndrome he calls “failure to launch,” which Sax often characterizes as caring more about getting a Kilimanjaro in Halo 3 than performing well in high school or taking a girl on a date. Among his early proposals was that boys should start kindergarten at age 6, a year later than girls, in order to ease the “sense of scholastic incompetence” that so many boys feel early on because they tend to develop later. Several friends quickly convinced Sax that American families would never go for this. So Sax started thinking it might be better for boys and girls to be in different classrooms.

Sax’s official foray into single-sex public-school advocacy started in early 2002, when, he says, he applied for “a 501(c)(3) with the pretentious and improbable name of the National Association for Single-Sex Public Education.” In its first few years, N.A.S.S.P.E. didn’t see much action. Then, in 2004, he was invited to give a seminar in Foley. His appearance there led to a workshop in Wilcox County, Ala., and over the next few years, Sax says, “things started to mushroom.” Sax estimates that, at present, 300 of the 360 single-sex public school programs in the country “are coming at this from a neuroscience basis.” Either he or one of N.A.S.S.P.E.’s board members has been in touch with about half the programs.

David Chadwell, one of Sax’s disciples and the coordinator of Single- Gender Initiatives at the South Carolina Department of Education, explained to me the ways that teachers should teach to gender differences. For boys, he said: “You need to get them up and moving. That’s based on the nervous system, that’s based on eyes, that’s based upon volume and the use of volume with the boys.” Chadwell, like Sax, says that differences in eyesight, hearing and the nervous system all should influence how you instruct boys. “You need to engage boys’ energy, use it, rather than trying to say, No, no, no. So instead of having boys raise their hands, you’re going to have boys literally stand up. You’re going to do physical representation of number lines. Relay races. Ball tosses during discussion.” For the girls, Chadwell prescribes a focus on “the connections girls have (a) with the content, (b) with each other and (c) with the teacher. If you try to stop girls from talking to one another, that’s not successful. So you do a lot of meeting in circles, where every girl can share something from her own life that relates to the content in class.”

While Sax rejects the notion that he is a gender essentialist — according to Sax’s own definition, “a gender essentialist is a derogatory term that arose in the 1970s to define someone who is an idiot, or a Republican, or both, who does not understand that gender is socially constructed” — he does say that “human nature is gendered to the core” and that “all that happens when you take a toy gun away from your son and give him a doll instead is that you tell him, ‘I don’t like the person that you are and I wish you were more like your sister, Emily.’ ” He opens “Why Gender Matters” with two cautionary tales: one about a boy who starts kindergarten at age 5, is given a diagnosis of A.D.H.D. and depression and ends up on a three-drug cocktail of Adderall, Wellbutrin and clonidine; the other about a girl who transforms “from chubby wallflower to outgoing socialite” in middle school, seems to have it all — friends, academic success — and then shocks her parents by overdosing on Vicodin and Xanax. The two anecdotes are capsule versions of the boys’ and girls’ crises, and depending on one’s point of view, Sax effectively either addresses or exploits these parental concerns. After presenting the Adderall-doped grammar-school boy and the suicidal middle-school girl, Sax offers a possible cause of these sad stories. “The neglect of gender in education and child-rearing has done real harm.” These tragedies “might have been averted if the parents had known enough about gender differences to recognize what was really happening in their child’s life.”

Among the differences Sax notes between boys and girls: Baby boys prefer to stare at mobiles; baby girls at faces. Boys solve maze puzzles using the hippocampus; girls use the cerebral cortex. Boys covet risk; girls shy away. Boys perform better under moderate stress; girls perform worse. Many academics and progressives tend to find Sax’s views stereotyped and infuriating, yet Sax does not seem to mind. Sax told me that in 2005, he delivered a lecture at a conference at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. When the next speaker, Michael Younger, of Cambridge University, took the lectern, Sax says Younger threw down his speech and said, “I’m going to depart from my prepared remarks because I’m so annoyed by the sexist rubbish I just heard from Dr. Sax. Dr. Sax is trying to tell us that boys draw action and girls draw stasis. He might as well have said: ‘Boys are active, girls are passive. Boys should go out and have jobs, girls should stay home and have babies.’ ” While Sax, a gadfly, enjoys telling this story, Younger calls it “a fiction,” though he does concede “that certain aspects of Sax’s work suggest an essentialism about boys and girls which is not borne out by reality as exposed in our own research.”

A deluge of data has emerged in recent years detailing how boys and girls have different developmental trajectories and different brains. Sax has made a role for himself popularizing this work, though it’s not yet clear what the research means or whether there are implications for single-sex education. For instance, among neuroscientists, motor skills are often used as proxies for assessing cognitive skills and social and emotional control in younger children. As Martha Denckla, director of the Developmental Cognitive Neurology Clinic at Kennedy Krieger Institute in Maryland, explained to me: “Looking at normal motor development in boys and girls — the ability to balance, to hop, to use your feet, to use your fingers and your hands — as a group, 5-year-old girls look almost completely the same as 6-year-old boys. The same is also true for anything having to do with speed of output: for example, how quickly you answer a question. Maybe you know the answer, but you just can’t prepare your mouth to form the words.” The gender gap in motor development shrinks through grammar and middle schools, Denckla says, disappearing once everyone has gone through puberty, around age 15. Yet Denckla doesn’t see any need for single-sex public education; she thinks mixed-grade K-1, 1-2 and 2-3 classrooms are a better way to deal with the developmental differences among school-age kids.

