 here in our school to talk about raising boys and educating boys is a dream come true for me for a very, very long time for two reasons. One, because understanding the emotions and physical needs of boys can be difficult to understand. Second, I don't think I could have found anyone better to come and talk to us on the topic that our guest is here to speak about tonight. Name a radio show or TV show NPR 2020 60 Minutes, the Oprah show, Good Morning He's been there talking about boys. Name a city, a country, a continent, Asia, Africa, South America, Europe. He's been there talking about boys. I could go on and on and I'm going to stop there because we have so much to learn from our speaker tonight. It is my proud honor to introduce you to Dr. Michael Thompson. Sam, what am I doing? We good? Can people hear me? Yes? All right, I'm completely wired up both for the video again, but I want to be heard. So, in the back of your having difficulty. We are good to go. I'm delighted to be here. I'm delighted to be here. Jenny called me and asked if I would do this. She was surprised when I said yes, she shouldn't have been because I've known about Jenny for 35 years because her mother, a school leader in Virginia, hired me a lot when I was a very young school consultant and knew nothing. I had really no experience and her mother, who had an immense amount of experience in school leadership, used me as a consultant and actually taught me far than I think I contributed to her. So, I've always had a debt to her mom and got to know her dad very well. But what Jenny doesn't realize is how much her mom talked to me about her. So, to have Jenny called was kind of, it's my life together in a very nice way. And I'm delighted to be here and delighted to see what a terrific audience, Jenny's efforts of beating the drum have brought out. And my wish is to be helpful and practical. I'm kind of assuming, but let's get a show of hands. How many of you are parents or grandparents of boys? Yes, good. You've come to the right place. How many of you, little guys, birthed the five years old? Five to ten years old? Ten to fifteen? Fifteen to twenty? What are you still hoping for? So, somebody give me, somebody with a little guy, a birth to five years old, if I could address the concern you have, the where you have, what would it be? Come on, come on, play with me. You've come to interact with psychologists. You may not have thought about it. I haven't talked about it, but I'd like to know. If I could address any concern you have about a younger than five year old boy, what would it be? Please, your name? Danielle. Danielle, we're going to get you the mic. I won't put you too terribly on the spot. You're speaking, yes. So, my son is three, and I would say that the toughest thing would be the power circles with that age group. Right. He's a little barbarian. Yes, yeah. Human aggression peaks between two and a half and three. Otherly, we're morseless, unapologetic, human aggression peaks, and they're feeling that little power, and everything's just, thank goodness, they're so small. Otherwise, they'd be really dangerous. Am I addressing so many? Yeah. Yeah. That's the three year old, and it's sometimes hard to believe that they're going to be reasonable five year olds. It is difficult to believe it. Yeah. And people always talk about the terrible tooth, but I think three is, yeah. Actually, many people are surprised by how sweet they've heard about the terrible tooth, and then their child was two, and they think this isn't bad at all. I bet it's just, all right, when we go in front of the speaker. So, anybody else? A question about a younger than five? Sean, please, yes, here. You want to go? Thanks. Yeah, I won't want to. Here, please, please. Tell me your name. Yeah, hi. My name is John Boyd, and I have a four and a half year old boy. Yes. Totally the life of every way, except I want to help him stay in touch with his anger, but channel it in a way that's not destructive. He is in touch with his anger. Yeah, but I don't know what to do. Just really kill those feelings. Right, because he's challenging. Exactly. And he gets furious. Totally furious. Right, because... That's a broken pattern, mostly. Right, but he's upset because he would like to bend the universe to his will and opinion, and run everything. Especially almost. Yeah, yeah, well, your house is just the beginning. It's the local venue for the universe that he would like to run, and his frustration mounts up pretty fast, and then he melts down and is furious and hard to comfort. Right. So, ask me a question, for which I may not have the... I don't actually think... I know the modern parent always wants to affirm the feeling. Yeah, he's actually... He's fine with the feeling. I don't think you have to affirm much. I think you have to say, you know, I get it. I take this seriously. So, can you... Can you calm down? Do you need me, your mom, to help you calm down? And begin to introduce a little reason, not along the discussion. Do you think you can calm yourself? Do you need me to calm you? Get him to focus on the idea that one of the other of you is going to get him to the calming place. Right? Because the job of a mother of a four and a half year old is to help him learn to develop more self-control. And, I mean, you can't imagine how big his feelings are inside. They're just taking him over. You can see it. But, I mean, just... They've completely taken him over, and his dreams are big, and his fury is big. And your job is just to respect that and to help him. So, you'll have it. You'll have it, but it's important that moms work with him because we know that a mother who works with a boy is going to produce a more empathic adult in his 30s, actually. Okay? That's right. Well, there's no quick ROI in parenting, right? Return on investment. Yeah, it's a long-term ROI. A five to ten, a five to ten year old, please. Your name. Hi, Tassie. Hi. So, I have two boys, 19 months apart. Sorry, two boys, 19 months apart. And back in the three-year-old range, when my oldest was three, I was in a good scent. I did not handle that three-year-old face as well as I would have liked. I met him with a scent. Since then, I have regained some sanity. He is now eight, and he's regained or gained some control of himself as well. But I see some residual impacts of that time, and I'm just wondering if you have a suggestion. What do you think you see? A lot of assuming that, a lot of just up front anger that I don't think would have been there had I not fostered that during their actions. Okay. I can hear the parental guilt. But you think you, if you hadn't gone to the barricades with him at three, that he wouldn't have such a ready anger now. Yeah, okay. Well, these are the tough, I'm not surprised to hear this because this is what the battle with a certain kind of little boy is. But there are some peaceful boys who don't get into power struggles, and then there's some others for whom it is a ready option, and you had one of those. Very hard to know what is temperament and what is parenting. But what I want to know is, does his school experience him as angry? So it's important that you all appreciate that sometimes there are things that go on between a mother and child that are in a relationship, but it doesn't mean the child was badly parented, right? So he's not taking his anger out on the world. He's not blowing up at school. You're not hearing about this. This is special for you, right? And it's both a source of pain and but ought to be a source of some satisfaction that he's not taking this on the road, okay? Yeah. Anybody else? Five to ten, please. In your name? Corbyn. Yes, Corbyn. I guess my son does blow up at school as well. And his anger is because he believes that nobody listens to him. Right. And it doesn't seem to matter whether people try to listen to him or not once he gets to that space. He's making assumptions before the incident. Okay. Corbyn, did you tell me his age? I'm not picturing it. He's not. He'll be ten years old. Okay. And he believes that life is not fair. Yes. And it lands unhappily on him. Correct. Okay. He's not the first boy. Who is not us? A new sense of outrage is connected to a sense of injustice in the world. Have you talked about a lot of future career in the law? Okay. It's useful. But a keen sense of justice and feelings of injustice, powerfully, is something that I tend to associate with boys, or at least the ones who vocalize it. I'm sure, I'm certain, there are girls who feel the world is not just, but they don't often proclaim it as loudly, as furiously as boys do. Does he get the attention of the authorities and they feel disrupted by... They definitely feel disrupted. Yes. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. So you're hearing about that. Yeah. But let me say something about perfectionism in boys. Perfectionism we think of is, I need to be perfect. And I'm going to be ferocious on myself and must I am perfect. And that's the kind of perfectionism that leads to obsessive compulsive, baby. But there's a kind of perfectionism that is attached to idealism. The world ought to be perfect. It's not perfect. I see it, what it should be, and it makes me furious that it is not, and that I can't again bend the universe to my will and opinion. And this fury that the world is not fair is one that has to be taken seriously. But what's unattractive is if a child positions himself to always see himself as a victim of an unjust world. And so one of the things you're going to need to help him see is that he has strategies. He has resilience. He can cope. That the fact that the world is not a perfect place doesn't need to be a source of outrage for him always because the things he can do to make it a better place. And his growing sense of power and efficacy will reduce his feeling of the unfairness. Because it's unfair now. The world is not perfect as we all know, but he doesn't think he has any tools to deal with it. And when he feels he has more tools to deal with it and more ways to handle it, then he won't be quite as furious about it. So that's what I would work on, is how can he get some sense of personal power in an unjust world? The problem is he's stuck in school. And that becomes a source of just built infurism. My colleague in Chicago went to the University of Chicago with me at our PhDs. She works with Head Start programs and has been training Head Start teachers. She's been in Chicago for years and she said, you know, there's just many boys experienced. School is being like jail. There's a permanent angry. And that is something I will talk about. So 10 to 15, 1 and then we'll go off, please. Hi, thank you for coming. My name is Laura. Yes. I have three boys. 10, 12 and 14. And here is my question. If they are given any two or more minutes space of time, they will go and try and play a video game on a screen. They are so drawn to it that we have lists of things to do before you can use the screen. We have lots of opportunities and alternatives in our home. But for some reason they cannot get themselves to stop the screen. Do you have a daily limit? Do you have a screen limit? We do, but honestly, both my husband and I work. So they're home alone for a couple of hours after school. And that is the worst because they'll just sit there the entire time. So when you get home is that the end of screen time? Absolutely. Yeah, good. So the limit is you're right. Right now. But it's hard to have three boys be deeply dismayed that you've arrived home. They'll sneak in and we don't want them to feel like they had to sneak in. We would love to be able to work with them with a healthy amount of screen time today. We cannot figure it out. No, I know. This is a worldwide issue. I was in China last week. It is a worldwide issue. Chinese parents have their boys addicted to screens and the Japanese have been writing about this. Japanese psychiatrists have been writing about this. Boys who just won't go to school and just hold up in their rooms playing video games. Meanwhile, the neuroscientists are trying to figure out if it is a true addiction on a normal biological basis like gambling and sex, which you know affects the dopamine receptors in the brain and locks you in or whether it's just psychologically addictive. But it kind of doesn't matter, does it? No, because whether it's no biological or just psychologically addictive. So basically, do we just change all the passwords and take away the phones? That's where we're at because... Well, you know, I think you have to find a way to limit something. And every school I know is fighting this. And I worked at an old-boy school outside Boston Bell, my old school. And we thought we had rules that were being obeyed, but we got Sherry Turkle, who's written a great deal about technology use among kids. She came in and sat in the back of our classrooms, and she said, your teachers have no idea how much use is going on illegally. So, you know, you're clueless, but we're all feeling clueless. What I don't want you to feel is self-conscious of bad about the war you're fighting. You're just now sitting in front of a wall. I think your son should know that this is a healthy hunt-and-chase game with their parents. It's kind of a meta video game. And you know that they're going to sneak it, and you don't trust them, and you are going to hunt them down with their devices when the use is excessive. And I would have a sense of humor about it, and a seriousness of purpose. Yeah. My life was changed 20 years ago this month. Dan Kinlan, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, had asked me whether I wanted to write a book about the psychology of boys, because he was doing research on boys, particularly with Tony Earls, on 6,000 kids in inner-city Chicago, and he asked me if I wanted to write about it, but he and I had both started consulting to all-boys schools. He did St. Sebastian's, Catholic All-boys School, and Dan and I had started at Belmont Hill. And we'd had to adapt all of our therapeutic techniques, moving from co-ed situations to all-boy situations. And our writing about trying to make a therapeutic contact with boys was the central thrust of raising cane, the subtitle Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys. It was the book was published six days before the shootings at Columbine, which is 20 years ago this month. Up until that time, it was the most horrible and the largest school shooting, and there hadn't been many. And one that really changed our view of boys, but the result of it was with this six-day-old book, Dan and I were pressed into service as experts on boys. And all of a sudden, for a period of months, I did three or four radio shows a day. Everybody was saying, how do we identify school shooters? Should we have metal detectors in the door? So I wasn't a trained criminologist. I hadn't worked with violent populations of boys. I certainly worked with angry boys. And I had certainly consulted schools about disruptive and challenging-boy behaviors, but not school shootings, but not many people had at that time. What was interesting to me was when I was on a morning TV show, I'd be asked all the questions about potentially violent boys. But then when the camera was turned off and the lights went off, an anchor would be returned to me and say, you know, my 15-year-old won't talk to me. I don't get my 15-year-old to talk to me. The camera member would come out