Boys

• “A smaller and smaller proportion of boys are going on to college. Right now, the student body at the average university in the United States is 58 percent female, 42 percent male (with similar numbers in Canada and Australia).3 And going to college doesn’t guarantee any positive result, particularly for boys. In fact, college is where the gender gap in motivation really shows up. Most girls who enroll in a four-year college will eventually earn a degree. Most boys won’t.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 8
• “Imagine visiting a twenty-first-century kindergarten—which is to say, a kindergarten where children are expected to do what first-graders were expected to do thirty years ago, a kindergarten where children are expected to sit for hours doing paper-and-pencil exercises. In the typical kindergarten, you will often find that the teacher has divided the children into two groups. Over here, with the teacher, are the kids who are ready to learn to read and write: mostly girls, one or two boys. Over there, on the other side of the room, are the other kids: the kids whom the teacher has (correctly) recognized are not ready to learn to read and write. That group is mostly boys, with one or two girls. There’s one thing five-year-old girls and boys are equally good at figuring out who’s in Dumb Group. By November, the kids in Dumb Group are aware of their inferior status, and they don’t like it.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 18
• “The teacher’s intentions are good. But most five-year-olds are keenly aware of their status in the eyes of adults. A boy whom the teacher has relegated to the Play Group (a.k.a. the Dumb Group) may think the teacher doesn’t like him. He’s figured out that the smart kids are in the Accelerated Reading Group. He wasn’t chosen to be in the elite group. He knows that the teacher was responsible for that choice. So he may decide that the teacher doesn’t like him. That’s unfair and illogical, but he is not a grown-up. He’s a five-year-old child, and five-year-olds are often illogical. Many five-year-olds, whether girls or boys are likely to conclude that the teacher likes the kids in the Smart Group better than she likes the kids in the Dumb Group.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 19
• “Professor Deborah Stipek, dean of the school of education at Stanford University, has found that kids form opinions about school early.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 20
• “Critics of American education often point out, quite accurately, that the United States spends more money per pupil than most other developed countries and yet accomplishes less. On the international test most widely administered around the world, the United States ranks at #25, well below countries whose per-pupil spending on education is much lower, such as Hungary (#23), Poland (#21), the Czech Republic (#15) and Finland (#1).7 Finland, incidentally, consistently scores at or near the very top of all of these international rankings. What’s the most distinctive characteristic of public education in Finland? Very simple: Children in Finland don’t begin any formal school until they are seven years old.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 20
• “Nevertheless, by the time they’re teenagers, Finnish children are beating American children by large margins on the same test. In the latest round of testing, for example, the average fifteen-year-old in Finland scored 545 in reading; fifteen-year-old American students taking the same examination scored 490. In problem-solving, the average Finnish teenager scored 547, while the average American teenager scored a dismal 480.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 20
• “Many parents have figured out that the accelerated pace of today’s kindergarten is not a good match for their five-year-old son. Particularly in affluent neighborhoods, it’s become common for parents to enroll their son in kindergarten one year later than the district would normally enroll that child; it’s not unusual to find that half the boys, or more, are enrolled in kindergarten at age six rather than at age five. In low-income neighborhoods—where many working parents simply can’t afford to keep their children home another year—typically fewer than 3 percent of boys will be held back.10 One reason that boys from low-income neighborhoods are doing so much worse in school than boys from more affluent neighborhoods, beginning in early elementary education, maybe that the boys from more affluent neighborhoods are starting school at a later age, on average, than the boys from the poor neighborhoods.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 21
• “Lonsdorf, Eberly, and Pusey found consistent sex differences in how young female and young male chimps learn from their elders. Girl chimps pay close attention to the adult (usually a parent) who is showing them the procedure. Girl chimps then do just what the adult showed them: she breaks off a branch, cuts it to the same length as the adult had done, strips the leaves as the adult had done, and so forth. But the young males ignore the grown-ups; they prefer to run off and wrestle with other young male chimps, or to swing from trees.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 23
• “The entire order of primates is characterized by profound sex differences, and those sex differences are fairly well conserved across the order. 17 Young male monkeys, like young male gorillas and young male humans, are significantly more likely to engage in aggressive rough-and-tumble play than are young females from any of those species.18 Likewise, young female primates are far more likely to babysit a younger sibling than a young male primate would be.b That’s true in our species as well: girls are far more likely to babysit a younger sibling than their brothers are.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 24