Scans of boys’ and girls’ brains over time also show they develop differently. Analyzing data from the largest pediatric neuro-imaging study to date — 829 scans from 387 subjects ages 3 to 27 — researchers from the National Institute of Mental Health found that total cerebral volume peaks at 10.5 years in girls, four years earlier than in boys. Cortical and subcortical gray-matter trajectories peak one to two years earlier in girls as well. This may sound very significant, but researchers claim it means nothing for educators, or at least nothing yet. “Differences in brain size between males and females should not be interpreted as implying any sort of functional advantage or disadvantage,” the N.I.M.H. paper concludes. Not one to be deterred, Sax invited Jay Giedd, chief of brain imaging at the Child Psychiatry Branch at N.I.M.H., to give the keynote address at his N.A.S.S.P.E. conference in 2007. Giedd spoke for 90 minutes, but made no comments on schooling at all.

One reason for this, Giedd says, is that when it comes to education, gender is a pretty crude tool for sorting minds. Giedd puts the research on brain differences in perspective by using the analogy of height. “On both the brain imaging and the psychological testing, the biggest differences we see between boys and girls are about one standard deviation. Height differences between boys and girls are two standard deviations.” Giedd suggests a thought experiment: Imagine trying to assign a population of students to the boys’ and girls’ locker rooms based solely on height. As boys tend to be taller than girls, one would assign the tallest 50 percent of the students to the boys’ locker room and the shortest 50 percent of the students to the girls’ locker room. What would happen? While you’d end up with a better-than-random sort, the results would be abysmal, with unacceptably large percentages of students in the wrong place. Giedd suggests the same is true when educators use gender alone to assign educational experiences for kids. Yes, you’ll get more students who favor cooperative learning in the girls’ room, and more students who enjoy competitive learning in the boys’, but you won’t do very well. Says Giedd, “There are just too many exceptions to the rule.”

Despite a lack of empirical evidence, a cottage industry has emerged working the “boys and girls are essentially different, so we should educate them differently” angle. Several advocates like Sax have been quite successful commercially, including Michael Gurian, a family therapist, who published the best-selling “The Wonder of Boys” in 1996, a work he has since followed up with 15 more, including “Boys and Girls Learn Differently!” Through the Gurian Institute, he provides trainings to teachers, “showing the PET scans, showing the Spect scans” (a Spect scan is a nuclear imaging test that shows how blood flows through tissue), “teaching how the male and female brain are different,” Gurian told me. Like Sax, Gurian speaks authoritatively, yet both have been criticized for cherry-picking studies to serve their views. For instance, Sax initially built his argument that girls hear better than boys on two papers published in 1959 and 1963 by a psychologist named John Corso. Mark Liberman, a linguistics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, has spent a fair amount of energy examining the original research behind Sax’s claims. In Corso’s 1959 study, for example, Corso didn’t look at children; he looked at adults. And he found only between one-quarter and one-half of a standard deviation in male and female hearing thresholds. What this means, Liberman says, is that if you choose a man and a woman at random, the chances are about 6 in 10 that the woman’s hearing will be more sensitive and about 4 in 10 that the man’s hearing will be more sensitive. Sax uses several other hearing studies to make his case that a teacher who is audible to boys will sound too loud to girls. But Liberman says that if you really look at this research, it shows that girls’ and boys’ hearing is much more similar than different. What’s more, the sample sizes in those studies are far too small to make meaningful conclusions about gender differences in the classroom. The “disproportion between the reported facts and Sax’s interpretation is spectacular,” Liberman wrote on his blog, Language Log. “Dr. Sax isn’t summarizing scientific research; he’s making a political argument,” he wrote in an e-mail message. “The political conclusion comes first, and the scientific evidence — often unrepresentative or misrepresented — is selected to support it.”

One of Sax’s core arguments is that trying to teach a 5-year-old boy to read is as developmentally fraught as trying to teach a 3 1/2-year-old girl and that such an exercise often leads to a kid hating school. This argument resonates with many teachers and parents, who long for the days when kindergarten meant learning how to stand in line for recess, not needing to complete phonics homework. Yet public schools are beholden to state standards, and those standards require kindergartners to learn to read. As a result, even leaders of single-sex public schools, like Jabali Sawicki, the principal of the all-boys Excellence Charter School in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, are using some of what Sax has to offer while quietly refuting other claims.

Sawicki is 30, lanky and mocha-skinned, with an infectious energy. He grew up in a tough part of San Francisco with a single mother who managed to get her son a scholarship for middle school at a private all-boys school. From there he went to a private high school and then on to Oberlin College. The Excellence School is part of Uncommon Schools, a small network of charter schools. Housed in a gracious building on a modest street, Excellence currently teaches children in kindergarten through Grade 4, and will add a grade each year for the next four years, up to Grade 8. Sawicki’s office occupies an empty classroom slated to be overtaken by students as the school grows. There, he told me that educating lower-class black boys is “the new civil rights movement.” He then walked me down the hall to one of his kindergarten classrooms, where a sign on the door read “Fordham, Class of 2024.”

