<p>maybe its because of what people expect and accept? you know, the whole “boys will be boys” thing…
also at my school all the “cool” girls get good grades and work hard, while many of the “cool” guys don’t… and vice versa is not as acceptable. in fact, one of my good guy friends who hangs out in the slacker crowd recently got diagnosed with adhd and went on meds, then suddenly started getting a’s and b’s. i was so proud of him but a lot of his friends acutally made fun of him!
girls on the other hand, are sort of looked down on by other girls if they dont get good grades…
interesting post, very true. kind of sucks for us girls too… i dont want to get stuck at a 70% female college!</p>
<p>Hilary, it is becoming that way, it seems. I was surprised to see lopsided stats at schools like William &Mary. I expect them at Vassar, Wheaton, Goucher, Connecticut College where the schools were traditionally female, but a number of nice colleges, not necessarily the selective ones either, are becoming increasingly female in population. Also I doubt if the females want to deal with a war generation problem where all of the “good” guys are gone or quickly taken. It is a problem for both sexes.</p>
<p>Agree with the comment about expections and willingness to accept certain things. I think teachers are collectively relieved (at least in our school district) when boys aren’t acting out in dangerous ways that they’re willing to overlook the gap between talent and achievement with these boys. After all, when they want to see beautiful notebooks and on task behavior, they just turn to the girls. Since the girls are performing, it can’t be the system, right? </p>
<p>A gross generalization, but I know in my heart that there is something to these observations that so many parents (but in my opinion, not professionals) are seeing and describing and what a waste of talent it is that we cannot get a handle on it. (My experience comes from living with the poster children for the two different camps).</p>
<p>I am enjoying this thread, as the mother of two boys. When my boys were middle school age or so, they started noticing all the programs to help girls improve in math and science, and they always thought it quite unfair that there were no similar programs to help boys improve in the language arts. They got the feeling that society was saying it was OK for girls to do better than boys, but not for boys to do better than girls.</p>
<p>I homeschooled my boys fully until middle school, where they started taking a couple classes–PE, art, music. They then attended high school halftime or so. Thus they were not exposed to a lot of whatever indoctrination occurs in school. At home they were able to go their own way, learning at different paces in math/science, as opposed to language arts. </p>
<p>My second son, in particular, would probably have been a “lost boy” in the public schools. He could not read until 3rd grade, so he would have been in remedial reading. (which would have been totally unnecessary, as he caught up to grade level quickly once his “readiness” kicked in–another factor boys have to cope with more than girls…) He was a wiggly kid, but at home he could wiggle away and still learn. At school that probably would not have worked. He also did not learn to write a decent paragraph until 7th or 8th grade, but qualified for Honors English when he started taking English at the high school in 9th grade. Another case of readiness. Not everyone matures at the same rate, and this often puts boys at a disadvantage, as girls tend to be the faster maturing.</p>
<p>By being at home he also missed the middle school change I saw in so many of my sons’ friends. They had been great students in grade school, but once the hormones starting kicking in, their grades started dropping. Grades were just not important at that age and in that group of kids. Many of them never did recover, although I heard of one (who struggled in high school) who just graduated from college with honors. I saw in my son, too, the desire to do only what was needed. However, and he blames me for this <g>, he had high enough goals that he wanted to do just enough for an A, not just enough to pass. (That’s why, in high school, he would work harder in his PS classes than in his ungraded work at home.)</g></p>
<p>I have read that the British are starting to rethink schooling, to try to help boys more. I think it is time the US does so, as well. I’m not sure what the answers are, but I hope some can be found. I hate to see any potential wasted.</p>
<p>Socially, boys tend to mature later even for those that do well academically. My nephew,val and on merit scholarship, is a total dork, does not have a girl friend and does not look that interested in wanting one either. While my niece, is just as smart and talented but are much more aware socially.
