Real Boys

by William Pollack

  Barry rebelled. “I’d make little squeaking sounds while the other kids were finishing their dittos, getting louder and louder until she heard me. I’d throw paper airplanes. I’d fidget. One time she left the room for a minute, and when she came back, she found me standing on top of my desk and screaming as loud as I could. That didn’t go over real well!”

  In November, Barry’s parents had him switched into a different first-grade classroom. “My parents thought I was a bit mischievous, but they knew the problem wasn’t just me. My new teacher gave me more challenging work, and I settled down a lot more after that.”

  As Barry’s recollections demonstrate, there are ways in which schools can either respond or fail to respond to a boy’s specific needs. Barry needed to be creatively challenged, to engage in action-oriented tasks, to experience a continuation of the stimulating educational environment his mother had created for him at home. Thrust instead into a first-grade classroom that left him feeling bored and restless, Barry acted out. He was lucky that—instead of being placed in a special education class as a “disturbed” child or being misdiagnosed as “hyperactive”—he found his way into another classroom with a teacher who was better attuned to what he needed most to succeed: creative, high-energy, hands-on learning activities.

  Listen to my interview, in a similar vein, with two concerned parents who struggled with the educational environment in which their son was initially placed. After explaining to me that they had tried to raise their son and daughter without abiding by the narrow gender roles imposed on them as children, Regina and Donald Lincoln acknowledged that they had communicated distinct expectations to each child. “Without being conscious of it, I know I’ve been more protective toward my daughter, and I’ve encouraged my son’s independence more,” Regina Lincoln admitted. “Both of my children are bright and creative. But Corey is much more quirky and exploratory, Marissa is much more diligent and deliberate.”

  The Lincolns found that their son’s learning style did not fit well with the neighborhood’s public school. “No matter what the assignment was, Corey wanted to change it or abandon it altogether. While Marissa was enjoying filling out endless worksheets, Corey was bored to tears. When his teachers started complaining about his wildness in class, we quickly figured out he just couldn’t stand the tedium.”

  The Lincolns transferred Corey, who is now eleven, to an arts-centered experimental school. “I like school much better now,” Corey told me. “We get to make spaceships out of clay, and play drums, and play around a lot more.” While his new school has the same amount of recess each day, Corey experiences the curriculum as a medium for self-expression.

  The Lincolns are pleased with their decision. “I question whether the structure of Marissa’s school is ideal for her. But in Corey’s case, it was imperative that we get him out of there if we wanted him to flourish.”

  Boys, just like girls, do best in schools that give them the chance to participate in learning activities that correspond to their personal interests and competencies, enabling them to sound their authentic voices and thrive as individuals. It’s important that boys feel at home in the school environment and that they find the teacher and the activities he or she organizes sufficiently appealing. Indeed the studies on self-esteem by Professor William Purkey also demonstrated that when classrooms are specifically made to be inviting for boys, their problems of lower self-esteem were significantly abated.

  WHO’S GOT THE PROBLEM PAYING ATTENTION?

  THE BOYS OR US?

  When schools fail to attune themselves to boys’ unique ways of learning and don’t truly address our sons’ needs, the consequences can be devastating.

  In some schools a boy with ordinary exuberance may be “punished” by being placed in classes intended for learning-disabled children or sent regularly to a detention room where he sits unattended for several periods, losing valuable classroom time. For this unlucky boy, this may mark the beginning of a life relegated to second-class economic and intellectual citizenship, invite dangerously diminished self-esteem, and significantly increase the likelihood that he’ll later be misdiagnosed with attention deficit disorder or some other psychiatric disturbance. Even for boys who escape these more dire fates, being at the “wrong” school can mean twelve years of feeling like a square peg in a round hole, of squirming with excess energy that is suppressed rather than harnessed, and of doing worse academically and emotionally than they would in schools that meet their individual needs and abilities.

  GABRIEL: WHEN AN ACTIVE BOY IS DIAGNOSED AS

  “HYPERACTIVE”

  Gabriel Bauer-Brown was in the third grade when his teacher first labeled him with attention deficit disorder, or ADD.

  “She told us he spoke out of turn, got too rough on the playground, and disrupted class,” his dad, Perry, remembers. “She said he could never focus on his work, so it must be ADD.”

  At her suggestion, the Bauer-Browns sought help from their pediatrician, who immediately prescribed Ritalin. Perry was nervous about the drug. “I didn’t like the idea, but if it worked, it would be worth it. If my kid needed Ritalin to be able to do all right in school, then that was just what we would have to do.”

  On Ritalin, Gabriel changed. Instead of acting out, he became sullen and unresponsive. “It was as if the Ritalin had carried him away to some other planet,” Perry says. “He wasn’t making a lot of noise in class, but he wasn’t concentrating on his schoolwork any better either. And at home, he was spacey and much less communicative than he used to be.”

  The Bauer-Browns decided to take Gabriel off Ritalin and pursue professional counseling for him. At first, Gabriel saw a school social worker. Then, after several months, the Bauer-Browns met with a therapist who specialized in child psychology. “What the therapist told us felt shocking at first, but later we had to admit we had suspected it all along,” Perry told me.