“Jacob,” said Sawicki, folding himself into a tiny chair and pointing to a line in a workbook, “will you read that for our guest?”

Jacob, who is 5, straightened his tiny tie under his green cardigan and used his index finger to track his place on the page. “A rat and a rabbit went down the slide.”

“Thank you,” said Sawicki. “And can you tell our guest what you like about the Excellence School?”

“I like that I get to wear a sweater with buttons,” he said, glancing down at his uniform. “And I like that I’m going to college.”

While there’s some dispute over whether there’s an ongoing education crisis for white, middle-class boys, there’s no doubt that public schools are failing poor minority students in general and poor minority boys in particular. Despite six years of No Child Left Behind, the achievement gaps between rich and poor students and white and black students have not significantly narrowed. “People are getting desperate” is how Benjamin Wright, chief administrative officer for the Nashville public schools, described the current interest in single-sex education to me. “Coed’s not working. Time to try something else.”

Wright was one of the first principals in the country to address the racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps by separating boys from girls. In 1999, he was sent to the failing Thurgood Marshall Elementary School, in Seattle, to try to turn the place around. One of the first things he noticed was that three boys were getting suspended for every girl, “and for the most ridiculous things in the world — a boy would burp, or he’d pass gas, or a girl would say, ‘He hit me.’ ” Nationwide, boys are nearly twice as likely as girls to be suspended, and more likely to drop out of high school than girls (65 percent of boys complete high school in four years; 72 percent of girls do). Boys make up two-thirds of special-education students. They are 1.5 times more likely to be held back a grade and 2.5 times more likely to be given diagnoses of A.D.H.D. So Wright met with his fourth-grade teachers and recalls telling them, “O.K., here’s what we’re going to do: how about you take all the boys and you take all the girls?” Wright says that in 2001, after Marshall’s first year in a single-sex format, the percentage of boys meeting the state’s academic standards rose from 10 percent to 35 percent in math and 10 percent to 53 percent in reading and writing.

Wright attributes this both to the insights of “brain researchers” like Sax and to what he calls “the character piece” — giving children a positive sense of themselves as students — which he says is easier to address in a single-sex setting. “Nobody cares about me, nobody really wants me — an African American or a Latino boy will tell you that in a hurry,” Wright told me when we spoke in January. “Or a Vietnamese or a Cambodian boy, if you’re in the right neighborhood. Don’t nobody care. Teachers need to understand when it’s time to stop teaching the content and start teaching the context.”

Not all schools see great results from switching to a single-sex format. After transforming the Thurgood Marshall School in Seattle, Wright moved to Philadelphia to work on the district’s single-sex programs, and the results were rather modest, a fact Wright attributes to working both with middle- and high-school students and with less-engaged teachers. Other districts have started single-gender programs only to shut them down, as major logistical headaches outweighed the small academic gains. Lori Clark, principal at Jefferson Leadership Academies in Long Beach, Calif., which in 1999 became the first public middle school in the country to convert to a single-gender format, is in the process of reverting her school to coed. “We just didn’t get the bang for the buck we’d been hoping for with our test scores,” Clark told me. “Our master schedule is like one of those old Rubik’s cubes. It’s hard enough to make sure each kid gets this level English class and that level math class — and then we need to account for if that student is a boy or a girl? We just couldn’t have our hands tied like that.”

When Sawicki first took the job at Excellence, he attended conferences given by Sax and others on single-sex education, and at all of them he’d stand up and say: “Tell me what is it that I should do? What’s the magic dust that I should sprinkle?” Now, four years into the job, he’s following Wright’s lead, trying to take the best of all models. At Excellence, in a third-grade room, the teacher Roberto de Leon roused his students into calling out the two-dimensional sides of three-dimensional shapes while throwing around a big purple eyeball. But the Excellence school couples their games with serious discipline. By 7:30 each morning, 220 boys walk through the school’s heavy double doors, each dressed, in the terminology of the school, as a professional scholar: in black sneakers, dress pants, a white shirt, a green cardigan, a belt and a tie. If a child arrives at 7:31 a.m., his parents will receive a call at 5:45 the next morning to make sure that boy will be at school on time. Excellence is a charter school — meaning the school is publicly financed but has been freed from some of the rules that apply to other public schools, in exchange for promising to produce certain results. Its halls are silent from 7:50 to 10:30 a.m. each day. “The school’s sacred time,” Sawicki explains. “Right now we have 220 boys who are reading. Just a few blocks that way” — he pointed toward Crown Heights, a nearby section of Brooklyn — “you’ve got 220 boys who are doing something that’s not going to get them to college.”

After meeting Jacob, Sawicki walked me over to a room labeled “University of North Carolina, 2024,” where the kindergarten teacher Trisha Bailey was sitting with nine boys in a reading circle. Part of Excellence’s strategy is to keep boys too busy to fall out of line. “Friends, who’s sitting tallest?” Bailey said in her brightest voice. “Who has a smile on his face? Whose feet are flat on the floor? O.K., here were go.” For the next two minutes, Bailey led the boys in a simple phonics exercise, sounding out together cat, kitten, kiss. Then she said, as animated as the host of “Blues Clues”: “Good job for you! Good job for me! Good job everybody! O.K., next.”