behind the camera and say, I have a 17-year-old. I don't know what's going on. I mean, could he be violent? And it seemed that many people thought boys were a mystery. And that gave me a sense of mission, which has propelled me these last 20 years, to talk about what the inner life of the boys is and how they construct their world and their sense of masculinity. And that's what I'm here to talk about tonight. Viewing things from 35,000 feet, there are four issues which all of us who advocate for boys and I never meant to be a boy advocate. I was a feminist-inspired psychologist at the University of Chicago. I wrote my PHP dissertation on anorexia nervosa as a cultural illness. And I believe that our culture tortured girls about their body image and our, as Mary Piper wrote in reviving Ophelia, that the culture was toxic for girls. I've been very influenced by the feminist revolution, the women's movement. That's what I came out of. But, so the class of an advocate for boys was really a surprise. But the movie could start to insult to schools, even schools that haven't had anything violent with boys, you soon find that two-thirds to three-quarters of your referrals in elementary school are boys. They're more anxious little boys. They're more angry little boys. They're more boys who are struggling with learning. They're more boys who find school a tough bit. And then there are teachers who seem to be locked in to struggles with boys. I still get, referring to it, it's Tessie, yeah. I get preschools who say, you know, we have this four-year-old boy who's taking over the pre-kindergarten class. He's like, brought the school to a halt. And I can tell there's a monumental power struggle going on with a very upset and angry little boy but now nobody meets him and I've had teachers say to me, you know, I try and talk to this boy and ask him why he did what he does and he doesn't tell me and he's like a psychopath and I think, relax. He's a little boy and he's cornered and he's using everything he's got. But we have to understand his psychology. So there are four issues from 35,000 feet, which those of us who advocate for boys are thinking about. And let me just mention these and I'm going to move to the particular worries about boys at every age, which is how I've started this talk. We are the most violent country in the industrialized world. Our murder rate rates are two to 20 to 60 times higher than the countries in Western Europe. And of course the most violent is committed by young men. And so when people look at boys and they're playing and they're anxious and they kind of feel like ours, they can't stop thinking about could these boys be violent. This is not a question that actually parents in Germany think about, it's not a question that parents in Japan think about because the rates of young male violence there are so fantastically low. But our culture has these high rates and so the issue of violence and could this boy be violent? Could his video games be desensitizing into violence? Could he get out of control? Is it an issue that follows every boy in school? And even if you're a peaceful boy, a violent verbal boy who loves to read, you get petered with that, that brush at least the concern about boys. And I need to mention it because it's been there and it drives a lot of what I can ask to do after the Brett Kavanaugh hearings. Lots of all boys' private schools called me and said, would you come and talk about boys respecting women? And I thought the Kavanaugh hearings is what you want me to address somehow. Whenever boys have trouble, my phone rings. And I'm happy to talk about it, but it always has the undertone of can we fix boys at early, which is a view about boys and I have objected more about that in a second. The other issue is that boys are underperforming in schools relative to girls. When I graduated from high school in 1965, I'm 72 this month, 58% of college graduates were young men, only a group of young privileged white men like me. And that pendulum, 58% young men and 42% young women, has over the course of my working life slung to the exact same spot on the other side. Our college graduates, now a much more diverse and interesting group of people, are now 58% young women and 42% young men. It's in the exact same spot and we're headed for 60%. And I was on board with arguments that said that young women were being systematically discriminated against by college counselors and just regular high school counselors and not propelling them to college when those statistics were what they were 50 years ago. But now we have the same statistics with the genders reversed and the No Child Left Behind Act has shown that boys are behind girls in all 50 states. Some research suggests that the average 11th grade boy in the United States writes at the level of the average 8th grade girl. That the gap between genders is almost as big as the historic and shameful gap between white and black and white and Hispanic. Part of what was the No Child Left Behind Act was supposed to reveal was the schools that were failing out of children of color and that risk minority population is all kind. But also reveal these huge gender gaps. I mean, two-thirds of the violence in the United States are girls. I go to any school and I say, well, what's the gender breakdown of your top 25% of your senior class? Well, we don't know. We don't keep gender statistics. I say, is there a college counselor in your room? They say, college counselor says it's about 70% girls, 30% boys. And I said, what's the gender breakdown of the bottom 25% of your class? Well, it's about 70% boys and about 30% girls. The middle 50, band of 50% is mixed, but the top and the bottom are gendered and boys are underperforming. Girls surpass boys overall in American public education in 1982. They pulled even in math and science in 2004. They're now more young women taking pre-top gills and top gills than boys. And then going on to college and finishing college. This is an issue. This is an issue. And as I say, I keep referring to my age, maybe because of my birthday month, but I have been around remembering when teachers said girls were math-phobic and we ought to get young, talented women to come in and teach honors math in middle school to give girls, propel girls towards higher math achievement in high school. I thought, yes. And yet I go to two few districts who are working on enormous lag in boy writing and boys dislike of writing. I hear from teachers, boys don't like to write. I don't know why. We're just asking to share their feelings in journals. I don't know why the districts are working on it. I think partly because they're a generation of teachers and feel that to pay special attention to boys is unwitting me to support the patriarchy. And it's complicated. It's really complicated. But the most interesting thing that's happening in my working lifetime is the availability of the human brain. When I was in graduate school, we only had cadaver brains and we knew that the male brain was bigger but the form and structure of the brains of I was taught were identical. But now we have so many ways of looking at the human brain as it's operating. PET scans and MRIs in lots of different ways. And we're seeing, as Steve Pinkert said a few years back, he's a professor of psychology at Harvard, we have 60 pieces of research showing us that there are meaningful gender differences in the brain. When the Shegwitz is at Yale studying dyslexia and they gave a language rhyming task to boys and girls and men and women and then watched them complete the rhyming task while their brains were lit up in a way that they can do with a PET scan. And they found that the boys and girls were using different parts