Struggling School-Age Boys

It's the environment, they need more medications, they need more attention...we blame everthing and everyone else but ourselves. How about more discipline in the homes? Has anyone ever considered discipline? Or did it get thrown out of the window along with all the other virtues that this society desperately lacks? When parents instill discipline and other values into their children at home, teachers will have an enriching and enjoyable experience teaching our children, and other students will be able to learn in a safe environment. The same boys we don't discipline when young, may very likely walk into their classrooms, malls, and other public places and take the lives of their teachers, peers and/or other innocent civilians. They may even take their own parent's lives. When we teach our boys to respect others, to understand that no means no and to respect authority, we have productive members of society that change the world; on the other hand when we don't discipline them, drug them from an early age to sedate them, and never teach them to control their emotions, we create weapons of mass destruction.

When I was in grade school there was a push to address some inequities by getting girls to achieve in math and science at the same level as boys. This was also the period of time when excessive homework was seen as a detriment in early education because, let's face it; young boys simply can't sit still for long periods of time. I didn't start to have any significant homework until Middle School.

By contrast, today???s kindergarten and first graders have hours of homework to do every day. There simply isn't time left for kids to be kids. I find that girls seem to do better with this kind of structure but boys fidget and simply cannot pay attention long enough. They begin to fall behind in school and end up doing worse than girls.

Enrollment for women in undergraduate programs now exceeds that of men. At the graduate level, over two-thirds of students are women. Boys have been set up for failure in the name of a more just system. Children are not meant to live completely structured lives. Neither are adults for that matter. No wonder we???re all so depressed. By scheduling every aspect of their lives, children are missing out on the natural inquisitiveness borne from simply goofing around.

This growing trend is not surprising when you measure the level of decreased physical activity, and especially unstructured, outdoor physical activity between our school-age boys today and boys 40 years ago. This seemingly simplistic, yet effective methodology-increasing unstructured, outdoor activities in a safe environment at least 2 MORE hours a day-will prove to balance the physiological, developmental, and social needs of our boys. Try it! This is the safest study to carry out and will have a dramatic effect on stabilizing our boys who are suffering from decades of cultural shifts that have led them inside to be 'safe'. Boys need at least 4 hours of physical activity a day, preferrably outside. Turn off the TV and video games and throw them outside! NO MEDICATION NEEDED. Our boys are not failing! WE as a culture are failing our boys! (Maybe it is time to invest in a new business for after school care-outdoor play spaces for 8-12 year olds.)

I really enjoyed this article...First of all we have to blame the parents first! Home is the first school and parents are their first teachers! I absolutely do not agree with pushing anything upon a child until they are ready...this will only inhibit their growth in all area's of their life! I am a mother of 4 boys and I know how fast little boys can get frustrated! Also, the educational system needs to give it a break...Kindergarten testing is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard of! IT'S KINDERGARTEN FOR HEAVEN SAKES!!! Let the kids be kids and parents need to quit being so competitive about what their children know! It's ok for them to grow up and play-play is such an important part of childhood development! I just hope that as the world changes and society introduces newer ways of life, that we as parents will be able to stand up and say no and take control of how it is supposed to be done!!!

I agree 100% with the previous comments. It seems the majority of teachers are women. Women can be just as qulified to teach as men but boys do not have the male role model to look up to in school anymore. They need that just as much as at home. I agree it is due to alot of this liberal mindset that has gone too far and I believe it is the "man haters" behind the scenes that are the root cause. I see it in my sons grade school also. What is up with this "no tag"? My son's school has the same rule. I would like to find out the reasoning behind this which most likely came from women. I heard it is because they don't want the kids to get hurt playing tag and getting too rough... WHAT???. That's funny beacause my son can play tackle football during recess but not tag??? Don't get me wrong, women can have just as good teaching skills but they cannot fill the void boys are facing like men can.
Then of course all of theses so called "experts" come up with their weak human solutions which just makes society worse and think they can solve all of our problems when they just create more complex problems to solve and the cycle progressively continues to get worse. I think the scheduled lives we create for our children are also to blame. They get so use to always doing something, constanly on the go, that when it comes time to just relax, they can't stay still. The answer is not drugs, it's not counsiling, it's not these so called "experts" who think they know everything about children. How did they become experts??? from other human beings who call them selves experts. What a crock !!!

Things that we make and buy, like for instance a piece of un-assembled furniture or a new stereo system usually always come with an owner's manual. Who made this manual? the one who created the product because they know how it works and or how it is put together. In some cases there are also trouble shooting solutions in these manuals.
"Blessed with boys" in rsponse to your question; What we need to do is brush off the dust from our manuals that we have been provided and read it. Who made this manual ? The God that created us. He knows how we work and how we were put together and it has all the answers and trouble shooting solutions. I think one thing we could do from here is form some type of nation-wide group with our manuals in hand and start organizing to go after the ones who created this problem. They made changes that we now seeing the ill effects of. We too can make the changes and correct the problem.