Under Bailey’s guidance, the boys did two more pages of phonics, and then she jumped to her feet and announced: “Stand up if you need to get your sillies out! Put your hands on your belly. Ha . . . ha, ha . . . ha, ha, ha. Now get ready for a blastoff with me!” Bailey counted down from 10 to 1, crouched down into a squat alongside the boys and then exploded into the air. Then she promptly took her seat. “Sit up tall, fold your hands, three-two-one, here we go.” Bailey held up a page and put her index finger on a red dot. “Boys, let’s read together now. This . . . is . . . my . . . kitten.”

The Young Women’s Leadership School in Harlem is widely considered the birthplace of the current single-sex public school movement. This position of eminence stems from both its early beginnings and its success: since opening in 1996, every girl in every senior class at T.Y.W.L.S. has graduated and been accepted at a four-year college.

T.Y.W.L.S. occupies the top five floors of a commercial building in Harlem, on 106th Street near Lexington Avenue. Most of the girls come from the neighborhood, where they walk home so quickly that they often breeze by their own mothers before registering whom they’ve passed. One afternoon in January, Dalibell Ferreira, a senior, sat drinking a soda in the college counselor’s office, where she sometimes stays until 8 p.m. because she finds her own home distracting. Ferreira is tall, poised, with wide-set eyes and her hair neatly pulled back around her fine Dominican face. When she graduates, she wants “to go to Wesleyan and study abroad, then travel, and then work for Unicef.” When she entered T.Y.W.L.S. in the seventh grade, she mostly liked that the linoleum floor was so clean she could see her own face reflected on it. Then she started appreciating that people wouldn’t snicker, “Oh, she thinks she’s so smart” when she raised her hand in class. Then one day last spring, on the way home from a friend’s house, Ferreira ran into a classmate from elementary school who was pushing a stroller and also pregnant. “I know that girl is smart, very smart, but now she just hangs around the block,” Ferreira told me. “I want to be bigger in life. Maybe that girl had dreams, too, but you can just see: the lights have gone out in her face.”

T.Y.W.L.S. was founded by Ann Rubenstein Tisch, wife of Andrew Tisch, the co-chairman of the Loews Corporation. Ferreira’s is exactly the story Tisch, a former correspondent for NBC Network News, hoped her students would someday tell. Tisch first got the idea for a public all-girls school while on assignment in Milwaukee in the late ’80s. She was interviewing a 15-year-old at a public high school that had just opened a nursery so teenage moms could come back and finish their degrees. “Where do you see yourself in 5 years?” Tisch asked the young mother. The mother started to cry. “I said to myself: ‘She’s stuck, she knows she’s stuck. And she’s impacting three generations: her mother, her child and herself.’ We need to get these kids on a completely different path, a path that wealthy girls and parochial-school girls and yeshiva girls are offered. Don’t you think that might make a difference?”

Tisch is 53 years old, with reddish hair and a strong, warm face. One of the first things she did when she got serious about trying to start an all-girls public school was to hire a lawyer, George Shebitz, to explore the legality of a single-sex school. Tisch started visiting elite Manhattan all-girls private schools like Brearley and Spence, and once she had a vision of girls in blue-and-white uniforms sitting in circles around tables instead of at rows of desks, Tisch met with Evelyn Castro, who was then the superintendent of New York City’s District 4, the district that encompasses part of East Harlem and one known for its innovation. She then spoke to Rosemary Salomone, the legal scholar at St. John’s. Salomone knew of a 1994 report by the New York City Department of Education showing a gender gap in math and science scores, which was particularly notable among African American and Hispanic females. Salomone knew that Title IX prohibits schools that receive Federal funds from discriminating on the basis of sex, but she explained to Tisch that this gender gap could work to her advantage.

As the Supreme Court would rule in June 1996, just three months before T.Y.W.L.S. opened, the legality of single-sex schools depends on context. In United States v. Virginia, a case regarding females’ exclusion from the all-male Virginia Military Institute, the justices found that the male bastion was in fact violating the equal-protection clause of the 14th Amendment, and that the state of Virginia’s proposal to open an all-girls school wasn’t a sufficient remedy because V.M.I. gave its students not just a good education but powerful connections within Virginia’s military and political elite. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who earlier in her career had been a founder of the A.C.L.U. Women’s Rights Project (a group that has been active in suing single-sex public schools), wrote the majority opinion, composing what some people consider a condensation of feminist thinking up to 1996. Ginsburg’s opinion states that in some contexts, single-sex schools might be legal, as long as those schools worked to “dissipate, rather than perpetuate, traditional gender classifications.” “The two sexes are not fungible,” Ginsburg wrote, quoting a 1946 decision; the physical differences between the sexes are “enduring” and “cause for celebration.” Yet, Ginsburg warned, those differences cannot be used to place “artificial constraints on individuals’ opportunity.”

