Book Report

The Trouble with Boys: A Surprising Report Card on Our Sons, Their Problems at School, and What Parents and Educators Must Do by Peg Tyre

Ben and I read this together at his suggestion. The author was an investigative journalist for NewsWeek magazine. The book goes through every grade from Pre-K to College and identifies how many boys are struggling at every level. She identifies historical (Women's Lib movement) and political reasons (No Child Left Behind and standardized testing) why the problems exist and why it's so unpopular to discuss the problems many boys have.

Some problems she sites are that boys are inherently different than girls, meaning they are naturally very active, even aggressive, they are slower to develop fine motor skills and typically learn to read at a later age, and these differences are often overlooked in the typical expectations boys face in schools. She follows that boys are quicker to get referred for evaluations, get labeled with a diagnosis and get medicated or labeled as learning disabled and get an IEP (or whatever they're called nowadays) or put in special classes. Worse, little boys from Pre-school and kindergarten become discouraged because it's too hard for them to sit still or live up to increasing academic expectations at younger and younger ages and "check out" of school before they've hardly begun.

The problems continue throughout the school years and many boys aren’t even interested in continuing their education through college and many of those who do can’t pass admissions requirements. This is where it got interesting. Colleges are starting to lower their standards for boys just to get them admitted. If their ratio of boys to girls is too lop sided admissions go down all together. So, they end up overlooking more qualified girls to get more boys in their schools. That’s discouraging for EVERYBODY!

She doesn't have any miracle solutions, which I can appreciate. She mainly encourages parents to advocate for their boys. She affirmed that there are many teachers and school officials that are trying hard to find ways to meet the needs of boys, but many are not as most don’t even recognize that there is a problem. Some ideas I gleaned from her if you think you may have a super active little boy are: choose play-centered pre-schools instead of overly academic ones, wait an extra year to have your son enter school, don't assume male teachers are all sexual predators - remember boys like to learn from men, make sure Dad role models reading, and watch out for video game addiction in your son. For schools: one school has a different police officer come every week to read to the elementary kids in full uniform (gun and all), don’t limit recess and lunch times, incorporate movement in the classroom, encourage reading and writing topics that the children are truly interested in, be sensitive to inherent differences in boys – if most of the boys in the class struggle with handwriting, it may be too early to expect them to have as nice handwriting as their female peers.

I think Ben was excited about this book because there were chapters covering the elementary years that he feels depicted what he went through. He was the little boy who couldn't sit still or stay quiet and was struggling enough his mother pulled him out of school and home schooled him for a year in fourth grade. I appreciated learning some ideas to use in my future home school classroom to keep my son's interest.