of their respective brains. Whoa, whoa, that's a fundamental challenge for co-education, isn't it? Because the whole idea of co-education is we can teach boys and girls together because the lesson lands on their brains in the same way as what does it? How different are the brains of boys and girls and now I need to be a little course in the statistics of the gender brain. So bear with me. If you gave all the psychological tests ever developed, if you gave the girls, it's a theoretical exercise because there are hundreds of thousands of psychological tests that have been developed to torture human beings with. Psychologists need to do this when they're writing their doctoral dissertations, right? But let's say you gave all the hundreds of thousands of tests to girls, it would fall out on a bell-shaped curve. You'd have a girl with a bell-shaped curve, right? A standard restriction, we know this because everything human falls out that way. Then if you gave the same hundreds of thousands of tests to boys, it would fall out on a boy with a bell-shaped curve. And then the interesting question is if you superimpose the girl with a bell-shaped curve and a boy with a bell-shaped curve, how closely overlapping are they? Right? And again, it's a theoretical exercise but we think we know the answer. The brain is 85 to 90% overlapping. If you think of the brain as a mosaic made up of tiles, the men and women in this room, 90% of the tiles in your brain are both brains. And the women have 10% of tiles piled up and the men have 10% of tiles that the women don't have, right? So 90% overlapping. That's why coeducation is valid. But the 10% is interesting. More about that in a second. But then you say, well, so the human brain is more human than it is gendered. And anybody, and there are a number of advocates for boys like O'Gurion, the man I like very much, to get something talked about, the male brain and the female brain. And that's just scientific rubbish. They're not separate brains. If they were separate brains, then we jolly well ought to. We had to educate them separately and I ranked our lessons to do different brains. But I've been on the diets with many, many neuroscientists to say, look, we're just getting the beginning of knowledge about the differences and actually how to teach to them. And in any case, not all girls have the difference. Not all boys have the differences, right? In fact, if you choose, this is the second level of understanding, if you choose girls at random, this is why it's a little statistics course, choose any two girls at random and compare them upon any trait. Those two girls are more likely to be different one from the other than girls are different from boys on that trait. If you choose any two boys at random and compare them, they're more likely to be different from one another than boys as a group or different from girls. The language for this is within group variance is greater than between group variance. I'll talk about it this way. A very shy boy and a very shy girl are going to have a more similar journey through school than a very shy boy and a highly gregarious and social boy. The gap between those two boys is bigger than the gap between the shy girls, right? So individual temperament rules, right? It beats everything. That unique thumbprint that is a human being that is like no another. That beats gender differences. So if I'm saying, brain is more human than it is gender. Individual variation triumphs. Why am I and might be your fun doing my boy stick, right? Well, here's the deal. If you go up the top, you drop down the average, that dotted line, the average girl, right from the top, and you go up to the boy bell shake curve, remember the two bell shake curves are 90% overlapping. But you drop down the average girl and the average boy, those two dotted lines are meaningfully and significantly different. Our average girl and our average boy are different. And I'm going to say in three dimensions which really affect how they perform in school. Physicality, by school age, by five, three quarters of the boys in the class are more physically active and more impulsive than any girl. Okay, three quarters. They're not 90% overlapping. They're only 25% overlapping. And there's some girls who are as active and restless and maybe as impulsive as the boys. But pound for planter, average boy is just far more ending. Who's this news to? Right? I'm telling you, science is perfectly obvious. Every kindergarten teacher is trying to get her kids sitting in a circle for reading time. All the girls are sitting there and she's got some boys but then she's got some boys wandering around and by then the boys in the circle start to pee pile on one another and she's got to come back and get them going, right? They're just way more physical and more impulsive. Not every boy but the average boy. Girls are more efficient in the process of language. By school age, girls just click in, you know? They're doing linguistic analysis and the boys are still over in the right hemisphere thinking, I know this is like Legos and it's not actually. It's just not like Legos. But girls process language more efficiently in both hemispheres they get to that point faster and more efficiently than boys and the elementary school classroom is for fish language based. Okay? So a lot of boys think what is this thing in school about? It's rigged. As one six-year-old boy said to me you can't do anything in school. And I said, what do you mean? He said, well, you can't clap on the tables, you can't wrestle, you can't do anything. It's your school. And then there is there is another issue which is boys engage and I believe for biological for fundamental wiring in a certain set of behaviors which are described by animal behaviors as dominance behaviors. And your name is? Chris. So Chris, you and I are in first grade together and I come up to you and I say, Chris, what are you doing this stupid? And besides, I run much faster than you. What are you going to say to me, Chris? I'm going to say, no you're not. I'm faster than you. But the moment I insulted Chris he gave me a big smile. You couldn't see him, but I could. He gave me a big smile. Oh, game on. But for schools, what I just did to Chris is consider antisocial and negative and possibly dangerous back to my first point about the cloud of potential violence hangs over every boy. So this meeting of two boys that starts with an insult and a challenge. Probably our greatest writer about boys Mark Twain begins his book Tom Sawyer with two 12-year-old boys meeting on the street. They immediately begin to insult each other's fathers, not knowing that either of them has essentially effectively a father. They start attacking each other's fathers then they get into a physical scuffle and then Twain says, this was, of course the beginning of a great friendship. But many people consider the way boys relate to be uncooperative and potentially dangerous and certainly not nice. So let me introduce you to a boy the Melrose Public School System. How many of you saw my film last week? So it's a repeat for those of you sorry about that. But we're going to meet Kevin who's at the Lincoln School of Melrose as a writer so we can wait they'll speak for themselves here. We good? Alright, thank you Kevin. No problem. I'm going to do a little stupid thing just like hard to concentrate. I probably think it's easier for girls. It might be easier for girls because sometimes the teacher's favorite is a girl on high school and she doesn't really work. Most of the teachers are girls and some teachers are boys at school girls are nice. You know, it's tough being boys in school. By ages 10 to 11 girls perform equally well as boys in math and