News of an all-girls school opening in Harlem hit the press in July 1996 and started a firestorm of arguments about whether single-sex public education was illegal, regressive, anti-feminist and a nonanswer to the problem of how to educate both boys and girls well in school. As Salomone recalls, T.Y.W.L.S. “divided the feminist community right down the middle.” Later that year at Fordham Law School, Salomone debated the merits of single-sex public education against Anne Conners, then the president of NOW-N.Y.C. According to Salomone, Conners evoked Brown v. Board of Education. Salomone countered that race is substantially different from gender, and, more important, that a child would end up at T.Y.W.L.S., or another single-sex school, only by parental choice. After the debate, Salomone says she asked Conners if she had lost members over the issue and that Conners suggested that she had. Salomone told her, “Well, you lost me.”

Thanks to Tisch and the money she raises, T.Y.W.L.S. enjoys some significant advantages over an ordinary urban public school, most notably a health-and-wellness curriculum and a superheroic college counselor, Chris Farmer, who starts taking the girls on field trips to Columbia University in seventh grade and who once drove a student’s entire Ghanaian family, Islamic music blaring, from Harlem to Hobart and William Smith Colleges in upstate New York so the father would feel comfortable enough let his daughter attend. Tisch’s connections also make for priceless opportunities: Bill Clinton and Katie Couric, among other megawatt notables, have visited the school. But it was inside Emily Wylie’s A.P. English class where the real social value of single-sex teaching was on display. Ferreira, among 20 other seniors, sat in a circle discussing “Pride and Prejudice.” Wylie asked the girls to call out which characters had which vices and virtues. A serious discussion of whether lust — Lydia’s lust — was a vice or virtue ensued.

“She’s following her passions!”

“At least she’s not sleeping with folks for money.”

Wylie regretted to inform her girls that lust is one of the seven deadly sins, which prompted the thoroughly modern question: “But how is lust bad?”

Wylie says she believes she is a better teacher, and her students are better students, because they’re in a desexualized — or at least less-sexualized — environment. “Sure,” she says, “when they take pictures, they often present their backsides first. But I think I’m giving girls a better education than I could have if there were guys in the room. I’m freer. I’m more able to be bold in my statements. When I teach poetry and I talk about the sex in poetry I don’t need to be worried about the boy in the room who is going to chuckle over the thing he did with the girl last week and embarrass her. Which happened more than once in my last coed environment.”

Nearly everyone at T.Y.W.L.S. acknowledges that often parents’ most pressing concern when enrolling their 11-year-old daughters is sheltering those girls from sexualized classrooms and sexualized streets. “Harlem’s a very intense environment,” says Drew Higginbotham, T.Y.W.L.S.’s assistant principal, who lives in the neighborhood. “You’re constantly needing to prove yourself physically, to prove yourself sexually. Parents, when they come to our school, they sort of exhale deeply. You can hear them thinking to themselves, I can see my daughter here and she’s going to be O.K. for six hours a day.” Sax is not above or beyond this kind of thinking, either. In fact, after a nearly-two-hour conversation filled with scientific jargon and brains, he told me, perhaps wishfully, that really the most important reason to send a child to a single-sex high school was that those kids still go on dates. “Boys at boys’ schools like Old Farms in Connecticut, or Saint Albans in Washington, D. C., will call up girls at Miss Porter’s in Connecticut, at Stone Ridge in Maryland, and they will ask the girl out, and the boy will drive to the girl’s house to pick her up and meet her parents. You tell kids at a coed school to do this, and they’ll fall on the floor laughing. But the culture of dating is much healthier than the culture of the hookup, in which the primary form of sexual intimacy is a girl on her knees servicing a boy.”

In the past few years Tisch’s Young Women’s Leadership Foundation has opened schools in the Bronx and Queens, as well helping start ones in Chicago, Philadelphia, Dallas and Austin. Tisch wants to be careful about not overextending her network — “we don’t want to become Mrs. Fields or Benetton” — but she says she also feels an obligation from her success. Last year, 2,100 students applied for the three open ninth-grade spots in the Harlem school. Many other schools make inquiries about how they might replicate T.W.Y.L.S.’s success. This coming year, for the first time, Tisch plans on holding her own conference on single-sex public education. Though she’s meticulously circumspect about not disparaging Sax, her actions suggest that she is aware that if she doesn’t engage with the many districts interested in starting up single-sex programs, there’s a chance that Sax will run away with the movement.

Education scholarship has contributed surprisingly little to the debate over single-sex public education. In 2005, the United States Department of Education, along with the American Institute for Research, tried to weigh in, publishing a meta-analysis comparing single-sex and coed schooling. The authors started out with 2,221 citations on the subject that they then whittled down to 40 usable studies. Yet even those 40 studies did not yield strong results: 41 percent favored single-sex schools, 45 percent found no positive or negative effects for either single-sex or coed schools, 6 percent were mixed (meaning they found positive results for one gender but not the other) and 8 percent favored coed schools. This meta-analysis is part of a larger project by the Department of Education being led by Cornelius Riordan, a Providence College professor. He explained to me that such muddled findings are the norm for education research on school effects. School-effects studies try to answer questions like whether large schools are better than small schools or whether charter schools are better than public schools. The effects are always small. So many variables are at play in a school: quality of teachers, quality of the principal, quality of the infrastructure, involvement of families, financing, curriculum — the list is nearly endless. Riordan says, “You’re never going to be able to compare two types of schools and say, ‘The data very strongly suggests that schools that look like a are better than schools that look like b.’ ”

That certainly appears to be the case for single-sex schools. The data do not suggest that they’re clearly better for all kids. Nor do they suggest that they’re worse. The most concrete findings from the research on single-sex schools come from studies of Catholic schools, which have a long history of single-sex education, and suggest that while single-sex schools may not have much of an impact on the educational achievement of white, middle-class boys, they do measurably benefit poor and minority students. According to Riordan, disadvantaged students at single-sex schools have higher scores on standardized math, reading, science and civics tests than their counterparts in coed schools. There are two prevailing theories to explain this: one is that single-sex schools are indeed better at providing kids with a positive sense of themselves as students, to compete with the antiacademic influences of youth culture; the other is that in order to end up in a single-sex classroom, you need to have a parent who has made what educators call “a pro-academic choice.” You need a parent who at least cares enough to read the notices sent home and go through the process of making a choice — any choice.

