What Today's Boys Really Need to Thrive

What's Up with Boys?

By Georgia Orcutt

If there's a boy in your world, you know that he's made of much more than snips and snails and puppy-dogs' tails. But what's really going on beneath the impish grin or the messy hair can often be a mystery.

Researchers have been zeroing in on boys for the last decade, examining what makes them tick and how we all can better understand them and meet their needs. In 1997, family therapist Michael Gurian's book The Wonder of Boys urged us to examine how we manage and respond to boy culture. William Pollock's 1998 book Real Boys used groundbreaking research from Harvard Medical School to examine why so many boys were sad, confused, even violent, and called for an understanding of what boys experience. Two years later, Michael Thompson co-authored Raising Cain, urging us to broaden our definition of masculinity and to save boys from the tyranny of toughness.

But as these watchdog professionals and others tune in to boys in America today, they've found more troubling trends. Boys as a group are not thriving in school. Many are addicted to video games, losing touch with the happenings of the real world. Our culture doesn't offer up positive role models for boys, and father-son time seems to be on the wane. A divide is opening between accomplished, motivated girls and drifting, disdainful boys.

What can we do? Here's a look at emerging thoughts about boys from the authors of four new books, along with some positive, practical ways for parents to provide the nurturing that boys need.

Peg Tyre

Author of The Trouble with Boys: A Surprising Report Card on Our Sons, Their Problems at School, and What Parents and Educators Must Do (Crown Publishers, 2008)

While covering the education beat at Newsweek, Tyre pored over data, visited scores of schools and talked with nearly 200 teachers nationwide, asking how boys are doing and what may be affecting their performance in school. Among her findings:

Elementary school boys are diagnosed with attention problems or learning disorders four times as often as girls and are twice as likely to get held back.