science and much better in reading and writing. Boys are still less emotionally mature more physically active That leaves many boys to conclude that school is a place where the deck is stacked against them. But as we shall see an understanding teacher can help change that attitude. Is a very charming boy. Thanks a lot for tonight I said. When I got a haircut one day the next day one was so scary but he looked good today. He's fun and energetic. I think he will be better off after some day. Melrose is a middle class mostly white community outside Boston. At the Lincoln school Mr. Octarian's fifth grade class has 14 boys and 5 girls. Mash money boys account for 70% of the Ds and S given out in school. Why the difference? Well what's school all about? School is mostly about sitting down and listening to an adult talk. Our formula is one half times the base. For boys like Kevin that can be very hard to do. Sixth of the base times the challenging days. He does my hard time focusing. Now what's our formula for Michael again? Kevin? What's the formula? How do we figure it out? When he does get distracted it definitely takes away from what he has to get done. Last year Kevin's distractibility caused his grades to fall. He got mostly seeds and he sometimes disrupted plans. Kevin Kevin Kevin Matt was having this a handful. He pushed things to an extreme but his energy is typical for boys his age. So it's no surprise what boys say they like most about school. So the gym gym recess recess lunch 30 years ago elementary schools offered recess twice a day. Boys got a chance to work off their physical energy. But there's only one recess at Kevin's school to make more time for classes. Some schools are even eliminating recess altogether. I believe that's a real mistake. Boys in particular need more recess, not less to become more effective students. We ever heard yet? Hold on, we'll get to see what your question does. All too often this behavior gets labeled as a disorder. Now there's no denying that some boys do have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. In fact, they're nearly three times more likely than girls have ADHD. But when almost 85% of the world's stimulant medication gets prescribed to American boys we have to ask the question are we medicating boys because they're sick or because they're boys? I have mixed feelings on it. As an educator I've seen it work. One is with kids you can see with some kids when they're not on the medication or when they are on the medication it's very clear. As a parent I have a different feeling about it. I don't know if I want my son or daughter. I'm from just being a boy especially when they're young just to jump the gun and sing but they're not really listening because that's really not the case. In a lot of schools you probably would be. Parents and Mr. O'Terry are trying to make school into a place where Kevin can succeed without drugs. 5-9-4 5-9-4 1-1-4 Now which is bigger? Helping Kevin is a lot of work. Every Tuesday after school Mr. O'Terry on his own time provides special tutoring for Kevin and other boys. Was that the first one? It's hard. This is the first day he's had a male teacher which I think worked out great. Kevin loves this. He can relate to all these boys in the class. Today fewer than 1-9 elementary school teachers in the US is a man. Now bring down the rules. Attracting more male teachers might help improve boys' performance. Kevin, can you stop? Can you stop? Kevin, you're smart enough to do that problem. You need to stop, though. Still it's not easy for Kevin or Mr. O'Terry. So to keep Kevin engaged Mr. O'Terry has come up with other creative strategies. I might seem struggling with the class and his frustration that we'll build. I'll shut down while he's for the rest of the afternoon or if he's instructing the other students in class. I'll send him around the school and I'll know that it says I'm on a walk. Where are you going? I'm going to go downstairs for a second. Because I gotta make it to, like, somewhere really wide. But I have to, like, like, walk around the building and then come back up. Kevin gets sent on these walks a couple of times a week. I'm on a walk. I'm on a walk. Lucky to have a dedicated teacher like Mr. O'Terry and parents who advocate for him. So far this year, his grades reflect that. They find who sees to be but in other communities it's a much tougher struggle to keep boys engaged in school. Thanks. And then we move to the South Bronx an African-American boy named Ruben whose public school teacher tells his adoptive grandmother get him somewhere else, get him out of public schools. He's cute, he's going to be a player. The girls are all interested in him but he's really gifted academically and his grandmother moves him to an old boys Catholic school George Jackson Academy and we follow his fortunes so those of you who saw the film saw Ruben and it's not that I'm making him brief for boys schools. I am a consultant to an old boys school but I think we all have to be open to whatever approaches are successful for boys. When I showed Kevin the Tennessee Teachers Association Nashville 900 public school teachers and when my narrative boys said Mr. O'Terry's class has 14 boys and 5 girls there was a collective groan and I actually resent that working in all boys school you know that a class of boys would be a burden and that professional teachers would say so. On the other hand when I've shown this with my colleague Ned Hallowell who wrote driven to distraction and answers to distraction and delivered from distraction and married to distraction Ned has the distraction franchise wonderful books but he says you know with a little bit of medication Kevin's day in school would be much easier and Melrose had been trying to get Kevin on medication for two years but his mother wouldn't have it and so I was really in debt to Melrose public schools and particularly the principal of Lincoln school that she allowed us to film Kevin because he was not an easy thing as you heard Mr. O'Terry say but I have to tell you whenever I was filming that PBS documentary I was with five guys there was a producer an associate producer a first cameraman and a second cameraman and a sound guy and they were top PBS documentary filmmakers the sound man had just come back from Africa with Oprah they had amazing resumes all five of them completely identified with Kevin's school experience Jason the 32 year old cameraman I spent the days with Kevin and Jason Jason moved more than Kevin it was Jason I wasn't there when Kevin was sitting on his walk and Jason chased him down the stairs but there was a kind of a special irony in it because Jason had found a profession where he could move constantly and stop moving but it was interesting to me that these men had their memories of school were pretty unhappy and their relief at finally finding a profession where they could move almost constantly which is what filmmaking is actually was notable that they all identified with him so the issues boys in school are very often what you heard the parents talk about the ferocity of the three year old the fury of the four and a half year old and calming that that anger they've got these muscular little bodies now and they've been playing with the boys group and they understand now they live in a boys world where they have to command the respect of other boys boys and girls play together without reference to gender at one and two and two and a half and sometimes in a preschool class you can find there's a formidable girl who is the real physical enforcer of everything and the boys are like in awe of her but around three the girls separate from the boys this is a universal phenomenon this is seen around the globe