The War Against Boys

by Christina Hoff Sommers

  From the earliest age, boys show a distinct preference for active outdoor play, with a strong predilection for games with body contact, conflict, and clearly defined winners and losers.9 Girls, too, enjoy raucous outdoor play, but they engage in it less.10 Deborah Tannen, professor of linguistics at Georgetown University and author of You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation, sums up the research on male/female play differences:

  Boys tend to play outside, in large groups that are hierarchically structured. . . . Girls, on the other hand, play in small groups or in pairs: the center of a girl’s social life is a best friend. Within the group intimacy is the key.11

  Anthony Pellegrini, a professor of early childhood education at the University of Minnesota, defines rough-and-tumble play (R&T) as a behavior that includes “laughing, running, smiling, jumping, open-hand beating, wrestling, play fighting, chasing and fleeing.”12 This kind of play is often mistakenly regarded as aggression, but according to Pellegrini, R&T is the very opposite. In cases of schoolyard aggression, the participants are unhappy, they part as enemies, and there are often tears and injuries. Rough-and-tumble play brings boys together, makes them happy, and is a critical part of their socialization.

  “Children who engaged in R&T, typically boys, also tended to be liked and to be good social problem solvers,”13 says Pellegrini. Aggressive children, on the other hand, tend not to be liked by their peers and are not good at solving problems. He urges parents and teachers to be aware of the differences between R&T and aggression. The former is educationally and developmentally important and should be permitted and encouraged; the latter is destructive and should not be allowed. Increasingly, however, those in charge of little boys, including parents, teachers, and school officials, are blurring the distinction and interpreting R&T as aggression. This confusion threatens boys’ welfare and normal development.14

  Today, many educators regard the normal play of little boys with disapproval, and some ban it outright. Preschool boys, much to the consternation of teachers, are drawn to a style of rough-and-tumble play that involves action narratives. Typically, there are superheroes, “bad guys,” rescues, and shoot-ups. As the boys play, the plots become more elaborate and the boys more transfixed. When researchers ask boys why they do it, “Because it’s fun” is the standard reply.15 According to at least one study, such play rarely escalates into real aggression—only about 1 percent of the time.16 But when two researchers, Mary Ellin Logue and Hattie Harvey, studied the classroom practices of 98 teachers of four-year-olds, they found that this style of play was the least tolerated. Nearly half (48 percent) of teachers stopped or redirected boys’ dramatic play daily or several times a week, whereas less than a third (29 percent) reported stopping or redirecting girls’ dramatic play weekly.17 Here are some sample quotes from teachers reported by the two authors:

  • “My idea of dramatic play is experience created by an adult with a specific purpose in mind. In our learning environment, we perceive dramatic play as a homemaker in the kitchen [or a] postal worker sorting mail. Rough-and-tumble play is not an acceptable social interaction at our school.”

  • “We ban superhero toys at school.”

  • “Rough play is too dangerous. . . . playing house, going fishing, doctors, office work and grocery store keeps dramatic play positive.”

  • “Rough-and-tumble play typically leads to someone getting hurt, so I redirect. When a child talks about jail, using karate, etc. I’ll ask questions and redirect.”18

  Such attitudes may help explain why boys are 4.5 times more likely to be expelled from preschool than girls.19 Fortunately, there were champions of R&T among the teachers in the study. As one said,

  Rough-and-tumble play is inevitable, particularly with boys. It seems to satisfy innate physical and cultural drives. As long as all participants are enjoying the play and are safe, I don’t intervene. Play is the basis of learning in all domains.20

  Play is, indeed, the basis of learning. And the boy’s superhero play is no exception. Researchers have found that by allowing “bad guy” play, the children’s conversation and imaginative writing skills improved.21 Such play also builds their moral imagination. It is through such play, say the authors, “that children learn about justice . . . and their personal limits and the impact of their behavior on others.” Logue and Harvey ask an important question, “If boys, due to their choices of dramatic play themes, are discouraged from dramatic play, how will this affect their early language and literacy development and their engagement in school?”22