We took God out of schools, out of society, out of our Government and out of our lives. Now we are reaping what we have sown. You can see it all around you in globally abroad.

Everyone reading this article, PLEASE PLEASE check out a book called "Wild At Heart". It speaks to this issue directly and is a wealth of knowledge and information! :-)

Tyre's article, ???Struggling School Age Boys??? hits the nail on the head. I have been called in repeatedly to school for teachers to tell me my 7 year old second grade boy is not completing his work. He is quiet, pays attention, sits still and behaves but still cannot complete his work. We have had numerous tests to try to find something ???wrong??? with him. Nothing found. Could it be that our proud school and their highly important standardized testing and repeated commands of ???work faster!??? are what is wrong?

I completely agree as well. The academic demands on kidergarten and 1st grade are too much, mismatched to where this age grp is developmentally both boys and girls. I have yet to see that the early acadmeic expectations are getting kids a head either individually or as a nation. Play is such an integral part of learning to problem solve and socialize it's a shame we as a society have chosen to dimiss it as useful.
In wokring at a mental health adolescent partial program and having a 4 1/2 yr old little girl, I worry about the the girls as well. We see many academically gifted girls and boys in our program depressed, anxious and suicidical and generally burnt out on all the performance expectations placed upon them so early. The latter kids I am talking about are not behavior problems. They are respectful kids with lots of potential.
Let childern be children and educationally do a better job of matching development with reasonable academic expectations before we have generations who have no love of learning and are unhappy.
Luci

As a family practice physician I encounter these problems on a daily basis. On a fundamental developmental level there are distinct differences in boys and girls and in the ways they develop. No girls are not smarter than boys/ and vise versa, but yes they are different. And every single child develops differently. It is very hard to categorize all children and all developmental patterns. One other thing is abundantly clear. Physical activity has decreased exponentially over the years, obesity has risen and the rate of development of behaviorial problems has risen. All children, irregardless of gender need several hours a day of physical activity. All adults, need several hours of physical activity as well. So parents, get your children and yourselves up and moving, follow a healthy diet, and see what learning techniques work best for your child.

"One in five parents of boys ask a professional about their son's behavior." That doesn't say anything about whether the son actually has a behavioral problem. It only says the parents are incapable of recognizing if its true and have to depend on some one who has never met their son to make a wild guess. The fact that this study was picked up by the news media is enough evidence to condemn it.
I've worked with school kids in public, charter, private, religious, special needs daycare, and home school programs and the difference between the parents and children from each group is astounding. It isn't the kid who has a problem, its what, how and who he was taught by. Medicating kids and diagnosing them with a behavior disorder is just handing them a free pass to act out. The kids with ADD who were drugged up were hopeless victims of it. The ones who's parents didn't tolerate their child's bad behavior succeeded in helping their child over come it. I had one kid tell me, "I can't do what your telling me to cause I have ADHD." How could I convince the kid, "I'm sorry you have ADHD, buy that doesn't mean you can't obey." when their whole life they had been told otherwise?!
The kids who's parents were closely involved in their education and didn't drop them off at day care or even public school were the best behaved, best learners and the most confident. Their parents knew their kids well enough to know whether their kid had health or behavior issues. These boys aren't struggling because they are allowed to be boys. If we listen to the studies and the media they will tell us, "YOUR CAR IS EVIL, YOUR KIDS AREN'T SAFE, SAVE THE PLANET, WOMEN RULE, EVERY THING YOU TOUCH MIGHT GIVE YOU CANCER, EAT ANTI OXIDANTS, PEACE, HUG A TREE..." And that just isn't how strong men are made.
- A home-schooled girl

I truly believe that my son falls into this one in five! He's in the third grade, and the school system that he is in has absolutely no tolerance for children it seems! He doesn't have the behavioral problems, so much as he has the emotional problems. He hates going to school, and I don't blame him. I encourage him every single day to go to school and to do his best, but at the end of the day, he's drained! They have very minimal recess at school, so these energetic boys have no way to get that energy out! I have already had two meetings w/his teachers and several phone calls, and school hasn't even been in session a month! It's all about how he cries when he is frustrated and how he will literally make himself sick so that he can come home! His teacher is an awfully hostile unfriendly person-and if she is that way with me, I can only imagine how she is with 8 and 9 year olds! I have enrolled him in a special education class for his math, because it is basic algebra-IN THE THIRD GRADE!!!! This has more to do with our educational system than it does with medication! Sure, some children do suffer from ADD/ADHD, and those children should definitely be cared for-but to diagnose every single child with ADD/ADHD is ridiculous! We need to re-structure our schools! And to be honest, school has changed so much since I attended (I graduated High School in 1998)-that I can tell because people just don't seem as well educated when leaving high school these days! They don't have the people skills that were once taught in schoool! It's ridiculous-and people wonder why kids are becoming violent and unstable! If the home is stable or not, they are not getting the stability at school either! ALL children deserve a good and wholesome education, and the schools these days are not giving that to our children, and it's disgusting!!! Something needs to be done NOW!!!