As T.Y.W.L.S. let out on a Friday in January and the girls spilled onto 106th Street, one such parent, a man in saggy jeans and a black parka, walked up the sidewalk clutching his daughter’s dog-eared report card and hoping to secure her a spot for next year. “This where the school at?” he asked a security guard. The engagement of parents like this may be a major part of the success of single-sex public education. These schools are popular with many parents, who are happy to have an option that has long been available in private and parochial schools. And they are also attractive to teachers and administrators, who are offered a relatively easy and inexpensive way to try to improve some of the intractable problems in public education, especially for disadvantaged students.

But schools, inevitably, present many curriculums, some overt and some subtle; and critics argue that with Sax’s model comes a lesson that our gender differences are primary, and this message is at odds with one of the most foundational principles of America’s public schools. Given the myriad ways in which our schools are failing, it may be hard to remember that public schools were intended not only to instruct children in reading and math but also to teach them commonality, tolerance and what it means to be American. “When you segregate, by any means, you lose some of that,” says Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation. “Even if one could prove that sending a kid off to his or her own school based on religion or race or ethnicity or gender did a little bit better job of raising the academic skills for workers in the economy, there’s also the issue of trying to create tolerant citizens in a democracy.”

Elizabeth Weil is a contributing writer for the magazine. Her most recent article was about when a child should start kindergarten.

Chapter Two: Thorn Among Roses

2008-02-26T09:25:00.000-08:00

It is wrong of me to start this off with admitting I want a kid like Daniel from the first classroom example in the chapter?

Interesting tidbits:

Studies that track children's development...suggest that, by the third grade, a child has established a pattern of learning that shapes the course of his or her entire school career.
The most important thing to remember, the guiding principle, is to try to keep your son's self-esteem intact while he is in school.
Two of the most common of these [archetypes] images we see are those that cast a boy as a wild animal - out of control and incapable of responsible behavior or intelligent thought - or as an entitled prince who isn't held accountable to the same moral standards as the rest of us.
Physical activity can relieve some stress, but it doesn't eliminate the source of it...It discharges the energy around the feeling but not the feeling itself.

The nature-nurture argument rears its ugly head in the section titled "Gender Differences: Worlds Apart in a Classroom Together". What we as parents do at home has an impact on how our kids develop. (No real surprise.) If encouraging my son to read more rather than just encouraging his athleticism is what is going to help steer him into becoming a better student, I'll certainly give it a try. I imagine you have to take your cues from your kid, though, as forcing him into it would seem to have the opposite effect. I was a little disheartened when I learned the cut-off date for entrance into school meant I'd most likely have to keep Henry out of school for an extra year (he was born mid-October) but now I'm really glad about it. It means we'll have more time to work on helping him learn impulse control and proper school behavior, etc. But we are currently still deciding on public versus private education, leaning more towards private. The testing in public schools (in Oregon, at least), which I believe begins in third grade now, puts too much pressure on kids. In reading another one of my parenting books, I learned that Denmark (I think) has kids basically going to school to play for the first few years of their education, none of this learning to read in kindergarten business. I can't for the life of me remember why I found that so extraordinary at the time but I know my response to reading it was "Wow, why don't we do that here." Let's work on socializing kids and acclimating them to the classroom before we expect them to diligently sit down at their desks and get to work.

ADHD/ADD - My speech pathologist friend once described walking into a classroom where many of the kids were diagnosed with this and it sounded VERY creepy as all of the children were just sitting there in their drug-induced hazes. That being said, if your child truly has a problem and medicine can help, I'm all for taking the meds. But I do think we are quick to jump to ADHD/ADD as a diagnosis to explain normal behavior. I don't know if you guys watch The Sopranos or not but there is one episode where Tony goes with his wife to speak with the school counselor about his son. The counselor is talking about how one of the symptoms of ADHD/ADD is fidgeting. I won't write Tony's reply but I remember agreeing with his sentiment. We know boys are more active, yet the opportunities (P.E., recess, etc.) for them to expend some of that energy are slowly disappearing. We know they mature slower than girls - although I'm not sure why this is, does anyone know? Do their brains behave differently? - and yet we expect them to behave like the girls in their classrooms. I applauded the idea that advocates researching what reasonable expectations are for a kid that is being reviewed as a potential ADHD/ADD case and looking for nonmedical explanations for his behavior.