Girls tend to do well academically because they tend to be perfectionist and organized. But I think the perfectionist part will not help them later in real work situation. I have 2 girls and the one who tends to be more perfectionist tend to keep getting stuck doing the same thing to get near perfection, refuse to move to different thing, waste a lot of time, while the other one tend to get close but not perfect, able to move on and learn different new things. While this same trait is actually detremental in a work situation because it’s not good to do everything to perfection,it’s good to cover more ground and be perceived getting more things accomplished.</p>
<p>Talking about boys not turning in their homework assignments and such - Why are they allowed to do this? I homeschooled both of my boys (oldest 3rd - 9th, youngest 1st-9th) and they could not give me work that was incomplete. I was shocked when they both started HS & my oldest came home and said that kids did not even take tests! They just put their heads on their desks and slept during the test. They also tell me that they don’t get into trouble for not turning in homework. </p>
<p>My niece would get bad grades on her progress reports & everytime that my sister would call they would tell her that her daughter hadn’t handed in certain assignments. Even though she didn’t turn in home work & special projects she would still get A’s on her final report card.
Why are we letting these kids get away with this?</p>
<p>If the teachers & parents don’t expect students to do their work then why even hand it out. Sorry, but this drives me nuts. The other thing I also notice is that kids who are good in class get graded on behaviour. I have seen my son’s friends (who are truly the cream of the crop) get so discouraged that while they do all this work & the kids who are just good in class get the same grades that they do.</p>
<p>At our school there was no unweighted vs. weighted grades so in many cases the kids taking the hardest classes got no reward for all their hard work. It is discouraging to see these bright kids get no recognition for their hard work. </p>
<p>On a lighter note, my youngest son got a 105% on his Biology notebook. The reason for the extra 5 points - first student to ever have a complete notebook (LOL).</p>
<p>Well, what do you suggest doing if they do give you incomplete or shoddy work? Kids often to get into trouble-have terrible consequences for not taking test, not turning in home, doing a terrible job with homework. What do you do with them? We are not talking about one kid doing this but a number. What do you suggest a parent do if a kid doesn’t do what he is supposed to do? </p>
<p>My cousin had problems with her kids going to school, staying in school, sneaking out of the house, and just not doing what they were told. When that line is crossed, there is little a parent could do. She finally refused to let one come back after he just refused to anything. He ended up living with some low lives, did not get his high school diploma, ended up bringing kids in the world with problems that broke his parents’ heart even further. Tough love did not work in this case. This is a young man who could have gone to college, could have lived a decent life had the crossroads been different. I hear parents telling me that we can’t let kids get away with this and that, but when a kid gets out of control, there really is not much a parent can do. There is an invisible “force”, so to speak that keeps kids on the straight and narrow, but when that is breached, you realize that there are not many things you can do if your kid simply disengages from his work. I have spent a good part of my life taking care not to lose that “force” through micro management, manipulation and everything under the sun and I’ve still lost control at times. Many of my nephews “friends” from highschool are bums, substance abusers, dead. Those parents tried everything from wilderness programs, lockups, shrinks, tough love to get them back on the path–these are not kids from families that are so dysfunctional that no one is doing well–I see that where I do work in an inner city high school and that is even more of a difficult situation. If a kid decides that he does not want to toe the line, does not want to think or focus, I have not found much you can do to bring him back. I have paid literally tens of thousands to specialists in teen behavior, from educatiors, psychologist, behaviourists, psychiatrists, counselors for answers to this problem.</p>
<p>Wow! I’m listening! Jamimom, can you talk more about this force? And at what age do you feel the force is most threatened, or is it different for each kid/family? Thanks.</p>
