Boys Going Emotional Meltdown

Grey

Grey

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As the father of a son doing school-leaving exams that start tomorrow, I have to say I recognise perfectly the situation described in this article by Will Hutton:



Boys today? We're doing their heads in

Most teenagers find life hard. But suddenly our sons are going into emotional meltdown

Will Hutton
Sunday June 4, 2006
The Observer


The GCSE season is about to enter its final, harrowing few weeks. It's hard to know who is more stressed. The students who know this is the passport to the future. Or their parents, in despair at the energy their offspring put into texting and messaging, computer games and rock music the nearer the exams approach.
Parents of boys are the most baffled. Girls have their particular problems - they suffer disproportionately from anorexia, self-harming and bulimia to mention just the most obvious - but the figures on examinations and university entrance tell a different story. This year, the proportion of girls achieving five A*- C GCSEs, including maths and English, is likely to be 10 points higher than boys (47 versus 37). At university level, 56 per cent of undergraduates are women, 44 per cent men, rapidly edging towards women graduates outnumbering men three to two.

And if you share a house with an adolescent boy, you can see why. Comparing notes over the past few weeks with friends and colleagues who are parents of boys has been sobering. It is as if this generation of boy teenagers has been infected by a new collective disaffection, refusal to settle and periods of sometimes uncontrollable anger.

As for exams, parents report their boys unable to concentrate sufficiently even to begin to study. If they start to revise, the quality of what they do is execrable. Lying on the bed with a book half-open, their mind on texting or instant messaging, they seem to take pride in being disorganised. One mother tells me about the daily struggle to get her son out of bed and the verbal violence she encounters.

A father confided that both his sons are about to drop out of college because they cannot be bothered to attempt the (already low) minimum. Another cannot allow his wife to be alone in the house with their violent teenage son. A university professor, whose two sons are now in their early twenties, looks back with horror on their nightmare adolescence of shouting matches, door slamming and stupefying drug taking.

One of the most sympathetic accounts of what is happening in boys' heads is by two American child psychologists, Dan Kindlon and Michael Thompson. In Raising Cain, they argue that today's society does not equip boys with the emotional intelligence to come to terms with their feelings. We do not begin to understand how they hear and interpret adults. Boys have activity levels which are high to the point of bursting. Yet the contemporary school environment, starting from primary level, is ever more controlling. Teachers may declare that the classroom is a gender-neutral environment, but its rhythms increasingly favour girls.

Today's education, emphasising tests with the GCSE as the ultimate test, does not mesh with boys' internal emotional lives. They are offered little vocabulary and few role models to aspire to. Their peer groups relentlessly punish signs of softness. When they see threats - perceived or real - they feel vulnerable and, without the emotional equipment to balance themselves, respond like cornered animals.

The sudden aggression and angry violence that upsets so many parents of teenage boys is not a sign of poor parenting or an appetite to be macho. It's an expression of boys' inability to live up to today's highly managed demands. They have an extremely low threshold of emotional pain and, without the capacity to articulate and confront their anxiety or sadness, they lash out. The only answer, think Kindlon and Thompson, is to break the cycle by finding ways to develop boys' emotional intelligence.

Their work is persuasive, but I think a larger process is at work. The relative decline of boys compared with girls is a phenomenon taking place across the West. Modernity undermines the conception of masculinity comprehensively. An intriguing recent paper, 'It's Beyond My Control', in the Psychology and Social Review by Jean Twenge and others, reports that the number of teenagers who think that they can have no impact on the world has exploded. Individualism, they argue, has given teenagers a chronic sense of disempowerment.

This hits hardest at boys' emergent idea of what it means to be male. Unable to make a difference and knowing that even to do well in a GCSE may not mean much, many simply give up. To revise is purposeless. They resort to the community of instant messagers and the pleasures of cyberspace; they express their anger by doing nothing. Their friends do the same - and it's a downward spiral.

In this culture, deferring gratification - working hard for today's exam for later rewards - is harder for boys to sustain. Girls, however, see more opportunity. Femininity is not so bound up with making a demonstrable immediate impact. The notion that rewards may be less certain, more diffuse and more distant does not challenge the essence of a girl's being in quite the same way it does a boy's. Girls, in short, are better at deferred gratification than boys.