• “Girls are more likely to affiliate with the adults. They are more likely to share common aims and values with the grown-ups. Boys and young men, on the other hand, are less likely to be sympathetic to adult aims and values and are more inclined to engage in delinquent behaviors such as smashing mailboxes, street racing, mooning police officers, among others, than girls are. A boy who smashes mailboxes “just for the fun of it” will raise his status in the eyes of at least some other boys. A girl who smashes mailboxes just for the fun of it is unlikely to raise her status in the eyes of most of the other girls. Girls are more likely to listen to what the grown-ups are saying and to do what the grown-ups ask, particularly if there are no boys around. (If boys are around, some girls become more likely to misbehave, perhaps because they perceive that disrespecting the adults will raise your status in the eyes of at least some of the boys.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 25
• “Girls are more likely to see the situation from the perspective of the grown-ups. In one study, investigators examined twenty cases where students were plotting a school shooting but the plan was detected and stopped before any violence occurred. In eighteen of those twenty incidents, girls—not boys—alerted school officials or other adults to the plot. All the potential shooters were boys. “Boys feel like snitches if they tell on a friend, [while] girls [can] more openly seek out adults with their concerns,” said James McGee, author of the study. Boys’ first allegiance is to other boys. Girls are more likely to see the situation from the parents’ perspective.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 25
• “It’s easy to see how these sex differences are relevant to education. Girls will do the homework because the teacher asked them to. Boys are more likely to do the homework only if it interests them. If it bores them, or if they think it’s “stupid,” they are more likely to ignore it. Researchers have consistently found that girls are significantly more likely than boys to do the assigned homework,25 in every subject.26 Even the highest-achieving boys are significantly less likely to do the homework than the comparably achieving girls.27 Girls at every age get better grades in school than boys do, in every subject—not because girls are smarter, researchers have found, but because girls try harder.28 Most girls would like to please the teacher, if possible. Most boys don’t care much about pleasing the teacher or about getting straight A’s—and boys who do try to please the teacher and who do care about their grades will lower their status in the eyes of the other boys.29 Girls are more likely to assess their work as their teachers do. Boys are less likely to care what the teacher thinks of their work. That divergence leads to an enduring paradox: at every age, girls do better in school, but are less satisfied with their achievements, compared with the boys.30 In 2006, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania reported that girls’ greater self-discipline and self-control—perhaps deriving from their greater motivation to please the teacher—appears to be a key distinguishing factor that has enabled girls to survive and thrive in the accelerated world of twenty-first-century education.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men(Leonard Sax) Page 26
• “Boys who have been deprived of time outdoors, interacting with the real world rather than with computers, sometimes have trouble grasping concepts that seem simple to us. Louv quotes Frank Wilson, professor of neurology at Stanford, who says that parents have been deceived about the value of the computer-based experience for their children. Dr. Wilson says that medical school instructors are having more difficulty teaching medical students how the heart works as a pump because these students have so little real-world experience. They’ve never siphoned anything, never fixed a car, never worked on a fuel pump, may not even have hooked up a garden hose. For a whole generation of kids, direct experiences in the backyard, in the tool shed, in the fields and woods, has been replaced by indirect learning, through [computers]. These young people are smart, they grew up with computers, they were supposed to be superior—but now we know that something’s missing.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 30
• “Louv provides a compendium of research demonstrating that when there is a profound imbalance in a child’s early experiences—when nature has been replaced by computer screens and fancy indoor toys—the result is an increased risk for attention deficit disorder. For example, Louv cites a Swedish study in which researchers compared children in two different day-care facilities. One facility was surrounded by tall buildings, with a brick pathway. The other was set in an orchard surrounded by woods and was adjacent to an overgrown garden; at this facility, children were encouraged to play outdoors in all kinds of weather. The researchers found that “children in the ‘green’ daycare had better motor coordination and more ability to concentrate.”37 Similarly, researchers at the University of Illinois have found that putting children in an outdoor environment, where they can actually put their hands in the dirt and feel and smell real stuff, as opposed to interacting with sophisticated computer simulations, is helpful in treating ADHD.38 Ironically, the outdoor alternative is cheaper than the program with the fancy computers. Boys are at least three times as likely to be treated for ADHD compared with girls, and the rates of diagnosis of ADHD for both girls and boys have soared over the past two decades.39 One wonders to what extent the shift from Wissenschaft to Kenntnis may have contributed to the explosion in the numbers of children being treated for ADHD.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 31