<p>LOL, my little ones are in the Star Wars mode and it is rubbing off on me! Unlike a lot of parents on this forum, I have had a lot of behaviour problems with my children. Partly because I have too many, partly because some are not my blood children that came with some issues, and partly because my blood children seem to be wired for trouble. So I have been faced with a stupid, recalcitrant teenager who says “NO” to my face when give simple directives. So what do you do? Hit him? I am a small woman who has never been physically very strong, and two of my boys are national level athletes and big. Ground them? So they just walk off. They have friends that will provide door to door delivery. They are a bunch of smart but stupid, handsome hunks that are very popular with other people. How does one rein in a lot like that? I am as foreign to them as if I just got off the boat last month, as I am a little, weak, woman with glasses, bookish, toes the line, conservative, not very social. Everything they do not want to be. So the “whip” or the “force” has to be the power. You don’t really believe the lion trainer or master in that rink is controlling those beasts with that whip or chair, do you? It is an invisible something, training, mental conditioning that keeps those lions from turning the chair into toothpicks, grabbing the whip and having the trainer for lunch. So it is with these kids because they would bite off their noses to spite their faces–they could end up in jail for something really stupid if you push them to it just to “show” you. And, if you care, and love them, you are stuck with the fall out. I have been part of too many support groups where very nice parents, and kids that started out very nice just lost that connection of control. If anyone has a sure recipe for getting a kid to do do a 105% notebook, I’d love to have it. My kids don’t even keep notebooks except under the most horrible duress and scrutiny. Their Engllish is mixed with their Math, and they even pick up each others. What ever is at hand. Thank god, the notebook checks ended at middle school. If my son who graduated college had kept notebooks for each class, his gpa would have significantly higher. I had to focus on the most basic things with these kids. I knew they had the intellect to do the work, they had other talents that made them highly desireable, but they just went through a crazy period in life where they could have ended up in instituitions other than college very easily.</p>
<p>I have 3 boys, aged 17 to 25, and although they all are good kids – the jury is still out on son #3 – I could tell you stories that would make you laugh (they’ve made me cry). My H works obscene hours so most of the communication with school, carpooling, discipline, etc. is in my realm – doesn’t make me happy but what can you do. At least my kids have done well academically (although you never ever know when that can change in a flash), have been pretty well organized, and have found one or two things to engage them during high school (not the academics especially but music, school paper, sports). Many of their male friends are late to bloom or never bloom in high school – and these are kids with high high SATs but low GPAs. I truly believe that some of this is due to peer pressure and crazy hormones. Son #3 also complains that several female teachers at the high school dislike the boys and treat them differently from the girls – true or false, I don’t know (I just tell him that life’s unfair). This is one reason why I love hearing follow up stories about some of their friends who often blossom in college and the workplace.</p>
<p>I haven’t followed this thread all the way through, but I wanted to add my $.02 as a mom of girls. When my daughters were young, it was the beginning of the “Reviving Ophelia” fad with the new evaluation of the self-esteem drop in girls during the middle school years. I bought this book I thought was going to help me figure out how to avoid that drop, called “Raising Daughters”. Basically, the book said that moms of daughters spent a lot of time telling the daughters to be careful when they played, and encouraging them to avoid making mistakes. The moms of sons, on the other hand, encouraged their sons to “have fun”, and just turned them loose on the playgrounds. The sons got much less direct supervision and were not made aware of mistakes, spills, etc, that the sons made in relation to the daughters. The book and I diverged big time, though, when it suggested that we needed to start raising our daughters like our sons. The book contends that daughters should be sent to the playground with the directive “have fun” rather than “be careful”. I started to think about what this book was really aiming for, though, to have a generation of girls raised like boys. Doesn’t that imply that there is something wrong with girls and women? I wonder what the statistics are for the prison population? Maybe if the moms of these men in prison for heinous and thoughtless crimes had told their sons “be careful” more often when they went out to play they would have had enough forethought to avoid behaviors that landed them in trouble with the law. </p>
<p>I continued to tell me daughters to be careful, and to pay attention to their mistakes so they could clean up after themselves and make amends.</p>
