From the time I knew that the baby I was carrying was a boy, I was told repeatedly that “there’s just something about boys” – in particular, the mother-son relationship. Leaving aside all Oedipal philosophizing, I think I’ve figured out what lies at the core of the bond shared by moms and their boys: Only we can put up with all of their nonsense and love them anyway.
Oliver drives me nuts. He’s far more active and demanding than either of my girls were as toddlers. He plays differently; he vrooms cars and trucks around the floor, and he turns innocuous items into weapons. He climbs onto the kitchen table and splashes in the toilet. He eats like a horse and screeches like a chimpanzee.
When he was still an infant, my father-in-law jokingly asked whether Oliver was crawling yet. “No,” I replied, “but he can burp and fart like a grown man.”
But he’s my son. Even when he’s driving me nuts, I adore him. Truth be told, I usually think most of his antics are hilarious.
The problem is that I can’t expect everyone else to think he’s hilarious – particularly when it’s time for him to head off to school. Will his teachers accept his inherent boyishness while helping him adapt to functioning in a classroom setting? Or will his potential love for learning be stifled by behavioral expectations that may pose a greater challenge than his schoolwork itself?
The discussion surrounding Peg Tyre’s book, The Trouble With Boys, reassures me that I’m not the only mother of a rambunctious boy who’s concerned about my son’s academic future.
When Tyre’s initial piece was published in Newsweek in January 2006, she received negative feedback from a variety of sources – feminists, who argued that the academic challenges faced by boys were still nothing compared to those plaguing girls, and conservative publications like American Thinker (which accused her of emasculating men and concluding that girls are, in fact, smarter than boys). An interview with Tyre in Babble last October referred to the so-called “boy crisis” and “normal” boys, betraying doubts that Tyre’s concerns are valid:
In your book, a lot of experts note that teachers today – particularly female teachers, which most are – can’t deal with the way “normal” boys act in class, i.e. roughhousing, being loud, asking a lot of questions, not always paying attention, etc. But is this really true? I find it hard to believe that teachers in the past were any more tolerant of this kind of behavior.
School has changed a great deal. Our academic expectations are higher. Our curriculum is narrower. Our tolerance for boisterous play – post-Columbine – has evaporated. We have less recess. These are big factors that I argue are affecting our sons.
Given that my academically-inclined and eager-to-please older daughter has struggled to adapt to a full-day classroom setting herself, it doesn’t surprise me that other children – both boys and girls – grow restless. Their behavior does, in fact, seem quite “normal” to me. Granted, teachers must often issue reminders of what is expected, and parents ought to reiterate those reminders at home, but the mere necessity of those reminders doesn’t mean that they should be construed as punishment or that the children who receive them are disciplinary cases.
The trouble begins early. From Tyre’s website:
“[Boys] are getting kicked out of preschool at five times the rates of girls, getting left back more in kindergarten, they are reading less well and less often. They are being diagnosed with learning disorders more and given attention-enhancing drugs at four times the rates of girls.”
She expands on this point in the Babble interview – specifically the expectations and constraints placed on children in preschool:
You talk about the ways in which academic acceleration – kids going to academic preschools, entering preschools earlier, being expected to master skills at earlier grade levels than they used to – hurts boys. How?
There are a lot of so-called educational experts who prey off parental anxiety and say the earlier we introduce kids to preschool, the smarter they’ll be. That by age four, kids are on or off the bus to Princeton. But there is good research to suggest that too much academics too early can actually hurt kids’ achievement in the long run – and the kids whose achievement is most depressed are male. Preschool used to be about making friends, coping with a group dynamic and figuring out how to get your raincoat on by yourself. Now it’s about teaching Mandarin and computation. We have ramped up preschool programs that are supposed to give early academic enrichment, but it creates negative experiences for a lot of little boys.
I have very definite opinions regarding the appropriate role of preschool: to teach kids how to follow rules, function in a group, and to accept another source of authority apart from their parents. In other words, preschool’s primary focus should not be academics, let alone preparing kids for the pursuit of an Ivy League education.
But for boys who acquire a dislike of school as early as age three, I expect it’s difficult to change those initial perceptions as they enter elementary school and teacher expectations naturally increase as the years pass. Tyre agrees: “I think the increasing, grinding emphasis on seatwork and circle time and structured instruction is developmentally inappropriate for a lot of kids, many of them boys. They start to dread school. They don’t want to sit that long. Negative ideas about learning begin to take root.”
I have the luxury of being concerned about Oliver’s academic future; most lower-income parents are preoccupied with far more basic needs. Tyre acknowledges that “poor boys and boys of color are really struggling right now. And they are going to need some dramatic help to get them back on track.”
But middle class boys need attention too, both from parents and teachers, as indicated by the responses to Tyre’s Newsweek piece: “Parents, hundreds of them, wrote to thank me for addressing the central drama of their lives—the underachievement of their boys in school. Teachers contacted me and asked me to write more…There are a lot of concerned parents, educators and policy makers who, while they don’t want to take away from the astonishing gains our young women are making, are starting to realize that we can no longer ignore what’s happening to boys.“
Oliver will go to preschool starting next summer, where hopefully he will begin learning to follow rules, function in a group, and to accept another source of authority. Three years after that, he’ll head off to kindergarten, where hopefully his time in preschool will have prepared him to begin adapting to a classroom setting.
Maybe his teachers will think he’s as hilarious as I do. Maybe he’ll drive them as nuts as he drives me.
Either way, knowing about Tyre’s book and the challenges my son may face, I feel better prepared to guide him to a successful academic future.
What do you think is at the heart of the mother-son bond?