the girls separate from the boys and say the boys play too rough because indeed boys are engaged in rough and tumble play that is the scientific term for it it's not aggressive play it's not violent play most often nobody gets hurt at all if people get hurt it's often accidental they say what do we do about the problem of violent play at the playground I say are you having people hurt well no but they play violently themed games they shoot each other like this I was in Philadelphia once and a mother came up to me and said that she was a birthright Quaker and that she had never allowed any kinds of guns of any kind into her house and it was a proper Quaker family they preached tolerance and pacifism and conscientious objection to war in all his ways but that one day her older son chewed his toast into the shape of a pistol and shot his younger brother in the back so I've always referred to it subsequently as the Quaker mother problem what do you do when your Quaker son chews his toast into the shape of a pistol what I said there was why did he he had this all the time but many people are uneasy with the nature of a boy's play and there are many elementary teachers whom I think in all good conscience are doing what they think is violent prevention without any scientific support for what they're doing because nobody's ever established a scientific correlation between boy's play and later boy with violence but people swear that their sons are being desensitized of violence by video games and certainly Craig Anderson at Iowa State has been trying to establish the link he doesn't like video games because he can't we know that video games shorten your attention span for other things but TB's been doing that for 70 years that it is arousing the aggression centers of the brain light up when you're playing a first person shooter game but the moment you turn it off it goes off the brain doesn't remain let mom say to me oh my son is these video games making very aggressive and I say really give me an example well whenever I tell him to stop playing he gets mad at me and I say children have always presented being told to stop playing and the addictive power we heard some testimony about that from a mom here so the issues of boys playing with other boys and constructing a sense of masculinity by age 4 boys are defining boy play as different from girls and better than girls and a lot of 4 year old boys sound like little chauvinist pigs they sound like little misogynists they don't get quite frightened of that but it's to me an identity exercise that it's it's contrast to compare what the girls do is stupid what we do is virtuous and it's for lack of any way to declare what exactly it is to be male but this I know for most boys and many men masculinity is something that they believe has to be won through a series of tests I don't think girls and women think feminity has to be won I mean there are some terrible ordeals and trials for girls about their bodies and thinness and selfies and Peggy Ornstein writes beautifully about the kind of psychological torture on the internet in a book called Girls with Sex and I commend it to you but girls don't often believe that they're being tested all the time but little boys often think that they are tests being given and if I fail can I command the respect of other boys and if I win them then I'm on the road to the next test and the next test and the next test and it's very hard for us sometimes to interrupt that belief that they have to impress their peers and pass the test in order to win the right to think of themselves as a self-respecting boy I was once in Toronto actually the old blind, old boys well I asked a group of 17, 18 year old seniors how many of you ever felt your last community was all in the line and if you failed to do something you wouldn't lose credibility as a boy and a man you wouldn't lose points in that contest and tell me the stories so these 17 and 18 year olds all told me stories about they know very definitely when their peers have challenged them and they know that their self-respect as a boy and a man is up for grabs so this boy told me he'd gone to a summer camp in Canada and I'm interested I wrote a book on summer camps called homesick and happy and I'm a big fan of summer camps I'm not a fan of this particular thing they had a 30 foot diving power on the lake and the rule of the camp why this rule the rule of the camp is if you climb the ladder there is only one way down right and I see people putting yes you did that I was the boy who scared the lights I mean I saw like right anybody remember the sensation of being on top about 30 foot diving tower I'm thinking oh crap but this boy had avoided it all summer he had avoided it all summer but it drew him and finally climbed the ladder and he got up there and was terrified he was absolutely terrified he was streaming so all the boys staying down in the dock were doing well they were talking here saying you gotta jump there's only one way down that's the rule you can't climb back down and he stood up there just potentially ashamed and humiliated him really at risk and at that point a young counselor seeing the dilemma the boy was in went up the ladder himself walked up next to him held up his hand and said better boom right and a lot of boys need somebody who will go to them in that moment when Dan and I chose the subtitle for raising Kane of protecting the emotional life of boys sometimes you really have to understand the psychology of boys could that young counselor come up and stood next to that boy and scolded all the other boys and told him to come down the ladder maybe maybe but by that time stakes were pretty high and so he stuck out his hand and said we're going together and they went together and the boy passed the test but when he started describing this Canadian boy he started describing this to me I cheered up for the generosity of the counselor the depth of his understanding right and the elegance of his solution to the boys a problem and I'm always trying to find an elegant solution to a boys problem and sometimes you know they just are baffling and sometimes they're just kind of mysterious creatures at my boys school we admit kids and they come back for a day they may have been admitted to other early schools in the Boston area and they revisit us and on a revisit day with a lot of outside visitors one of our eighth grade boys was possessed by the impulse to pump a radiator in a sexually provocative way and the head of our middle school his woman came to me and said what was going on and I thought I don't think he's going to have an answer why did you pump the radiator not a question I actually want to ask we certainly didn't want to answer and I didn't think it would be that edifying the moment had grabbed and many needed we edited something in a disciplinary way because the other boys would have been thinking that we were not a respectable school if we hadn't but there's I'm always telling teachers just assume guilt and move on the boys why I don't know the old term response for eighth grade boys why did you do that I don't know what were you thinking I don't know and then you know mom asked me what can I do with my nine year old so he's still open to me at 15 and I say nine why not is it can't I do the extraordinarily good mothering at nine because he's going to be 15 and my chapter on 14 and 15 in old boys in my book it's a boy it's called mystery boys right and I quote a father a friend of mine who said of course I don't know what he's thinking he's 14 and I had a mother in American school in London who said she said doctor I was in my 17 year old she started to cry she said will he ever talk to me again and I said when