<p>I pretty much raised my girls the same way as I did the boys but the boys colored waay out of the lines. The girls just did not. Said many more “be carefuls” to the boys, because they needed the warnings, not that they heeded them. The girls, I tended to say to “have fun” because they did not need the warnings warnings I literally had to hit the boys over the heads with bats to get their attention for anything I said.</p>
<p>Echoing what some other parents have said, I’d like to see more detailed numbers on boys going to college (or not). For example, if we had 30 years of numbers for the percentages of boys starting in public schools, in private schools, in home-schools, and in all-male schools, who then go on to college that would be more enlightening than the fact that more girls than boys now go to college. If the fraction of boys going to college is actually going down, and going down more or less euqally for all male educational backgrounds, then we have some societal issues to work out.</p>
<p>As a homeschooling parent, I don’t have enough data to draw the conclusions that many of you have drawn, but as a male I have always known that the girls mature faster and have more drive to succeed academically in the teen years. I think our society was doing a better job of overcoming the boy’s slacker tendency in the past. But we need more national information to what the problem is, and what is driving it.</p>
<p>Jamimon ~ I wish I had an answer for your issues, which seem very poignant to me. As a modest contribution, I can only suggest that some issues of overall obediance to family authority need to be enforced primarily by the father figure. Also, the small moms on our street report that starting at a very young age, all discipline dicussions (from the mom) should be handled by requiring the automatic first step of the boys sitting down on the couch. The mom remains standing. This is reported to help quite a bit in later years when the boys are hulking brutes of 16 or 17. It seems the “sitting” strategy helps to balance the perceived power mis-match, and slows the urge of the boys to storm off, ignoring the mom.</p>
<p>I would never have thought of it, but the moms here claim it works. I understand you have to start the “sitting” procedure and ingrain it when the boys are young, before the impulsiveness of puberty moves to high gear.</p>
<p>Star Wars (and the Simpsons), American cultural references of the highest order, especially for boys. </p>
<p>OK, you have no light saber. And you have no physical force or physical intimidation factor. And the boys don’t really care if their notebook is 55% or 105%. You want to get them through their early 20’s with their futures intact. There is a huge magnet pulling them in directions that you don’t want them to go. </p>
<p>You speak of an invisible force that makes a kid choose to do one thing and not another, or at least show a minimum degree of cooperation. It’s internal, but there’s an element of connection with the parent or authority figure, a hairline element of control. The force is more powerful than insubordination. The kid has to either choose to comply, or want to, or feel that he has to based on consequences that have been set out. </p>
<p>I don’t know what this force is. One thing my teenaged son said when we were going through a rough patch, talking about choices, is “how do I know when I’m making a choice? It doesn’t feel like a choice, it just feels like I’m doing something”. He needed to learn to think ahead more, and understand the logical consequences of what he was doing. I think that the force includes the development of foresight. This can be a slow process.</p>
<p>One of his scoutmasters is a high school teacher. He had a way of walking into a situation, quietly announcing, “This stops now.”, and “it” would stop. When I asked him about it, he said that it’s the element of the unknown, that they’re just not sure what the authority figure will do, and that little, tiny bit of uncertainty was, essentially, his “force”.</p>
<p>I’d like to think that the force becomes internalized when the child becomes of age. Jamimom, in your experience, is the force most effective when it’s a dynamic between the kid and one other liontamer? When both parents are involved, is the force strengthened or weakened?</p>
<p>Father figure is very strong here and probably the tip factor as to why the boys went to college instead of other places and did not continue further to the dark side. But not an easy process. We have used the sitting strategy, restraint strategy, all kinds of strategies. Whether it works in the long run is up in the air. Who knows what worked and didn’t In the short run, not much seemed to work when the kids were on their rampage. </p>