  Carol Kennedy, a longtime teacher and now principal of a school in Missouri, told the Washington Post, “We do take away a lot of the opportunity to do things boys like to do. That is to be rowdy, run and jump and roll around. We don’t allow that.”23 One Boston teacher, Barbara Wilder-Smith, spent a year observing elementary school classrooms. She reports that an increasing number of mothers and teachers “believe that the key to producing a nonviolent adult is to remove all conflict—toy weapons, wrestling, shoving and imaginary explosions and crashes—from a boy’s life.”24 She sees a chasm between the “culture of women and the culture of boys.”25 That chasm is growing, and it is harmful to boys.

  The Decline of Recess

  Recess itself is now under siege and may soon be a thing of the past. According to a summary of research by Science Daily, “Since the 1970s, children have lost about 12 hours per week in free time, including a 25 percent decrease in play and a 50 percent decrease in unstructured outdoor activities, according to another study.”26 In 1998, Atlanta eliminated recess in all its public elementary schools. In Philadelphia, school officials have replaced traditional recess with “socialized recesses,” in which the children are assigned structured activities and carefully monitored.27 “Recess,” reported the New York Times, “has become so anachronistic in Atlanta that the Cleveland Avenue Grammar School, a handsome brick building, was built two years ago without a playground.”28

  The move to eliminate recess has aroused some opposition, but almost no one has noticed its impact on boys. It is surely not a deliberate effort to thwart the desires of schoolboys. Just the same, it betrays a shocking indifference to their natural proclivities, play preferences, and elemental needs. Girls benefit from recess—but boys require it.29 Ignoring differences between boys and girls can be just as damaging as creating differences where none exist. Were schools to adopt policies harmful to girls, there would be a storm of justified protests from well-organized women advocates. Boys have no such protectors.

  Boys playing tag, tug-of-war, dodgeball, or kickball together in the schoolyard are not only having a great deal of fun, they are forging friendships with other males in ways that are critical to their healthy socialization. Similarly, little girls who spend hours exchanging confidences with other girls or playing theatrical games are happily and actively honing their social skills. What these children are doing is developmentally sound. What justifiable reason can there be to interfere?

  Of course, if it could be shown that sex segregation on the playground or rambunctious competitive games were having harmful social consequences, efforts to curb them would be justified. But that has never been shown. Nor is there reason to believe it will ever be shown. In the absence of any evidence that rough-and-tumble play is socially harmful, initiatives to suppress it are unwarranted and a presumptuous attack on boys’ natures.

  Such bans are also compromising their health. Obesity has become a serious problem for both boys and girls, but rather more so for boys. According to a study prepared for the US Department of Health and Human Services, “The obesity prevalence for male children quadrupled from 5.5% in 1976–1980 to 21.6% in 2007–2008. For female children, the obesity prevalence tripled from 5.8% in 1976–1980 to 17.7% in 2007–2008.”30 Diet is a big part of the problem, but lack of exercise is as well. Strenuous rough-and-tumble play is part of the solution. And it is something most boys will happily do on their own—if their elders were not so b
usy discouraging it.

  Figure 10

  Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

  Zero Tolerance for Boys

  On February 2, 2010, nine-year-old Patrick Timoney was marched to the principal’s office and threatened with suspension when he was caught in the cafeteria with a weapon. More precisely, he was found playing with a tiny LEGO soldier armed with a two-inch rifle. It was his favorite toy and he had brought it to school to show his friends. As he sat in the office, frightened and in tears, the principal, Evelyn Matroianni, called security administrators in the New York Department of Education for guidance. She confiscated the toy and summoned his parents to school for a conference. Patrick avoided suspension by signing an official statement and promising never again to bring a weapon to school. A spokesman for the Department of Education explained to reporters that the principal was just following the “no tolerance policy” that proscribes weapons at school.31

  Zero-tolerance policies became popular in the 1990s as youth crime seemed to be surging and schools were coping with a rash of shootings. These policies mandate severe punishments—often suspension or expulsion—for any student who brings weapons or drugs to school, or who threatens others. Sanctions apply to all violations—regardless of the student’s motives, the seriousness of the offense, or extenuating circumstances. School officials embraced zero tolerance because it seemed like the best way to make schools safe, plus it had the advantage of consistency. Inform students of the rules and subject everyone to the same punishments regardless of particular circumstances. Yes, the occasional student will be punished too harshly, but why not err on the side of caution?