did he stop and she said around 14 and I said so he hasn't talked to you in three years and she said then she was crying hard and I had an answer for her but I asked her I asked the audience other than mothers of 20 and 21 girl and did he stop talking to you and did he not did he return at some point yes at 19 after his first serious girlfriend after he got into college after he made a varsity sport after in his mind he had passed the test that one in his manhood then his mother couldn't unravel him because you see moms you talk to you raised and they wept in your lap they know and when they hear your voice they're 15 and you say how are you son they think oh my god one sentence and I'm feeling 13 and then you ask really no please tell me what's going on I have to do something to push my mother away and this is really tough on moms because you love them so when you lay the foundation their emotional life but that's the problem the regressive mother and then many mothers think well I can't he's not talking to me but I'll turn him over to my husband and husband and son may not actually have that kind of conversational flow and a father's of early adolescent boys think a conversation starts with a question like this how are things going in math son which is a conversation killer so many old say their fathers come and say son if you want to get into a good college don't you think you ought to be doing more homework I mean that's not a conversation it's a it's a mini lecture but those kind of benchmarking measure up to your father your father's viewpoint it's infuriating to make boys close out and so these are the challenges we started with little boys at three seventeen and I need to throw it open for a few more questions I hope what I've given you as it allows you to chew on something that will help you to understand your son a bit better questions we have you can I take 10 do you think alright thanks do you want to get it thank you thank you please okay so I'm one of the teachers yes I'm not a man yes and what I took away from your film was the importance of having men in these boys' lives there are not a lot of men on stage I know I go to elementary schools where the only man in the building was a custodian and the boys admire him because he's got a screwdriver and some keys he's got some music it's one of those elegant solutions you were talking about Maria I look mothers and women teachers are doing the work of raising children in this world and my hats off to them and I work with many many elementary teachers and of course the vast majority of them are women really we're suddenly going to get a huge influx of men into elementary school Maria it's more important to me that teachers know how to work with boys and like boys and this I know that a group of second grade boys can figure out in about three days where they've got a teacher who likes boys even works and all or she's going to find boys a problem they think they have a teacher who's going to find boys a problem they organize to torment her and the prophecy is fulfilled and that's the difficulty Michael Reichart and Rick Halling wrote a wonderful book about boys as relational learners it's a thin book it's called I Can Learn From You and they interview hundreds of boys about why they work for the teachers they work for and they kind of suggest that boys have a test for teachers and I remember that I remember failing some teachers and passing some teachers when I was a boy this is somebody I'll work for because she gets boys or there's somebody I'm not going to work for because she kind of disapproves of us and I remember hating tea I went to an old boys' room and I had a majority male faculty so male teachers in and of themselves are not the answer to me I'm some lousy man teacher but people who did not like boys and made that clear produced a reaction in me that I just couldn't get around to all the porn so it's important that boys love their mothers they love their women teachers as long as they know that their women teachers will temper their discipline discipline with some mercy have a bit of a sense of wherever about boys a little bit they'll roll with it and especially Richard and Holly say teachers who know something about boys like outside of school if boys think their teacher are only interested in them as a student in this classroom that teachers are less interested in that so I recommend a book called I Can Learn From You by Rye Card and Holly please thank you for being here I apologize for that it's not a test and there's plenty of time I'm listening to everything you're telling us about I teach fourth grade and I'm listening to what you're telling us about how much boys need to move and how physical and I see that on the playground it doesn't matter how many times I politely remind boys to have hands on or whatever it's just a need that I see that they have and I'm wondering if you have advice for schools about what are the most either best practices or most important things that schools can do either at recess or in their school days to support the needs of maybe all students who need that kind of movement and physical well I look forward to the day when the majority of seats in elementary school are young girls and or those kind of rock chairs chairs that move the idea that sitting still a solo sitting still at a desk position is the best learning position has always struck me as bizarre and that's intolerable for some kids for some girls too you know human beings learn while they're moving they often settle themselves with movement and another book by called reaching boys teaching boys emphasizes that the most important things in capturing the spirit the learning spirit of boys in school is movement teamwork competition and a public product and you can't make every lesson into an exhibition or a game but to people who worship the sitting stillness of learning are a danger to boys and the teacher can tolerate some movement a little noise and as long as that she knows that there's learning going on there's going to be just a profound relief to those physically active boys almost 12 and I'm a single mom so there's no dad that I can and so when you were talking about this sort of shutting down from 14 to 17 that's completely freaking out so I I know that that is not 100% going to happen but I'm really scared now so what can I do before he's 14 and kind of no yes but tell me your name Marty you're going to be able to tell whether your son is a happy guy you're going to be able to tell whether he goes off to school with some energy and some enthusiasm and you'll know from his grades whether he's engaged you'll know whether he's playing on a team and whether he's able to make a commitment and you'll know by looking at him and his posture and how he reacts with his friends and you'll know because he will be telling other people that things are fine and it will break your heart that he's not giving you the read out that you would like because you're his mother and you want to check on whether he's okay and only he's going to say to you some days it's fine and that is I get it that's really hard particularly when you're a single mom and you want to know but Marty I had I had a gift from the guns once I was at a Conker Carlisle high school giving an evening talk on my book The Pressured Child and a mother but a nine year old boy and my talk is not for kids whenever I see a kid in my talk and I can get to him first I say do you have a device please play and I missed your head he doesn't have a device I talked to this boy and his name was Teddy and I said Teddy can I call on you at some point if some of the adults need to answer me and we were talking about why kids don't answer the