In a perfect world, we (all adults) would not expect all young children to do the same things when they are not developmentally ready to do. We would be able to adapt our approach to meet them where they are and spend less time punishing and criticizing. We might also try celebrating strengths.
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The young men I see struggling arenât the bitter angry ones some of you are talking about. The ones I know are struggling with depression and anxiety and are often devastated when a girl ends a relationship.
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I offer a counterpoint. My sonâs grade school friend was a challenge, whether in karate or in school. He was fidgety and sometimes disruptive. It wasnât due to poor parenting either; both parents cared a great deal.
He was extremely bright, and one of the strongest kids in the country when it came to mathematics. By the time he got to high school, he had matured enough that his problems went away.
What exactly should have been done with a child like this?
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Yesâthe experience in our town (not saying this is everywhere, but Iâm sure itâs not just here) is that the early school years experience has shifted dramatically from my youth.
When I was in elementary school? Gym class at least 3x a week, art class/music class the same. In addition to recess and lunch recess. What this meant was that there was a real opportunity for physical movement EVERY DAY. Physical movement delivered two things: the chance to get energy out of the system as it built up during class time and, for many of us, it cleared the mind to allow for different, deeper thinking.
My kidsâ experience(both boys, though I think this applies to girls as well)? Budget cuts have resulted in each âspecialâ happening only 1x per week. So one gym class, one music class, one art class, one tech class, one something I canât remember class. Management to state exam performance has eliminated a stand alone recess after 2nd grade and lunch is 40 minutes (20 to eat, 20 to get outside, play and get back inside).
The best academic experiences my kids had were with three teachers. A first grade teacher who did 15 minutes of yoga with the class every day. A fourth grade teacher who encouraged standing at desks, working on the floor etc. and a fifth grade teacher who regularly created âerrandsâ for students to do around the school during the dayâit was used as a reward for academic performanceâget this next question right and get to run this note to the office.
Noted, all of these teachers with 20 years of experience whoâd built confidence in their own methods.
I consider each of those years a gift.
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This is where we really see âtwo Americasâ. The schools our children attended never did away with daily physical education (all the way through 12th grade) and recess was part and parcel of every day until 7th grade. Music education was twice a week (daily if you choose to do an instrument starting in 4th grade), art classes once a week, library time, etc.
The biggest changes I saw from when I went to school was in the quality of school lunches (pretty abysmal as opposed to the real food I was served), the lack of home economics and woodshop/tech classes being offered in middle school and/or high school as a mandatory part of the curriculum, and the extreme tracking systems which usually lock children into defined math/English tracks by 4th grade.
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The elementary school I attended in the 1960âs had no music or art classes. At all. We had PE every day ( state requirement). The more athletic kids were allowed to participate and the others ( including me) were expected to quietly watch. No school library. No extracurricular activities.
My kids school had art and music twice weekly, recess, library time and PE. There were after school activities, assemblies, filed trips - none of which my school had.
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Sounds like you have experience with both sides of education in the two Americas.
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I really did. To be fair, the school I attended has a lot more now ( did I mention there was not even special ed when I attended). But whenever I hear how much â betterâ schools used to be it was certainly not in my experience.
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There have always been the disparities in education access and opportunity, maybe it is just clearer to some as it hits closer.
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I agree with all of this, which is why I push back against narratives (including some of those expressed on this thread) which seem to foster this sort of reaction.
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Many, in fact most, young men who are struggling, though, are not bitter âincelsâ ranting online. I am more interested in why good boys are having such a hard time.
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My middle son was definitely a âdifficultâ one for his teachers. We got called in EVERY YEAR about his inability to concentrate. âShould we have him evaluated for ADHD?â âNo.â We finally did, when he was in 6th grade, and the counselor said he didnât have it. When he finally saw the psychiatrist that my older son still sees many years later, the doctor said, âYour son has extreme ADHD. Itâs harder for him than his mental illness diagnosis.â So I know we DID try, even though our son thinks we didnât try hard enough. 
He did well with a couple of teachers, who could see through his behavior what a bright, creative young man he was. Thank God for those people! I wish there had been more of them.
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Iâve been reading about that toxic gamer and online community that the Kirk shooter may have been involved with. Very nihilistic and scary. Literally never heard the word groyper before. If the evidence pans out, itâs dismaying to see that a smart, middle class kid from an apparently stable family can fall down such a toxic rabbit hole. Saying this not to be political. Just like I said, dismayed. I donât know that violent games lead to violence, but the âcommunities" associated with them might. Something I didnât have to worry about when my almost 40 year old S was a teen .
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How can young men go wrong with this kind of support? FYI, young men have been under represented at colleges for decades, but I find hardly a mention of it on campuses. It seems to be all about âEmpowering Womenâ, or âWomen in STEMâ, while young men are a bunch of incel losers, according to some. The former is fine, the latter is not.
The vast majority of my sonâs teachers in elementary, middle, and high school were women. Some were great, and totally âgotâ boys. Others, and far too many for my liking, simply seemed to see boys as a problem they couldnât, or didnât want to understand, and had no idea how to encourage and focus their energy. The results when it comes to college numbers are completely predictable.
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Well if my child had been disruptive to the other students in class I would have dealt with it and put a stop to it.
How you might ask? Well, one way is just to be so loud and forceful that said kid obeys and changes behavior. The other probably better way is to practice at home at sitting still and quiet maybe working on a puzzle at the kitchen table. Start with 5 minutes and then just lengthen it each day until sitting for 30-60 mins is no big deal.
Kids have to learn behaviors just like reading and math. It is just a matter of when they learn.
We really didnât have behavior issues with the kids. They knew we werenât going to put up with bad behavior. And just try to act up out in public. Same went for doing/turning in homework. They knew there were consequences for not doing it.
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Well, you were lucky and your kids must not have had ADHD. Our first kid was perfect (the one who eventually got schizophrenia), the second was incredibly challenging (and is about to start his masterâs degree studies at the University of Warsaw), and the third was in the middle. We were not pushovers, believe me. The youngest and oldest responded as you described to guidance and discipline. The middle one did not. It didnât make us bad parents.
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Neither did we. Our kids were loved by the teachers. We attribute that to a combination of both discipline and luck. You should too.
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Itâs easy to consider yourself a great parent when you have a child who responds to discipline and â goes with the program â. Then you have another one who doesnâtâŠ
Ask me how I know.
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I learned with my middle son not to judge other parents. I realized you can do everything right, as best you know how with lots of love and they can still decide to dive off a cliff (allegory). You just have to pray a lot for them and yourself and do all you can until they decide they want to follow a better path. Iâve seen some great kids with lousy parents - sometimes it appears there is no correlation.
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100 percent. Violent games donât create violent people. But the online chat functionality is a grooming ground for all kinds of predators. And kids who spend a lot of time on video games are sometimes lonely and might not have other social activities to keep them occupied and centered in real life. They might have great parents or they might not, but kids learn to lie quite easily about what they are up to online and I personally have been surprised by how easily my S26 circumvented parental controls when he was as young as 9 years old. Heâs a fairly honest kid who would confess eventually but he has definitely hidden things when he wanted to.
The internet, for all its wonders and delights, is, on balance and in my view, a net negative for most people, and especially for our children and young adults. It thrusts them into complex, dark dynamics that they are In no way equipped to handle.
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