"I struggle to deal with the fact that the best thing we can do for our kids is to give them medicine instead of allow them to be themselves." This statement posted earlier absolutely apalls me, mostly due to the word FACT! That simple word means that it is true (or atleast this person thought so) that the best thing we can do for our kids is to give them medicine instead of allow them to be themselves. Are you kidding? Though it may be a belief of some people, I refuse to call it a fact. What kind of a person doesn't want their kid to have any personality of their own? By doping them up, we've taken away all personality of that child. And I don't care if it's ADD, ADHD, depression, whatever! When I was 16 my doctors gave me an antidepressant (but didn't tell me it was an antidepressant) for headaches I was having. The side effect that kicked in: depression! So they gave me a second one (still taking the first) and sent me to therapy. The second one just made me more depressed, but I was hooked and it took all my willpower during those 4 years to stop taking them. As soon as the depression kicked in and I took that second pill, I was numb. I was withdrawn and uncomfortable, I just wanted to be alone. This was a huge shock to my friends because we were always so social. My friends changed, I ruined a great relationship, and I went through the rest of high school and the year after that trying to reteach myself how to be social again. It affected my school work, my ability to focus, and my classroom participation. When I finally stopped taking the pills, my friends noticed how different I was. They said I just seemed more full of life and had a greater dynamic to me than before.

I'm not telling you this to make you feel sorry for me, I'm telling you this so you can see the possible danger of medicating your children. I know people that had similar situations as mine, but they were "ADHD". After coming off their meds, they felt better and people saw in them the personality that was numbed by their medications. Not only that, but one example of this I encountered was the most obnoxious boy anyone had every met and that didn't change when he started taking his ADHD pills. So when he misbehaved, it was alright, because "I'm sorry, I forgot to take my meds today, I can't help it" was always his response. He, by the way, is currently in prison because no one ever taught him that acting out is not ok.

This is why I will look into everything that is perscribed to me or my children, not just going on believing it's ok because the doctor said it was. Doctors treat symptoms, they don't treat the problem itself. You can't sit still, take a pill; you have headaches, take more pills; you feel stressed, take another pill! When was the last time you got to the root of a problem you were having? Look more into why things are happening and don't just accept that a pill can fix it.

I definitely agree with this article that it's the parents and educational system's fault! Parents need to step up to the plate and go back to the old ways of raising our children and the educational system needs to slow down for our children to let them be kids! Kindergarten testing is outrageous I feel-ITS KINDERGARTEN!!! Children learn through play and if more and and more teachers understood this concept and are patient enough to initiate this in their teaching curriculum we would not have these kind of problems! I have 4 boys, and they get frustrated fast-they need hands on activities! This world is changing, but that doesn't mean we have to make the changes with it! Old and traditional ways are where it's at!!!

You hit the nail on the head. My son was having a hell of a time in school. The only answer from these so called teachers was to do more work. I got in there face and told them if there was something they didn't do well would they like to be forced to do it more! Quantity does not mean quality. I forced them to give less work. I also gave my son the power to decide when to do home work with one rule Git-r-done. It worked and he started to do much better as a student and a little person. He gained confidence and matured by seeing he could finish work and be a kid too.

Tyre has got this all wrong. The problem is not that too much is asked of kids in school. The problem is that too little is asked of kids in school. I come from Ireland. I started school at the age of 4 and learned to read and write in both English and Irish. I also learned math. Standards and expectations are much higher in Ireland. Six year olds in Ireland do the kind of work that third graders do in the US. Yet, we didn't have problems with boys acting up when I was a child. We didn't have to drug kids to get them to sit still.

In Ireland, primary school started at 9:30am. I think school starts too early here, so a lot of kids show up tired. We had breaks after every 1.5 hours of instruction. We studied 6 subjects everyday.

When I talk to young boys here they complain of boredom in school. Of course, they're bored. They are unchallenged. Children are curious and have a natural desire to learn, yet educators and people like Peg Tyre think that learning will harm them. They probably only study two subjects everyday. I would have wanted to tear my hair out if I spent the whole day learning nothing but English and Math.

Get rid of multiple choice and true false tests, which promote memorization rather than real learning. Get rid of standardized tests. Elementary kids should not be taking high stakes tests. Give kids creative writing assignments rather than standard book reports. Teach a variety of subjects: English, Math, History, Geography, Civics, Science, Art and Music at the Elementary level. Variety is the spice of life, after all.

NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND is garbage and should be put in the dumpster where it belongs.