  But in many schools the policy has been taken to absurd extremes. More often than not, it is boys who are suffering. Here are a few recent examples of zero tolerance at work.

  • 2011: Ten-year-old Nicholas Taylor, a fifth grader at the David Youree Elementary School in Smyrna, Tennessee, was sentenced to sit alone at lunch for six days. His crime? Waving around a slice of pizza that had been chewed to resemble a gun.

  • 2010: David Morales, an eight-year-old in Providence, Rhode Island, ran afoul of zero tolerance when, for a special class project, he brought in a camouflage hat with little plastic army men glued on the flap.

  • 2009: Zachary Christie, six, of Newark, Delaware, excited to be a new Cub Scout, packed his camping utensil in his lunch box. The gadget, which can be used as a knife, fork, or spoon, prompted school officials to charge him with possession of a weapon. Zachary faced forty-five days in the district’s reform school but was later granted a reprieve by the school board and suspended for five days.32

  It is tempting to dismiss these cases as aberrational. They are not. Punishing minor cases is not an unfortunate lapse: it is the heart of the policy. In defense of the schools, Jennifer Jankowski, a special education director at the school where Cub Scout Zachary Christie was suspended, explained to a reporter that “if Zachary or another student had been hurt by the knife, the district would have taken the blame. . . . There’s more to the school’s side than just us being mean and not taking this child’s interests into account.”33 She is right of course, but it is still hard to see why common sense cannot be factored into the mix. School officials should be permitted to consider the student’s motives, past behavior, and seriousness of the offense. But, of course, such discretion violates the take-no-prisoners logic behind zero tolerance.

  Under the zero-tolerance regime, suspension rates have increased dramatically. In 1974, 1.7 million children in grades K–12 were suspended from the nation’s schools. By 2007, when the K–12 population had increased by 5 percent, the number of suspensions had nearly doubled to 3.3 million—nearly 70 percent of them boys.34 In 2007, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, 32 percent of boys in grades 9 through 12 had been suspended compared with 17 percent of girls.35

  School suspensions, more than other punishments like detention, alternative classrooms, or community service, appear to accelerate a student’s disengagement from school. Not only do students fall further behind in their studies, many of them enjoy what is often an unsupervised vacation from school. Also, if students perceive a punishment to be excessive, capricious, and unjust, this weakens the bond between them and the adults who are supposed to be their mentors. According to psychologists James Comer and Alvin Poussaint, suspensions can make it “more difficult for you to work with the child in school—he or she no longer trusts you.”36

  There is not a lot of research documenting a direct correlation between suspension and school failure, but one recent study by two economists, Marianne Bertrand (University of Chicago) and Jessica Pan (National University of Singapore) should give anyone pause. After controlling for reading and math scores, race, gender, and birth year, Bertrand and Pan quantified the damage: “We observe a negative relationship between school suspension and future educational outcomes.”37 For example, a single suspension lowers a student’s chances of graduating from high school by 17 percent and the likelihood of attending college by 16 percent.38 With so many boys at risk of academic failure, it would seem that suspensions should be reserved for the most egregious cases.

