Building Boys Bulletin 4-8-24

Schools -- not boys -- behaving badly

Almost 10 years ago, I asked my then 8-year-old son how adults could make schools better for kids. His answer: “Make recess better. Let kids bring bikes and stuff, and have longer recesses.”

And then he said: “They need school to be kid-friendly place, not a grown-up friendly place.”

Kids need school to be a kid-friendly place, not a grown-up friendly place.

One decade and one global pandemic later, chronic absenteeism rates are soaring. Boys’ academic achievement lags behind girls — and is, in fact, even worse than it was 20 years ago, when my oldest son was in kindergarten. Boys are less likely than their female counterparts to attend (or graduate from) institutions of advanced learning, and teen and young adult mental health is in the dumpster. Recent research has finally officially underscored the fact that the pandemic dramatically (and negatively) affected boys’ mental health.

Photo by Pixabay

At least one new book (& a lot of conventional wisdom) blames much of this decline on kids’ access to smartphones. Near-constant access to the internet has indeed affected us all. But to blame all of young people’s problems on phones is disingenuous, I think, and ignores a lot of contributing factors. Among them: Societal misunderstanding of males. And schools that are not male-friendly.