question how was school today and I asked him does your mother ask you every day and he said yes he was there sitting next to his mom and I said what are you saying he said fine okay and his mom's face felt what's sad I said Teddy do you see that makes your mom sad he looked at his mom and he looked sad he saw her face was sad and I said do you see that he said yes I said well why don't you tell him more why don't you tell him more about your day and he stared at me in a way that kids do sometimes can you take it the absolute truth I said please Teddy we all want to know why don't you tell your mother more about your school day and he said there's not that much she can do about it that money is in the end the 14 year old knows he has to go off and do 8th grade and there's not that much he can do about it so giving you the full print out is like they know it's important to you now as a mother you do you can play the I'm going crazy card you can say I'm going out of my mind and he didn't know more about your life and they then they will usually then give you a few more seconds you'll have to be a silent question best thing today worst thing today thing that pissed you off the most that's going for the negativity I answer this question from others at 15 year olds it's my last answer in my book speaking of boys which it answers to the most asked questions about raising son it's among the most asked questions I get how do I get my 15 year old to talk to me and I give I think some very very helpful suggestions to double your son's output of words from 8 to 16 wouldn't fear this if he's living a healthy life you'll be able to see it in his shoulders and his posture right? and the way he talks to his grandparents the way he talks to the neighborhood right? but not always to you because there's that regressive pull of the mom that he has to resist a couple more are we on? just because our microphones over here we're not favoring this Ryan watch it I won't be here and I'll get one over here just for the sake of balance have you got anybody over there? yep and there was a hand here I'm the one here please, your name? thank you so much just building on that question I have a 10 year old and I seem to be happy to have everything else but things that happen that are needed in his life I wonder about because he has good friends and his good friends are friends of ours how do I get him to talk when things happen at 10 so that means 14 they talk to us how can I do something with a 10 year old to ensure they'll have me open when you have information about his 10 year old like he hasn't told you you have to say ok I've learned something ok you clearly didn't want to tell me but now I'm worked up and you've got to talk me through this ok just put your cards on the table and tell them what you need to know and what you need to know is that he's not around he's not flat on the floor feeling ashamed and victimized and bullied that he has a strategy and one of the best questions is so how are you ending this how are you ending this tell me how because if you haven't been running to me it implies to me that you have a strategy and if you have a strategy I'll feel much better right tell me your strategy ok please so on that just thinking about ashamed can you talk a little bit that happens sometimes from boys to other boys and adults to boys just curious what you can say about it well Bill Pollock is a real boy Bill's a psychoanalyst and he wrote in his book it's competitive so I have nothing to say about it but he said that he thought a lot of male behavior was shame avoidance that you know when that little boy face becomes hard and solemn it's often fury hiding shame and Bill said in his book that boys he thought were exquisitely shame sensitive I thought about that a lot I actually read Bill's book seriously and I thought actually I think human beings are usually shame sensitive I think that we are animals are easily ashamed and when I was down cast to look at the feed is a you know it's a human childhood position am I adequate can I handle this am I done wrong you'll get ashamed but he said I agree with Bill it's about the vulnerability of cutting it as a future boy a boy can command the respect of other boys and that's a particular kind of shame that I won't be seen as a potentially strong man boy because I have feelings of fear and anxiety and I know these very well because I was a very anxious boy that's why I'm a psychologist that's why you know you don't become a psychologist because you're not doing that stuff you're doing it with other people and in yourself as well and so there's a lot and especially if you're a very nerdy intellectual boy all of which I was you you feel at risk in a certain way but part of the boy is learning to both defend yourself and react to something with either this interest i.e. ignoring it or humor which was my game we're talking into death which is also my game every boy has to learn to handle the kind of thinking of other boys in a way that makes him feel self-respecting and form the athletically lousy boy who feels he's not going to cut it with the rugged boys the great belief is to make friendship and find out there's another boy who thinks about the problem the way you do you then retire to a corner and talk about how stupid the jocks are right and you have contempt and disdain for them that kind of thing you can also go into martial arts if you just want to say it you don't have to always play the team sports but you can master you know there are many arenas in which you can find yourself find new capabilities and it's painful for a parent who can't see the road or offer it but you have to trust that a boy is himself going to find a pathway and if you can trust that he will he'll feel his confidence is supported I believe that there are kids who then support but that's another talking about mainstream boys here okay I think this is going to be it this is going to be the last one so make it good I don't have any pressure tell me your name almost 7 years old so what do you do when that little guy has a lot of energy and turns into hitting I don't know why and mostly towards his sister but has she punched him back I wish why hasn't she because we're taught not to hit but he's really annoying I don't know if that's really okay even if she doesn't want to hit him she can put him on the floor and look up to the eye and say stop he loves her he understood him and he wants to annoy her so he can feel his power so he's got a whole complex of things going and my guess is that most of the time between them is pretty good if you had a stopwatch and he said would he and time the amount of sort of neutral or positive time to these kinds of cool collisions would it be 6 to 1 positive yeah it's only occasional but that stuff really sticks in the mindful mind but you have to put it in the balance but you can't say take the curve look I can't protect you against your 5 year old brother you have to develop some strategies and as long as you don't produce seriously the first strategies I agree with I mean they've got they've got a a deep complex looking relationship and she doesn't have to be completely alone by a 5 year old annoying her it's a little stressful if you want to be reasonable with him as she might want to be but is she telling you for a common story sometimes I tell her to handle it and you tell her to handle it they need to work it out and he needs to know that what she can bear that's a useful lesson and this is why you have brothers and sisters they teach you a useful lesson that nobody else can teach you hey look again I'm just delighted that I accepted Denny's invitation all turned down in September tonight thank you very much