• “A study published in 2006, conducted jointly under the auspices of the University of Michigan and the University of Texas at Austin, found that the likelihood of a child being diagnosed with ADHD is a function of three main factors:42 • Sex: Boys are several times more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD than girls; • Race: White children are more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD than black or Hispanic children;43 • Socioeconomic status: Affluent children are more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD than children from low-income families. For white boys in affluent suburbs, the odds of being diagnosed with ADHD at some point in childhood may be as high as one in three.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 34
• “Boys are less likely to read today simply because they don’t want to. And that change in motivation is, at least in part, a consequence of the gender-blind changes in education over the past thirty years.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 39
• “For many boys, failure is a spur to work harder.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 50
• “If you tell a boy who has a generous dose of this kind of motivation to sit down, he’ll stand up. If you tell him to stand up, he’ll sit down. He doesn’t care so much whether he’s standing or sitting. But he needs to know, and he needs you to know, that he’s in charge of whether he stands or sits. He doesn’t want you to tell him what to do.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 56
• “Secretly, these boys often believe that they are special, that they are unique, that they have a destiny that will be revealed in time. As a result, they believe that rules that apply to ordinary people don’t apply to them. Their “destiny” matters more to them than friendship or academic achievement—more than happiness, for that matter. They often do not expect other people, including their parents, to understand them. They may not even want other people to understand them, because they sense (correctly) that their worldview, with all its megalomania, will appear puerile and egocentric to most adult eyes.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men(Leonard Sax) Page 57
• “When these tests were first conducted thirty years ago, there was a substantial gender gap in the results, with boys outperforming girls. When the researchers repeated the tests in 2005, they found that the gender gap had vanished. The gap didn’t disappear because the girls were doing better. These researchers found that girls are not doing better; in fact, the performance of eleven- and twelve-year-old girls in 2005 had deteriorated slightly in comparison with the performance of eleven- and twelve-year-old girls thirty years ago. Instead, they found that the boys’ performance in 2005 was dramatically worse than it had been thirty years ago. “This is a huge and significant statistical change,” concluded Professor Shayer.18 Boys who are nearly twelve years old “are doing [only] as well as the eight- to nine-year-olds in 1976,” he observed.19 Why the drop? Professor Shayer suggested that “the most likely reasons are the lack of experiential play [Kenntnis] in primary schools, and the growth of a video-game, TV culture. Both take away the kind of hands-on play that allows kids to experience how the world works in practice.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 65
• “Professor Shayer’s study isn’t the only one to document a recent decline in the intelligence of boys and young men. Norwegian researchers published an analysis of test scores of Norwegian draftees between the 1950s and 2002. From the 1950s until the mid-1980s, test scores steadily improved, then leveled off, then began to decline in the early 1990s.21 (Norway requires military service of all young men, so a selection bias can’t explain this drop.) Denmark, like Norway, requires a brief stint of military service for all young men. Professor David Owen of Brooklyn College recently collaborated with Danish researchers to look for a similar phenomenon among Danish recruits. Analyzing test scores for more than five hundred thousand recruits between 1959 and 2004, Owen and his Danish counterparts found a gradual rise in performance from 1959 through the 1980s, a plateau into the early 1990s, and a definite decline between about 1994 and 2004.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 65
• “And what about preparing for the real world? In the real world—unless you’re a fighter pilot or a Marine sniper—being able to push a button 0.02 seconds faster than the other guy isn’t such a valuable skill. Preparing teenagers for the demands of real-life requires skills quite different from the cognitive and visuomotor skills required to master video games. Imagine a young father, in his twenties let’s say, trying to comfort his crying baby daughter. There are no buttons to push, no photon torpedoes to fire. The right thing to do may be simply to rock the baby and hum a lullaby. The chief virtue required may not be lightning virtuosity with a game controller, but merely—patience. If you need to get along with a belligerent coworker, the chief virtue you need may not be lightning speed. In most video games, the best way to deal with difficult people is to vaporize them with photon torpedoes. In the real world, what you need is not high-tech virtual weaponry, but patience.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 66