  Zero tolerance was originally conceived as a means of ridding schools of violent predators and drug users. Who could object to that? But careful reviews of the policy show that most students are suspended for minor acts of insubordination and defiance.39 No one is suggesting that such misconduct go unpunished. But there are many other ways to correct bad behavior besides suspension—ways shown to be much more effective.40 Preventive programs appear to work best. In 2009, 2,740 at-risk Chicago boys in grades seven through ten took part in a life skills/ethics program called Becoming a Man: Sports Edition. Most of them had low grade point averages, had missed many weeks of school, and more than one third had been arrested. A carefully designed two-year University of Chicago study found that by the end of the program, their grades and school engagement had improved, prospects for graduation brightened (by as much as 10 percent to 23 percent). Compared to a control group, arrests diminished by 44 percent.41

  In 2008, a task force for the American Psychological Association (APA) published a thorough review of literature on the efficacy of zero-tolerance policies. “Despite a 20-year history of implementation,” the report concluded, “there are surprisingly few data that could directly test the assumptions of a zero-tolerance approach to school discipline, and the data that are available tend to contradict those assumptions.”42 Put another way, they found no evidence that it worked. But the evidence that it harmed boys was unequivocal. Not only are young boys being shamed and treated as deviants for bringing the wrong toys to school, but suspension may be correlated with school disengagement, poor achievement, and dropping out.43

  The APA authors also noted that fears of school violence have been greatly exaggerated. While all violence is unacceptable, “the evidence does not support an assumption that violence in our schools is out of control or increasing.”44 But might it be that zero-tolerance policies had themselves suppressed school violence? The APA found no evidence for that. After controlling for socioeconomic factors, the task force found that schools with zero-tolerance policies had more behavior problems than those using other methods. School climate was worse, not better, under zero tolerance. Furthermore, far from making punishment more predictable and fair, the policy was applied unevenly—with African American boys most severely affected. The authors also found a negative correlation between the use of suspensions and academic achievement.45 These uniformly negative findings raised a question: what had prompted schools to adopt such a draconian policy in the first place?

  The Superpredators

  To understand the evolution of zero tolerance, and the increasingly harsh treatment of even minor behavioral infractions among young boys, we need to recall the widespread fear of youth violence that prevailed in the mid-1990s. On January 15, 1996, Time magazine ran a cover story about a “teenage time bomb.�
� Said Time, “They are just four, five, and six years old right now, but already they are making criminologists nervous.”46 The “they” were little boys who would soon grow into cold-blooded killers capable of “remorseless brutality.” The story was based on alarming findings by several eminent criminologists, including James Q. Wilson (then at UCLA). Wilson had extrapolated from a famous 1972 study of the juvenile delinquency rate among young people born in Philadelphia in 1945 and estimated that within five years—by 2010—the nation would be plagued by “30,000 more muggers, killers and thieves.”47 John J. DiIulio Jr., then a professor in Princeton’s Department of Politics, invoked Wilson’s findings and coined a chilling cognomen for the rising violent horde: superpredators.48 DiIulio believed that deteriorating social conditions were making matters much worse: Refining Wilson’s definitions and extrapolations, he forecasted that “by the year 2010, there will be approximately 270,000 more juvenile superpredators on the streets than there were in 1990.”49 In a 1996 book, DiIulio and two coauthors, William J. Bennett and John P. Walters, proclaimed: “America is now home to thickening ranks of juvenile ‘superpredators’—radically impulsive, brutally remorseless youngsters, including ever more preteenage boys . . . the youngest, biggest, and baddest generation any society has ever known.”50

  The fear of rising youth violence translated easily into fear of rising school violence, with support from additional research. Dewey Cornell, a forensic psychologist and professor of education at the University of Virginia, reports in his 2006 book, School Violence: Fears Versus Facts, “The perception that schools were dangerous seemed to be confirmed by a widely publicized report on school problems.”51 According to the report, when teachers in 1940 had been asked about “top problems in school,” they had listed chewing gum, running in halls, and not putting paper in the wastebasket. Asked the same question in the 1990s, teachers listed rape, robbery, and assault. The story of the contrasting lists and the contemporary school jungle culture entered the media echo chamber and was repeated thousands of times.