  “We adopted Gabriel when he was almost a year old. We got him from an orphanage in Brazil where we knew conditions were pretty awful. The therapist said she believed Gabriel had been seriously neglected there. She said we had done the right thing about taking him off Ritalin, and that therapy could help him express his pain in more constructive ways than those outbursts he used to have.”

  Progress has been gradual but continual, Perry now says. “He has a really strong bond with his therapist, and he’s becoming more and more secure and confident. His teacher was right that he needed help, but Ritalin wasn’t it.”

  For most any psychologist who works with boys or men, Gabriel’s story is painfully familiar. In the United States boys are up to ten times more likely than girls to be diagnosed with attention deficit disorder—a severe enough disturbance to require extensive counseling and potent medications. Of the more than one million children taking Ritalin (a powerful stimulant medication for ADD), three quarters of them are boys. According to a recent study, three times more boys than girls are enrolled in special education programs, with close to 70 percent of all high school “special classes” populated by boys. Many of the boys sent to these “special” classes and programs are boys diagnosed with ADD.

  As a clinical psychologist who has seen the severe damage done in missing a legitimate case of ADD in childhood and the miraculous effects of appropriate treatments—psychological and medical—in both children and adults, naturally I would urge against a simpleminded attack on the legitimacy of ADD or its necessary treatment. Even the great gender disparity—almost ten males to every female—is not without sophisticated biological underpinnings. However, one cannot help being concerned by the sheer number of diagnosed cases, the frequency of diagnoses initiated by overwhelmed classroom teachers and children’s guidance counselors, and the possibility that many mild to moderate cases of ADD are a normal variant of boys’ temperament that could be corrected by a properly trained, attentive adult. Many of these cases probably wouldn’t even come about in a classroom that was thoughtfully designed for typical boys’ temperamen
ts—one that kept them motivated and energized with a variety of interesting learning activities and paced these activities according to their unique learning tempos, one in which the teacher understood that so much of boys’ outward agitation and rowdiness is often just masked emotional pain.

  Indeed I believe that much of the behavior we label as “attention deficit disorder” is actually just the externalization, through action, of boyhood emotions. After all, action is often boys’ only way of saying “Look at me,” “Give me love and attention,” or “Please, I need your help!” When boys act out, I believe that—more often than not—they’re looking for understanding and empathy rather than diagnoses and medication. They are telling us, in essence, “I feel too ashamed to talk to you directly about what’s going wrong, so I am going to use my behavior to let you know indirectly.”

  The official name for the disorder with which so many boys are diagnosed is actually “attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder” or ADHD (ADD for short), and it includes several scientific categories of subclassification necessary for a diagnosis. But the behaviors to be identified are so close on the continuum to those often manifested by emotionally healthy boys that the capacity to distinguish serious learning disabilities from a boy’s ordinary boisterousness is difficult at best, even for a trained professional.

  In theory, the typical ADHD boy will have problems sustaining attention or concentrating, sitting still in class, or waiting his turn. He may yell out impulsively, talk too much, act disorganized or distracted, be forgetful. He may wriggle in his seat or abandon it for almost incessant movement, and the interruption of others may be common.

  I think you can begin to see how the line between pathological hyper-activity and a boy’s normal rough play is often hard to ascertain. The decision about how to diagnose him—and how to solve the behavior problems he’s exhibiting—is influenced by the school he attends, the attitude of his teacher, the ethos of his classroom, and the perspective of his parents. For example, a school that has a more tolerant and less rigid milieu that harnesses extra energy may be much less likely to tag Johnny with a diagnosis than an overcrowded class with strict “Sit in your seat” rules and negative attitudes toward boys’ rambunctiousness. These factors may make all the difference in the world not only in whether he is seen as “dysfunctional” or normal but also—even if he is appropriately diagnosed with a mild to moderate form of hyperactivity or learning disability—in whether his situation will be redressed appropriately. Will he be treated with pills and pushed into a special classroom, or will his caregivers try creative nonpharmacological interventions, such as placing him in an “open classroom” in which he can participate in hands-on activities or establishing a regimen of counseling sessions on a regular basis? Depending on how he is treated for ADD, the boy could end up either suffering years of psychological problems or, if the approach is a healthy one, enjoying a life full of creative energy and success.

  MARTY WOLT: ICONOCLASTIC OR “DYSFUNCTIONAL” LEARNER

  Marty Wolt had been tagged with the ADD label when he was a teenager. His mom, Beth, did not believe her son had ADD, but had to fight the educational establishment to have Marty treated as a “normal” boy. Marty was the kind of boy who typically ends up with the “disabled” label. He talked incessantly in preschool. In elementary school he followed kids around, acted rowdily, and incited classmates to act up. Teachers and school authorities told Beth that her son was “sick” and in need of medication, such as Ritalin.

  Beth resisted the diagnosis and the treatment. She volunteered to be in the classroom to help calm Marty down. She had him transferred to more creative educational settings with more flexible teachers. She found a sympathetic guidance counselor who was willing to talk with and listen to her son. She fought so that Marty could maintain his own eccentric form of boyishness without being branded as disabled.