<p>My nephew is now 30 years old and is a medical researcher. He ended up going to a top college, med school, and residency program. But he burned out a lot of schools and caused many gray hairs before finally settling down. And he can’t tell you why he was so crazy those years. Would blame it on his circumstances, except my son was every bit as bad. But he is now working right out of college, graduated in 4 years. There was a time that he was on the wanted list of many people for his shenanigans, but he was just never caught except by us. He is still a wild card. And this one I have is going to send me to an early grave, I think, as I am getting too old for this. Yet, as I have been to support groups, session, professionals galore, many have kids who had some pretty bad ending stories despite the parents efforts to follow the advice, desperately many times. I wish I had the answer too, as I know many right now who need it.</p>
<p>Reasonabledad, good suggestion about having the boys sit on the couch while the mom stands. I’d like to add that many times the teenaged boys do not perceive that their physical size/maturity could be intimidating to moms, even though they fully understand it on the playing field. In my experience, they spend time in front of the mirror admiring their adult physiques but the slightest comment about height, muscle, hair length, etc. can cause blushing and downcast eyes.</p>
<p>My invisible “force field” has been strong enough that none of my boys have ever physically intimidated me, nor have they ever shown any inclination to do so. I would be done had that ever happened. Just incorrigable. I don’t have too many answers. I wish I did. I wish to God that I could come up with a way to get the decision making cells in these boys to slow down and not act on impulse. As I said, I know some parents who would do anything they can to get more control over their kids who are going into a downward spiral.</p>
<p>Sorry if I implied that, wasn’t my intention. It’s my understanding that once a parent is physically intimidated by a child, the relationship has moved into an entirely different place, and not a good place, either. And glad to hear that your nephew seems to be settling into himself.</p>
<p>jamimom - I just don’t know what the answer is. I only know that when we were in school there was NO way you didn’t do your homework or not take tests. It just wasn’t an option. I think the question here is when did teachers start making this an option, and when did we as parents stop backing up the teachers? If my school called my parents and told them I wasn’t doing something I would have been in a bad way.</p>
<p>I only know what I did as a parent. When they were young and I told them no then they knew that I meant no. I did not count to 10 (all of my girlfriends at the time would count to 100 & give up with no consequences). I would tell them once, if you do that again you will go to the time out chair for X minutes. If they did it again they went to the time out chair. It took a lot of effort on my part to discipline them when they were young, but after about age 5 (maybe less) I hardly have ever had to “discipline” them. As they got older, I sometimes have had to take away a privilege and that seemed to work for them. </p>
<p>However, this does not mean that it would work for everyone. There are so many other factors (neighborhood kids, school kids, etc.) that factor into this. It is extremely hard to be a parent today. Our kids have so much more to influence them (tv, music, computers - don’t even get me started, etc.). How many sitcoms do we have on TV at the moment that the dads are portrayed as complete idiots (lovable & funny yes, but still not a great message). Parents can’t be with their children every minute & it is getting harder by the day when it seems like everyone else doesn’t care about our future as a country. </p>
<p>You have to remember that since I home schooled my kids until HS I was not aware of all the things that I am seeing. I almost feel like I woke up on an alien planet.</p>
<p>Yes, it is true that a parent can do everything right & have problems. We know plenty of parents who have done everything right & have had huge problems. You are right jamimom what can you do at this point? We really need to sit down as a society & evaluate what is going on with our children (leaving all the agendas out of this - it is about our kids futures). I am so glad that my job as a parent is ending & not just starting:)</p>
<p>Jamimom, I think you brought up a very good point; just because there appear to be many lost boys, does not necessarily mean that there will be lost men. I have a former brother-in-law who got my little sister pregnant at 17, didn’t work while she was pregnant because he needed to be available practice in his rock band, cheated on her while she was pregnant, etc. My husband nicknamed him “Spike”. My sister divorced him after 5 years, and he cleaned up his act, got a GED, went to college and now is a high math teacher. Also, some of the best and brightest kids get lost on the edge of adulthood and can barely support themselves. I went to H.S. with one of those kids. He was in many AP classes, and was engaging and seemed motivated. He dropped out of college after a year and the last I saw him was 6 years after high school and he was working at the pet store at the mall.</p>