I grew up with one sister, so being the mother of two boys has been quite eye opening. (I’m sure there are girls just as rambunctious, so I’m just generalizing here . . .) Everything becomes a sword or a gun, they race around yelling at the top of their lungs, and they fling themselves off all the furniture.
So far, it seems like my preschooler is capable of sitting quietly pretty well, but I worry – what if his elementary school has one of those exaggerated zero-tolerance policies and he makes ‘finger guns’ at someone on the playground? It’s a mostly harmless game that boys have played for centuries, but would that get him kicked out of school in the 21st century? Boys may not have changed that much, but policies certainly have.
The heart of th emother/son bond? My ability to not only capture and house reptiles/amphibians and (shudder) spiders, but then also have to shell out oodles of $$$$ to buy the aforementioned icky things bugs to eat…the very bugs I would smash with a shoe while wailing “Die, M@therf*cker” in a battle cry, would I have found them on my kitchen floor!
I have yet to figure out what it is that makes that mother-son bond so special, but we’ve got it.
As for school, I do think Tyre makes some excellent points. The trend toward “academic” preschools is very disturbing. Little kids learn through PLAY. Not flashcards. Please!
We’ve talked about my disdain with my daughter’s K experience thus far (though she does love it). I know Drew would not respond well to that situation.
I’m clearly in the “learn by doing not by doing 4000 worksheets” camp and it’s painful for me to see our schools lose what our kids really do need – PE, Music, Art, etc. all for the cause of “getting ahead.” I could care less about grades. I’m about lifelong learning. I don’t think the way we’re educating our kids today (especially our boys) fosters this.
My son is not the usual rambunctious type of boy and is headed straight for total Dorkdom. As such, I am really trying to hone his sense of humor in hopes that he can fill a Class Clown spot instead. Otherwise, he will surely be running for his life every day after school, just like Ralphie. Eh.
I am worried already about the whole ADHD thing because I truly believe something is amiss with our school system. I am seeing boy after boy after boy getting diagnosed with it – bright, sharp as a tack young boys getting labeled and pulled aside and designated as “trouble”. It floors me. It breaks me heart. And I don’t know the answer.
I am not sure the answer to your question about the mother-son bond. My son was my first child and that is such a different bond as it is. And then, his personality is different than mine. We do not clash as much as I do with his 2 year old SISTER, whose personality is just as persnickety as mine.
Thanks for bringing this book to my attention. I have THAT boy. At 5, he’s in Kindergarten, and already there have been a few bumps in the road (albeit minor). Many times his “boyness” wears on me. Oh to have THAT much energy at 5pm, I am struggling to find a way to manage my reactions and expectations. without squishing who he is.
My 8 yr old started ADHD meds 3 weeks ago. We are considering them for my 7 yr old as well. I have to say that while ADHD and some other learning disability often go hand in hand, ADHD and “bright” are not mutually exclusive, in fact they also often go hand in hand. A good school will recognize that, but you may have to help them find the right path for your sons so they don’t get lost in a label.
Schools do not diagnose and should not be in the business of diagnosis, but there is a growing lack of tolerance of “boy behavior” brought on by the post-Columbine anxiety that was mentioned, but also by the No Child Left Behind testing mania that has become the culture, not of acheivement, or “accountability” but of fear.
Kristen’s comment crystalized something in my mind about our current academic environment. It used to be that a well-educated person was fairly well-rounded, but our curriculum is narrowing, partly out of concern for test scores and partly for cost reasons. There’s more pressure, but we seem to be doing less and learning less. Why? Is it the schools or is it part of our culture that so devalues learning?
I do think there is a place for rote-learning – brain-training – I call it, but it shouldn’t have to be at the expense of arts, music, physical activity, and exploration. Studies have shown that those things enhance learning in the core areas.
One of the things that most frustrates me in education is the history of either/or in teaching. Either phonics or whole language, why not both? Either girls succeed or boys succeed, why can’t we teach for both? Clearly I could go on, but I have already hogged your comments. Sorry, Julie.
I was a little concerned about my son starting Kindergarten this year. He is very talkative and inquisitive and very much a kinetic learner. Things that bothered me, other people have seemed to find quite charming about him. And he’s doing well in all-day kindergarten, despite my worries. It seems he has risen to the challenge and is capable of more than I thought. Of course he often falls apart at home now, because being “good” at school for that long is hard for a little boy.
I’m a mom of all boys and I can totally admit that there energy and type of play wear me down a lot! So of course school is something I am hugely grateful for as it gives them another place to wear off some steam, lol. But as for the school thing, we’re lucky that our system isn’t crazy academic pushiness. We still have lots of art, lots of gym or other physical activities and learning through activity rather than just sitting still.
But still, my calmest boy struggled somewhat last year with a teacher who just didn’t do well with boys. She was sweet and well-liked but she was much harder on boys than girls, because she didn’t like how they talked or rough-housed and didn’t get their humor. It drove me crazy when she would send home a scathing note about my son’s behavior that was not at all excessive (and I mean exactly the behavior she described, not like I thought she lied, just that what she described as a problem was just very typical boy behavior!) When I questioned her she admitted “all” the boys were like that. How does that make them the problem then? She couldn’t see that maybe her expectations were the problem – not those lovely energetic boys.
I can’t even imagine how much harder it’s going to get as my kids get older and they are all in school!
I loved this post because even though I’m the mom of a 3.5 year old boy, I always thought of him just as “my kid” rather than defined by stereotypes. But as he gets older, he’s so much more of a boy, and I definitely need to tweak my parenting and learning to ensure he maximizes himself in all his surroundings. I hate playing to stereotypes, but I guess there is a definite difference between the sexes and how they learn and understand.