Why Boys Are Falling Behind (Newsweek)

Parents Forum
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<p>mackinaw:
Your post got me wondering about the effects of divorce/single parenting on the statistical underpinnings for this article. Perhaps (and I have no idea if this has been tested) the simple problem is that, overall, boys are impacted more negatively than girls by the absence of a father. Perhaps that alone can explain the apparent disparity in educational attainment. </p>

<p>Aother possible factor: Perhaps young boys simply watch more TV than young girls. With some of the recent, disturbing findings about the impact of watching TV on the brain development of children, that could also explain differences. </p>

<p>I understand neither of these things are tested (well to my knowledge anyway!). However, I'm still not willing to let schools off the hook.</p>

<p>cookiemom:
The dreaded art projects! Ugh. I was sitting in a high school (not my kids') one day (while my kid was there for a competition) in a social studies classroom. I could not believe all the art projects hanging on the walls! Colored maps, collages (will they ever go out of style?), family trees done with colored markers and photos, even some kind of hat display. I was amused at how easy it was to see the difference between the boys' projects (very much in the minority of what was hung BTW) and the girls'. My sons would hate that. They'd just do it on the computer!</p>

<p>A general comment:
Also, I'm concerned that people are taking my statements on here as if I don't understand the nature of statistical variability. That is not, however, what this article is really about.</p>

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<p>Why should you take offense, Tropical Triceps? There is plenty of data to suggest that it is an issue of mental maturity and development. That doesn't mean that many young men have all their higher level processing capabilities completely organized at age 14 or 15 - it just means that on average, most are still growing and developing their thinking skills.
Part of the reason that girls are more likely to take notes, follow instructions (particularly follow instructions) is because, on average, their brains allow them to do those tasks more easily. On average most grown men can adhere to deadlines and follow instructions - although asking for directions is another story - their neural processing has matured. Boys are more "distractable" if you will.</p>

<p>The illustration in the original article was very apt - given a science demonstration to do, the girls followed the instructions; the boys were doing everything else, some very creative things, but all getting in the way of following the instructions. Doesn't mean that they will never be able to follow instructions - just as a group not ready as early as the girls.</p>

<p>The issue that should be painfully obvious to CC posters, who are highly concerned with college admissions, is that this lagging achievement, for whatever reason, puts boys behind far behind on college admissions.</p>

<p>Also, I think that birth order plays a role in this maturity, again on average.</p>

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<p>Re: obedience--I agree that boys, especially after puberty, do not like to obey women. Or follow instructions, ask for directions, etc. One word explanation: testosterone. My homeschooled son was fine until 10th grade. After 2 years of struggling with him to get his work done, and hearing of similar problems with teenage boys from other homeschool moms, I sent him to school part time for 12th grade. (Ability not an issue--a bright student, NMS, etc.) I thought he'd have some "male role models." He's taking chemistry, AP physics, AP calc., and programming--and ALL his teachers are FEMALE. (He has also experienced some of the "artsy" projects that he thinks are designed to improve the grades of those who struggle with knowlege of the subject). When I was in high school --large public school--most of the math, science and history teachers were male, and I think the male (and female) students respected them more. </p>

<p>S has high English/reading scores, but hates novels. (All he knows about Lit. he saw on "Wishbone" 7 years ago!) My dad, who had a full scholarship to engineering school, admits to turning in the same paper 4 times (4 different teachers) in high school! It was on "The Old Man and the Sea"--the only novel he ever read in his life. "Why would I want to read other people's daydreams?" he said. Yet he likes "how to" books, and history.</p>

<p>I believe in biological/chemical/hormonal differences. (I have 4 girls and 3 boys, btw). Years ago, studies showed that girls, who did better than or equal to boys in math, suddenly (surprise?) slacked off around the age of 12-13. Anyone ever heard of estrogen? You've heard the stereotypes of female engineers? Women who are good at math tend (no offense-- I'm not saying ALL, but I'd like to see a study on this) to have higher testosterone levels (acne, facial hair, aggression, PCOS, infertility). There are plenty of women in the "sciences"--medicine, biology-- but not as many women are good at pure math/engineering. High estrogen women tend to be more nurturing. And, likewise, high testosterone men tend not to go into nurturing professions. </p>

<p>Just read something in the paper--a study on male/female brains and revenge. The "reward/pleasure center" in male brains lit up in response to revenge--shooting/killing a character who'd hurt yours in a video game, for example. Female brains did not find revenge pleasurable. Females were more compassionate/merciful toward those who'd hurt them. Anyone else see this?</p>