• “A comprehensive review of the research on video games recently demonstrated that playing violent video games leads directly “to aggressive behavior, aggressive cognition, aggressive affect, and cardiovascular arousal, and to decreases in helping behavior.” The linkage between the violent game and the boy’s antisocial behavior is unequivocally cause-and-effect, these researchers found; the end result is that boys who play these games are more likely to engage in “serious, real-world types of aggression.” The more carefully researchers control for all the variables, the larger the effect size, suggesting that previous studies “underestimate the true magnitude of observed deleterious effects on behavior, cognition, and affect.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 67
• “Moreover, researchers have found that playing violent video games has a substantially more toxic effect than watching equally violent television programs, probably because when a boy is watching a violent TV program he’s watching someone else commit the violent act, but when he’s playing Doom or Grand Theft Auto or Halo, he’s inflicting the death and destruction himself.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 67
• “These games are gratifying to boys, this study found, not only because the boys have the satisfaction of being the tough guy, but also because they are in charge of the game itself: they can turn it off any time they want to and move on to another game in another universe.26 In real life, you can’t just walk away from the havoc you create. In the world of video games, you can.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 68
• Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 68 (Video Games, Boys)“In my judgment, though, the research clearly indicates that boys who spend many hours each week playing violent video games are at greatly increased risk of disengaging from the real world.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 68
• “Professor Anderson also notes that the controversy now surrounding video games is reminiscent of the controversy surrounding cigarette smoking in the 1960s or lead poisoning in the 1970s. After all, most people who are exposed to cigarette smoke will never get lung cancer. And some people who get lung cancer are not smokers and have never been exposed to cigarette smoke. Likewise (Professor Anderson would argue) not all boys who play video games twenty hours a week will disengage from real life, and not all boys who disengage from real life are video game players.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 68
• “So what rules should you lay down for your son? Professor Anderson has provided some practical guidelines based on the published research.28 He recommends first of all that you either play the game yourself or watch it being played. Then ask yourself these questions: • Does the game involve some characters trying to harm others? • Does this happen frequently, more than once or twice in thirty minutes? • Is the harm rewarded in any way? • Is the harm portrayed as humorous? • Are nonviolent solutions absent or less “fun” than the violent ones? • Are realistic consequences of violence absent from the game? If you answer yes to two or more of these questions, then Professor Anderson suggests that you reconsider whether your son should be allowed to play the game.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 69
• “And what about teenage boys having relationships with girls? Surprisingly, especially to those of us over thirty, many boys today seem to prefer playing video games to being with girls.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 70
• “Boys prefer video games over girls? In the summer and fall of 2006, the New York Times published a series of front-page articles entitled “The New Gender Divide.” One of these described how many young men seem more interested in playing their video games than in being with their girlfriends. The reporter interviewed one young woman at college who had broken off her relationship with a young man, “in part out of frustration over his playing video games four hours a day. ‘He said he was thinking of trying to cut back to fifteen hours a week,’ she said. ‘I said, “Fifteen hours is what I spend on my internship, and I get paid $1,300 a month. That’s my litmus test now: I won’t date anyone who plays video games. It means they’re choosing to do something that wastes their time and sucks the life out of them.’” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 70
• “Family comes first; schoolwork comes second; friends come third; video games are last. If your family is one of the fortunate few in which most family members still sit down to share a common evening meal, then sitting down to dinner with the family is more important than playing a video game, more important than talking on the phone with a friend, more important even than finishing a homework assignment. Homework is more important than talking with friends or playing a video game. Taking a phone call from a friend should be a higher priority than playing out a video game, though.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 72
• “Video games teach these boys that if you manipulate things a certain way, you will get an easy win.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 75
• “The stereotypical pastimes of boys and men in previous generations were pretty good at teaching skills like patience. Thirty years ago, and even more so fifty years ago, it was more common for boys and men to go hunting and fishing together. Boys who go fishing with an experienced fisherman soon learn that a good fisherman has to be able to wait patiently. That sort of patience might serve a young father well. But video games do not teach that kind of patience.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 67
• “In my judgment, though, the research clearly indicates that boys who spend many hours each week playing violent video games are at greatly increased risk of disengaging from the real world.” Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Leonard Sax) Page 68