Archetypes - I had to laugh when I read the quote from Plato, who said of boys "of all wild beasts, the most difficult to manage". The study where they labeled certain kids "bloomers" just goes to show how much our perceptions of things can influence how we react. It makes me want to tag H that way myself so his teachers will work with him under that assumption and he'll have a better chance of actually making greater intellectual gains.

Questions that I have from the second chapter:
1. If we know boys tend to be more active, and we know they lack impulse control, how can we then compare them to their more mature counterparts and expect them to feel good about themselves?

Thorns Among Roses

2008-02-25T17:36:00.000-08:00

I found Chapter Two especially interesting since I struggle on a daily basis (well, every other day - daily) on what to do with The Boys. And I'm one of the lucky ones. I can still hide behind the "It's preschool - they need to be moving, I can't expect them to sit still so long, they're still young." However, as these kids move on to first and then second grade (I'm in a preK-2nd grade building) the gap between what these kids can handle and what is expected increases a great deal. The description of the kindergarten classroom at the start of this chapter could have very well been my room. The boys piled on top of each other, the one taking a little longer to get to the actual story area, and the one sitting nice and waiting with the girls - all are in my class - and each year it is repeated.
There's so much in this chapter that really hit home to me, but I'm just going to bullet a few points that really struck me and caused me to stop and think.

"Even among those (boys) who aren't considered problem boys, many teachers identify the ordinary boy pattern of activity, attitudes, and behaviors as something that must be overcome for a boy to succeed in school." It's hard not to think this way, but really, when you have a girl heavy class it's so much easier than a boy heavy class. There's just so much activity with the boys and they sort of feed off each other.
This chapter made it seem as though if a child can read he is at the same level developmentally as his peers. This is flat out false. I've had plenty of readers who could not hold their own with their peers in regards to following directions, paying attention, attending to a task. I do agree with the authors that reading is taught too soon and causes most kids (boys especially) to fall behind these expectations. "If you start teaching it (reading) any earlier, it looks as if all your boys have reading disabilities." Not only that, but just because a child is able to read does not mean that is what he/she needs to be doing. I'm sure there's a whole 'nother book about this, but basically preK and K should really be about learning to work within a group, socialize, cope, compromise, etc.
Academic success is important for a student's ego. I was amazed at this blunt statement from the author. "Kid has trouble learning to read in first grade; starts to hate school; his self-esteem goes to hell; and when he's a teenager, he's pissed off or taking drugs." So why not start boys a year later than girls? Or have some sort of entrance exam for kindergarten - and I'm not talking about a test. Some sort of observation report for preK teachers to fill out. Are they truly ready for kindergarten? Or better yet, let them go to kindergarten, but then are they truly ready for first grade? I think "giving them an extra year" should be more common than not; it's a lot easier to give them an extra year when they're five then to "hold them back another year" in fifth or sixth grade. How about an all boys post preK class? The year after preK, they'd all be 5, and then they' go to kindergarten the following year. Oh...if only I could open up my dream early childhood school.
Again I find myself struggling with how much can you expect of boys. Is the behavior normal or are you treating them like an entitled prince?

Things for us to remember:

Praise efforts.
Give hugs.
If a child is in a bad mood treat that bad mood like an enemy. "Oh, somehow your bad mood got a hold of you today. Can you try to shake it?"
Bad feelings (sadness, shame, etc) lead to high activity. Even if you allow the child to release that energy, the bad feelings are still there. You need to talk to them about how they feel. (Note to self - we've got a trampoline at work that I'll sometimes take a kid to jump on for a physical break. It's usually needed during playtime or after something happens, but I just now made the connection. Next time I'm out there with him jumping I'll encourage some conversation about what happened in the classroom.)

All in all I really enjoyed this chapter from a teacher's standpoint. I found myself looking at the boys in my room differently today and really noticing how much they move. Take a look at the last picture in my weekly winners. Notice the two boys standing. I watched today and I'd say about half the boys that came over to the project table did not actually use their chair.

I did enjoy the section on ADD and ADHD - but really all I can say is, "yup. I agree."

Chapter One

2008-02-24T16:57:00.000-08:00

Clearly one of my preconceptions about boys was corrected in this first chapter. I’ve always heard that “boys are so much easier during their teenage years than girls.” After reading I’m learning that boys may in fact seem easier, because they are not talking – there’s no drama because they tend to hold it in. However, according to the authors, “compared to a girl the same age, a boy in late adolescence is seven times more likely to die by his own hand.”
Another point that struck me was the fact that testosterone levels in boys and girls are pretty much the same until age 10. The authors continue to explain that men and women are more similar than what we are led to believe by the media. (What good would a news story be if it basically said, men and women both blah, blah blah?) They did comfirm my beliefs that young boys are more active than girls and need to physically move.
Near the end of the chapter the authors state, “We can raise boys to be nonviolent if we so choose.” How? They do not go on to explain how (maybe later in the book). I’ve seen plenty of examples of parents not allowing their kids to watch cable or violent movies or not allowing toys that look like guns in the house. Guess what? These boys still somehow find ways to make guns (trust me, anything can be made to look like a gun, if nothing else they’ll use their fingers) and will play shooting or something similar. At work I don’t allow shooting games or gun play. The boys were running airplanes around the carpet area during playtime making the shooting sounds. “Boys, no shooting at school.” To which Jack replied, “We’re not dropping bombs, we’re just dropping food.” Oh, okay…and they continued with the shooting/bombing noises complete with, “Watch out!” So I’m very anxious to see what the two authors suggest to do to raise nonviolent boys. In our house the rule is Quinn needs to ask before he tackles or wrestles people. He’s learned to say, “mommy, do you want to play tackle?” and then will either wrestle with me if I said yes or play something else if I said no. But he loves to wrestle and tackle – is this violent? Or are they talking about true violence? Violence that stems from anger? Violence that is meant to hurt someone?
I also enjoyed the section on emotional questions. It’s our job to talk about the emotions other people are experiencing and point them out to our sons. It’s also our job to help our boys describe how it is they are feeling – which sounds pretty tricky to me.