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<p>
[quote]
Women who are good at math tend (no offense-- I'm not saying ALL, but I'd like to see a study on this) to have higher testosterone levels (acne, facial hair, aggression, PCOS, infertility)

[/quote]
</p>

<p>Whoa, I wouldn't go so far as to say that! My understanding is that a lot of the hard wiring that causes women to be more verbal, and men to be more "spatial" goes on very early in development, and is just reinforced by social norms and the impetus of puberty. It is a very complex interdependence of genes, hormones, nurture and socialization. I doubt seriously that female engineers have higher testosterone levels - that is too simple a relationship. Perhaps their mothers had slightly different hormonal levels during pregnancy, which somehow led the daughters' brains to have better developed spatial skills, but I think it is too late at puberty for testos to have that subtle an effect. </p>

<p>As for the homeschooled son needing a change at puberty, that is "testos" in its most general manifestation. Young teen boys are pretty tribal, too, maybe they just need a tribe.</p>

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<p>
[quote]
Young teen boys are pretty tribal, too, maybe they just need a tribe.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>I think this should become my sons' school slogan.</p>

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<p>Lots of free-flowing prejudices and stereotyping going on here! I have one of each, and no ax to grind. My D liked math just fine, and my S liked English just fine. Both did fine in both. Neither was ever able, in my house, to get a way with, "I just don't like it" or "I don't respect my teacher because she's FEMALE."</p>

<p>The idea that literature is feminine is ludicrous--up until the last century, it belonged almost entirely to men, as did all other arts--there were always great women artists, writers, etc, of course, but not nearly as many as men, and it was much harder for them to gain notice. Now, finally, women get more respect, so arts should be taken less seriously? Puhleeze.</p>

<p>Last month, we had a whole thread claiming that classes are too regimental, and that's bad for boys. Now, classes are too touchy-feely, and that's bad for boys.</p>

<p>Maybe more boys should be brought up with the notion that the world does not revolve around them, and that they can decide to work with it, or not. (And deciding not to is a viable choice--my D is the one less apt to work with the system in my family), but that thinking it should adapt to them is just over the top.</p>

<p>The world does, on the whole, still revolve around men (look who's running the only super-power). I don't think they're quite an extinct species, yet.</p>

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<p>Whoa, I'm getting stuck on the girls good at math having facial hair--I have never noticed this! My very feminine (might I go as far as to say <em>pretty</em>?) daughter is one of two girls on the math team, and she seems to have a knack for math/science--not a genius, but has a knack for it. And she scores much better on the math than the verbal (as her PSAT scores showed once again. . .) And when I think of the advanced math girls I know, I can't think of a single one that has facial hair, acne, is not feminine, etc. </p>

<p>I do wonder if there isn't something to mentoring girls in math, though. I was talking to a mother of a girl who was way ahead in math in high school, and she said, no my daughter isn't smart, its just that she's been tutored since elementary school by a Russian math teacher. And I know my H liked to do math with my daughter when she was younger too. </p>

<p>Heck, my son, who is also very good at math, doesn't strike me as a high testosterone guy either!</p>

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<p>Thank you, garland. Your post reflects my thinking as well. I have one of each, and throughout their schooling I've seen the favoritism go both ways.
Worth noting I think is that success in the classroom doesn't correlate to monetary or career success in the United States. Males still strongly dominate the corporate world, which is what runs our country and the world. We have yet to have a female president, and we have predominately males in congress and the courts as well.
I agree also with the student who posted, Random Bob. In elementary school, my daughter would be scolded for her active learning style and assertive behavior at the same time that boys doing the very same thing would be praised for their leadership. This has more to do with societal norms than with any educational program flaws. Also, we live in an area with a high asian population. Perhaps because their culture prizes artistic expression, boys are often winning art awards and submitting the most impressive "craft" projects in my community. They also do superbly well academically.
Our country rewards athletics, power and money, not necessarily in that order. Little boys recognize this early on, and unless they are directed to value schooling because their families value their education, nothing the teachers do will have much of an impact one way or another.</p>

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<p>Hey, has it occurred to anyone that, possibly, in the absence of discrimination, girls are simply smarter and quicker to learn than boys, and that learning styles and teaching styles won't make any difference?</p>