  To Marty, having the sympathetic ear of supportive adults, made all the difference in the world. Of one of his guidance counselors, he said, “She heard me. I like it when somebody is listening. Who doesn’t?”

  Marty’s story turned out a success. He’s about to graduate from high school, hoping to head for college. He gets good grades, works part-time, and has begun writing plays as a hobby—plays about adults who can’t listen to kids. No one, not even his mother, denies that his behavior was extreme at times. A diagnosis of ADD and medication might even have been justified. Indeed, many boys who are labeled as having ADD are less disruptive than Marty.

  Although Marty wasn’t one of them, 5.4 million U.S. children were classified as “disabled” in 1995. ADD was the fastest-growing category, its ranks having doubled from 1990 to 1995. And remember that more than nine out of ten children diagnosed with ADD are boys!

  I believe it’s important that we as parents make sure our boys are not branded as “abnormal” and slapped with the ADD label before we’re absolutely sure it’s the case. As psychologist Diane McGuinness at the University of South Florida warns, many school systems to a large extent have “pathologized what is simply normal for boys.” Though ADD is a genuine neurobehavioral disorder, and research shows that it does occur in boys more often than in girls, I believe society’s response to this boyhood quandary has actually exacerbated the problem. In some cases we’ve misdiagnosed boys as being hyperactive who are simply very active. In other cases, where there is a pathology that looks like ADD, the boy is actually exhibiting the symptoms of depression. Some boys, properly diagnosed as ADD cases, are overmedicated. Other boys, who clearly are ADD cases, are branded as troublemakers and receive punishment rather than treatment. Both the sheer numbers of boys identified with “hyperactivity” and the distinctly unempathic ways many of these boys are responded to must give us pause to rethink the ADD dilemma.

  Although genuine hyperactivity exists and deserves our every effort at a nonstigmatizing treatment, one can justifiably suspect that much of what is called ADD is closer to MDD—male deficit disorder—with the deficiency lying not in our sons but within society’s inability to correctly perceive boys’ inner needs, yearnings, and pain. We tend to label and treat, rather than listen. Indeed, it is quite possible that the upsurge in “hyperactive” behavior in boys, especially younger boys in the early elementary grades, is a symptom of the trauma of separation we have spoken of and a protest against being fitted for the emotionally limiting gender straitjacket that awaits them.

  As we create more classroom and learning environments in sync with boys’ academic “tempos” that allow boys’ genuine voices to emerge, we may expect to see fewer cases of pseudo-hyperactivity, better interventions when the disorder is really present, and greater success in attending to our sons’ struggles for recognition, love, and achievement.

  LESSONS FROM SINGLE-SEX SCHOOLS

  As we try to guy-ify our coed schools and make them a better fit for boys, it’s helpful to look to what all-boys schools do in order to succeed with boys. I know that most boys will not attend an all-boys school, nor do I advocate that they should. But, having had the opportunity to consult to a large cross section of single-sex day schools for boys throughout the United States, I have found that many of them, because they’re specifically geared for boys, do a good job of creating an educational environment in which boys can triumph academically and emotionally. I have worked with many of these schools to help them develop an intramural culture that is empathic to boys, one that is sensitive to how the shame-based hardening process comes about and how boys use a mask to conceal inner struggles and uncertainties. Many of these schools have become comfortable learning spheres for the rough-and-tumble world of boys and some have thoughtfully addressed gender stereotyping in terms of how it restricts boys emotionally, academically, and professionally. Contrary to the myth that all-boys schools are dangerous, toxic breeding grounds of misogyny and aggression, I have found that many of them cultivate boys who have positive attitudes toward girls and women and who may feel as at ease being gentle and s
ensitive as they do gearing up for a rugby match.

  For almost a decade psychologists and educators have recommended all-girls schools as institutions that help shelter girls from the uninviting atmosphere of coeducational schools where they must compete with boys and overcome anti-girl bias. Girls’ schools have been widely reported as bolstering girls’ academic achievement, empowering them to feel more confident about who they are and what they’re capable of. The time has come, I believe, to look at whether the same is true for boys and, if so, to see what can be learned from these schools and apply it as best as possible within coeducational environments.

  Though we’ve grown comfortable with and thrown our support toward all girls’ schools, all my research suggests that, in America at least, we have not yet accepted a similar approach for boys. For instance, we look askance at all-boy remediation environments for students with legitimate learning disabilities and diminished self-esteem, and even challenge traditional all-boy social organizations such as the Boy Scouts. And, regrettably, the federal courts have rejected well-intentioned efforts to develop special all-boy academies to help young African American boys improve their English-language skills, viewing these “separate but equal” arrangements as patently unconstitutional. There is almost a sense that while we plan Take Our Daughters to Work Day and support women’s colleges and affinity groups, we are Taking Our Boys to the Psychiatrist, forcibly integrating them into coeducational environments focused on meeting girls’ needs, and denying them any all-male bonding environments short of the bench outside the principal’s office or the defendant’s seat in front of the arraignment judge on the way to jail. I wonder what has gotten in our way of examining the alternative of the all-boys schools for our sons, or of applying the lessons of all-boys schools to make our coed institutions more hospitable to boys.