Boys feel the disempowerment of modernity more acutely. Playing a computer game is a much more comfortable place to be than competing for an exam which has few upsides and plenty of downsides. Wearing goth warpaint or worshipping a band wearing horror face-masks is another way of saying you don't care. And they really don't.

This is not going to get better soon, if ever. One ardent feminist mother of boys whose behaviour took my breath away told me that, for all her despair, she still felt her sons had an internal swagger, an inner belief that they still could be masters of the universe that few girls possess. Her sons would come good in the end. And, indeed, they might, as many do, but they will have lost a decade.

I think the situation is graver. Our boys are 'doing their heads in' and, if we want tomorrow's men to be emotionally balanced, every aspect of today's life, schools in particular, needs to be rethought. And quickly.
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Go back to segregating boys and girls after primary school. Boys and girls don't develop physically or mentally at the same rate - any 14 year-old girl could tell the 'experts' that! Boys need different boundaries and different pursuits. They revel in team exercise and tribal bonding. They need to express being males, not neuters. They need to have playground brawls, fisticuffs, and normal physical expressions of maleness that are considered 'unseemly' in this current climate of castrating behaviour.

It's crazy that thousands of teenagers in America are on 'calming' drugs and anti-depressives and that that trend is already in place here. No wonder kids are confused more than they usually are - they get endless nannying about not taking drugs, but at the first sign of typical teenage blues or a good fight they're banged onto them.

It wouldn't harm Western societies if many parents knew how to be good parents, too. With the diaspora of so many families now, in search of jobs or new horizons, old family structures are far less in place which used to provide a variety of viewpoints, support, and emotional nurturing. If your grandparents live halfway across the world, you don't get the nurturing that elders used to provide. There's more to this emotional barrenness than just worry about exams.
 
My gut feeling is that children in the long term don't gain much benefit from being educated in single sex schools. I went to a boys-only grammar school, and looking back, it seems rather unnatural.

Do we know that this "problem" exists in other Western countries?
 
Do we know that this "problem" exists in other Western countries?
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Yes, Venusian, I think we do. The stats have been building up for a while across many countries. But what persuaded me to raise the question is the suggestion in Will Hutton's article that my son's behaviour, which I saw as completely aberrant, is in fact quite widespread among boys of his age.


Boys need different boundaries and different pursuits. They revel in team exercise and tribal bonding. They need to express being males, not neuters. They need to have playground brawls, fisticuffs, and normal physical expressions of maleness that are considered 'unseemly' in this current climate of castrating behaviour.
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Aunty K, I think this is true and that "the current climate of castrating behaviour" has seen to it that self esteem among teenage boys is low. Your description chimes with the bit in Hutton's article about how a controlling climate and a moral climate of individualism don't suit boys.

But I'm not sure that separate education is the solution. One might equally argue that bringing back compulsory military service would be the answer.

I think what might matter at heart is to allow boys other opportunities to gain respect from elders and peers. Sports, especially team sports, are a conventional example and theatre, debating, participating in bands and choirs are others. In fact, any opportunity for boys to shine outside the classroom, if encouraged and acknowledged by the school, will help their performance inside the classroom.
 
Originally posted by Grey@Jun 5 2006, 12:12 PM
Girls, in short, are better at deferred gratification than boys.
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I feel I must take issue with this particular statement. Mrs Simmo has demonstrated repeatedly that this is untrue.

eg:

Mrs Simmo: "Have you not washed those dishes yet"
Simmo: "I will do them later, I am conquering the world at present."
Mrs Simmo: "I'll just fucking do them myself then, I'm fucking sick of living in a pigsty!"

or

Mrs Simmo: "Can you turn the television on to another depressing real life drama."
Simmo: "Just give me five minutes, I'm about to win the World Championships"
Mrs Simmo: "I'm going to smash that machine into tiny pieces if you don't turn it over right now"
Simmo: "Get out of the way. Michael Schumacher doesn't have crazy bloody women standing in front of him when he's trying to drive at 200mph."

Such scenarios are common and very much at odds with the "deferred gratification" position exposited in the article. I am also aware that Mrs Simmo is quite lax in this respect when compared with other persons of her gender and therefore conclude that the article is guff.
 
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