<p>;)</p>

<p>Seriously, though, girls do mature faster than boys (biologically) and thus will do better in school until the boys catch up, as long as we sort by age instead of ability.</p>

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<p>Or, dmd77, boys are simply smarter and quicker to learn that performance in school really doesn't matter. They want to get their "ticket punched" with regard to the system so they can spend their time focusing on the subjects which actually interest them.</p>

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<p>This really just supports what weenie and others said, but what about the fact that our kids are being pushed ahead academically at younger ages than was common a generation ago? Many boys (and some girls as well, of course) are just not developmentally ready to handle some of the higher and more abstract courses at such young ages. Algebra I is now given in middle school. Nobody ever had to take the AP classes that the kids now are being encouraged to take for competitive colleges. Papers and research projects need to be worthy of a college PhD thesis! Maybe some kids who would have thrived on a slower, more appropriate pace are just being overloaded with too much, too soon. My S is also one of just a very few in his NHS group, and is in the minority in his honors and AP classes as well. Add to that the pressure of ECs, the perfect resume, and the college admissions game and it is no wonder that so many of our late bloomers are falling through the cracks. I think the pendulum will swing the other way when our kid's generation realizes that we were all nuts for putting them through all of this. It's not a race.</p>

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<p>Regarding masculine characteristics of females who are top math/engineering students, again, no offense. I didn't say ALL, but that I'd like to see a study on this, because these "freeflowing stereotypes and prejudices" come from somewhere.
(I teach about women's health, fertility issues, so I'm not just making this up about hormones, btw). </p>

<p>Males don't say "I don't respect the teacher because she is female," it is just that males after puberty naturally will not want to be submissive to a female, and there is a biological reason for this. </p>

<p>Literature is not particularly feminine, (in the past all professions--except motherhood and one other-- belonged to men), but it seems that math/science oriented people (majority male) tend not to be interested in fiction, don't get involved with the characters, relationships, personalities, emotions, etc.-- just as lit majors (majority female) usually aren't into physics and calculus. Some--all your kids, I'm sure--have a strong interest and high achievement in everything! </p>

<p>I don't think my kids, male or female, are at any "disadvantage" because of their sex. They are individuals with their own talents and weaknesses that they have to deal with. They also have to deal with the reality that males and females are not the same. I do think that teenage boys are more motivated by male teachers--I wish there were more of them at the high school level. Low pay is the biggest problem.</p>

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<p>"I do think that teenage boys are more motivated by male teachers--I wish there were more of them at the high school level. Low pay is the biggest problem."</p>

<p>I totally agree.</p>

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<p>This might be interesting to people
my younger d has a learning difference although she has also had some amazing insights and connections from a very young age.
She has sensory difficulties, which are getting better with age, but at age 8 for example, she didn't know her letter sounds, nor could she tolerate underwear or socks. I can't say that she was wearing socks by the end of the year but she was reading full lenght books like Harry POtter.
I think her neurological system wasn't ready before, it wasn't the teaching or that she wasn't working hard, she just wasnt ready to learn to read
<a href="http://www.sciencemaster.com/wesson/home.php%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.sciencemaster.com/wesson/home.php&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

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<p>DMD, I was once caught in a cross-fire. Woman on my left said that men develop slower than women...not catching up until age 40. Woman on my right said, yeah, and then they immediately enter their second childhood. I was bleeding for three days.</p>

<p>Wow...female math/science students are more masculine. Some "study." Yeah, the drop-off occurs when estrogen becomes more manifest...with a correlative interest in boys where suddenly the girls who are invested in being socially popular "dumb themselves down" to make themselves appealing to the boys. The "dumbing down" phenomenon has been widely observed.</p>

<p>BurlMom #78: "...parents more concerned with their boys being good athletes than good students." How very sad but it feels true, outside certain socioethnic groups at any rate.</p>

<p>TropicalTriceps #80: "organized brain" has nothing to do with intellectual capability...brains develop throughout childhood and into early adulthood. Male brains tend to develop--and thus acquire some skills--more slowly. There's extremely little debate about this phenomenon.</p>

<p>RandomBob #69: thank you for participating. And good points, about the socialization.</p>

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<p>"Males don't say "I don't respect the teacher because she is female," it is just that males after puberty naturally will not want to be submissive to a female, and there is a biological reason for this. "</p>

<p>Luckily, somewhere along the way, we invented "civilization" where men, and women, get to participate in all sorts of higher order societal structures where basic biological reasons are worth squat, (and they don't get to hit someone with a brick if they disagree, even if they're biological imperatives tell them they should.)</p>