Chapter One: The Road Not Taken

2008-02-23T23:18:00.000-08:00

One chapter down, eleven more to go.

I guess I should start by saying my son (H) is only four months old, so my perspective isn't formed from direct experience, although I do have five nephews, currently ranging in ages from 8 years to 20 months. Now, on to the book...

The first chapter had a few things that stood out to me.

Testosterone levels in boys and girls are approximately the same until the age of 10.
Mothers' and fathers' answers of questions can subtly discourage questions of feelings for boys.

Okay, so the key to raising a boy with emotional literacy is to teach him the essential vocabulary. Got it. And to do that successfully it sort of sounds like you have to go against everything society reinforces. Not an easy task. But it makes sense, doesn't it. Girls are brought up to address their feelings, boys to squelch them. If we want our boys to be more like girls emotionally, we have to encourage boys to express and examine their own feelings and the feelings of others (empathy plays a large part, no?).

Somehow we are surprised when the gamut of boys' emotions is paired down to acceptable masculine emotions (e.g., anger, aggression, withdrawal) and boys use these "tools" - if I'm remembering the authors' analogy correctly, we've just handed our kids hammers, right? - and end up angry, aggressive, withdrawn children. We should expect if the authors are correct, and I believe they are already making a case for not treating boys in the "boys will be boys" manner to which we've all become accustomed, that allowing boys to experience feelings in a more loving and receptive manner (meaning we understand they have feelings, acknowledge them, and encourage them to have said feelings) will keep them from reaching the stage where they only have anger, aggression, and withdrawal to use as coping methods.

Questions that I have from the first chapter:

1. How do we fight gender stereotypes? Learning that I have an impact at home means I can change the way I do things but how do I stop H from being confronted with this every time he leaves us and goes into the world?

2. How do we respond to folks who use that line we already discussed in an earlier conversation - "Boys will be boys" - to allow their kids to get away with actions/behaviors we deem unacceptable?

On a side note, my husband saw I was reading this book and said "Oh yeah, so-and-so recommended that book." He's going to read it when I'm done.

Pre(Mis)conceptions about boys

2008-02-22T16:53:00.000-08:00

Before I started reading I figured I would air out some of my pre(mis)conceptions about boys and having sons.
First, the phrase I hate the most is, "Boys will be boys." As a preK teacher and aunt I've heard this all too many times. Yes, boys will be boys but in my opinion it is Not Okay for boys to: throw toys, kick things, ruin books, not sit for a meal, push each other around, hit people, break toys, etc. I'm a little nervous about this book. Am I wrong? Do boys need to do these things? I've always thought about writing a parenting book called, "Boys Will Be Boys, but That Doesn't Mean..." something like that anyway. I think parents and teachers tend to use that phrase to explain behavior or turn the other way.
I do think that boys, especially preK boys, usually have more of a need to use up physical energy. I encourage both Quinn and my boys at work to use up that energy. I take the kids out whenever possible (darn winter) and when we can we get to the gym in our school so the kids can run around. I've got a bouncy/rocking horse for Quinn and when he gets really antsy I challenge him to go and bounce really high and we count together as he bounces. We've also got his scooter in the basement so he can ride that around. All kids need to keep moving - need to use their energy - but I do think boys have more than girls, as far as needing to physically move their bodies around.
What else? Is it true that boys will be easier as teenagers than girls? Why?
I feel lucky to have a well-balanced husband as a role model for the boys. He cooks, cleans, writes (and reads) poetry, buys flowers. He also likes to skip showers, holds a black belt in Tae Kwon Do, enjoys horror movies, Steven King books, watch football, play football, etc. etc. A little bit Renaissance Man a little bit manly man.
I'm looking forward to his book to get a different perspective of boys and their needs.
Do you guys have any preconceptions about boys?

And we're off!

2008-02-22T14:05:00.000-08:00

As my parents said at the beginning of nearly every road trip, no matter how long or how short. I have my book now and am turning to the first page, which happens to be the preface to my edition (paperback).

Ready, Set, Go?

2008-02-18T11:31:00.001-08:00

Alright. So once we've all gotten our books let's leave a comment here to know when we're all ready. I'm still waiting for mine... watching for the UPS man.

Welcome!

2008-02-18T07:07:00.000-08:00

Welcome to Mom's Library. An online book club tackling the never-ending supply of parenting books and more! We'll be starting a discussion on Raising Cain shortly. Interested in joining in on the fun? Go ahead and comment! Want to really get into the discussion? Just send me an email and I'll add you to the list of contributors. mccathy at comcast.net