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<p>I think Kate Hepburn said it best ( as she did so many things well)
when she said " Nature, Mr Allnutt is what we were put into this world to rise above"</p>

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<p>From the WSJ 01/13/06:</p>

<p>Speaking of innate, males' superior spatial ability seems to be. Numerous studies find that boys outperform girls on tests of mentally
rotating an object, which seems to predict performance in math and science. The boy-girl gap shows up in Africans, Asians and Westerners as young as preschool (though not in the Eskimos of Baffin Island, where both sexes hunt). </p>

<p>But no one had ever looked at whether the gap exists in every socioeconomic group. Now a team of scientists has. They had 547 second- and third-graders in the Chicago area read a map or complete a puzzle. Only boys from high-and medium-income families did better than girls. "There was no difference at all between the boys and girls from the poorest group," says Susan Levine of the University of Chicago, who led the study. </p>

<p>If male superiority in spatial ability reflects genes, testosterone on the brain or other innate causes, then it shouldn't vary depending on
whether dad belongs to a yacht club. But maybe spatial ability reflects environmental inputs that poor kids, and girls of every class, have fewer of. For instance, Legos, puzzles and videogames foster spatial skills, and boys generally spend more time on them than girls. But poor kids may have less access to pricey toys. Also, exploring the neighborhood is correlated with spatial ability. Boys do it more than girls, since parents tend to be more protective of daughters. But poorer boys in more dangerous neighborhoods may be given less chance to explore than better-off boys. </p>

<p>The interaction between socioeconomic status and spatial ability, Prof. Levine and her colleagues write, "poses a challenge for explanations that downplay the role of environmental effects."</p>

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<p>But maybe spatial ability reflects environmental inputs that poor kids, and girls of every class, have fewer of. For instance, Legos, puzzles and videogames foster spatial skills, and boys generally spend more time on them than girls. But poor kids may have less access to pricey toys. Also, exploring the neighborhood is correlated with spatial ability.
Environment stimulates the neurological system to mature.
I have mentioned my oldest D who incurred intercranial hemmoraging after her premature birth. Often brain bleeds in an adult mean brain damage, but young childrens brains are more pliable and new connections can be formed to replace those that are lost.
Now I am not a neurologist, but I have read quite a bit :)
Once it was established she was healthy enough to come home, and that she didn't have any physical health problems, I focused on trying to give her adaquate stimulation to make up for being born 10 weeks early. ( I was motivated by the children that I had seen that had graduated from the NICU, were physically healthy, but also had other obvious problems)
I not only gave her regular massage and nursed her, but took her to baby swimming classes, to toddler exercise programs ( really) where she had a variety of equipment and games to play.
I think it paid off, she still had somewhat of a gross motor delay, but she taught herself to read when she was three-. This amount of development according to the drs at the UW was very unusual for any child, and especially for a very early baby.
It was pretty exciting- I don't think it can be placed to our economic or academic background which was low income blue collar, but to the amount of positive stimulation of all sorts that she experienced.
I guess this means I should be an advocate of not just preschool, but lots of physical play in preschool-& earlier</p>

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<p>On the topic of male v. female teachers...my sons didn't start longing for male teachers until middle school, when a few of the female teachers still treated them like they were in elementary school and made them participate in activities and projects that embarassed them. For example, making popsicle stick finger puppets and then having the whole class sing a silly song in Spanish while making the puppets "dance" to the silly song in front of an audience. Naturally some of the boys registered their discomfort by having their puppets fight with each other (I know this because I was in the audience)... which reinforced the Spanish teacher's belief that boys are "disruptive." The male teachers never seemed to do things like this with their classes and all of my kids, including my daughter, noticed. She was just never as uncomfortable conforming to these rather silly demands as the boys were. </p>

<p>That is not to say that all female teachers did these things...or that 8th grade boys don't secretly enjoy singing silly Spanish songs or making popsicle stick puppets dance--I'm sure many do, but most don't want to admit it or do it in front of their classmates. My sons did all sorts of silly things in the privacy of their home, but never at school. I just think we need to respect that. Boys can enjoy "The Secret Life of Bees" but they might not enjoy talking about finding one's "inner mother" in their 10th grade English class. There are so many other ways to teach Spanish and English, we don't need to make students intensely uncomfortable to do it.</p>