aus The
Sunday Times, London; November 18, 2007
Boys must be boys – for all our
sakes
Our uptight, risk-averse world is denying
boys the outlets they need to grow up into civilised, successful adults, writes
Sue Palmer
Ryan was eight when
he tried to kill himself. He saved up his Ritalin tablets until there seemed to
be enough for an overdose, then knocked them back and waited to die. Later,
after he had been very sick, his mum asked why he had done it. “Because I’m too
naughty,” he said. “I’m just a nuisance to everyone.”
Ryan is constantly in
trouble at school and at home. He has been diagnosed with ADHD (attention deficit
hyperactivity disorder), a “developmental disorder” involving problems with concentration and self-control.
ADHD did not
exist as a
medical condition until 40 years ago
but is now thought to affect about 5% of the population. The vast majority of
sufferers are male.
Last year I published
a book called Toxic Childhood,
looking for reasons behind recorded increases in children’s behavioural and
learning difficulties over the past 20 or so years. I concluded that rapid
social and cultural change – junk food, poor sleeping patterns, a screen-based
lifestyle, marketing pressures, family upheavals – were interfering with
healthy development.
It was clear from my
research that behavioural and learning difficulties hit boys hardest.
Educationally, for instance, many now fall at the first fence and never
recover: boys are three times as likely as girls to need extra help with
reading at primary school, and by the time they reach GCSE they trail behind in
almost every subject on the curriculum. Indeed, less than a century after
women’s emancipation, female students significantly outnumber male ones at
British universities.
Behavioural disorders
such as ADHD are about four times more likely to affect boys and so are the
emotional, behavioural and mental health problems that, according to the
British Medical Association, now beset 10-20% of our children and teenagers. As
these sorts of problems in teenage boys all too often lead to school failure,
disaffection and antisocial behaviour, there are powerful reasons for trying to
solve them.
So I’m now
researching another book to find out why the modern world seems particularly
toxic for boys. It’s already clear that the sort of behaviour we require from
our offspring in an uptight, urban, risk-averse and increasingly bureaucratic society comes far less naturally to
infant males than to their sisters.
Take the “naughtiness”
that is wrecking life for Ryan and those around him. There have always been
naughty boys, but in the past the activities of scamps, scrumpers and
scallywags were usually shrugged off as high spirits. Fictional rascals, like
Huck Finn and William Brown, clearly viewed themselves as heroes, not suicidal
victims.
The big difference
between Ryan’s miserable existence and that of youngsters in the past is that,
until the end of the 20th century, much of boys’ boisterous behaviour went
unnoticed and unrestrained by adults. There was time, space and freedom for
lads to run off steam. Even when shades of the prison house did close around
the growing boy, the time at the edges of the school or working day was still
his own and the local woods and hills were his natural habitat.
This is not simply a
case of “blue-remembered hills” – the tendency of adults to romanticise
childhood. There have, of course, been periods in the past when children were
mercilessly exploited and probably had little time or energy to play, but most
historical accounts of boyhood, even recent urban ones, involve a degree of
freedom to roam that seems unthinkable today.
There are many
reasons behind contemporary parents’ reluctance to let their children play
outside, one of which is a very reasonable fear about increases in traffic.
Another is the far less reasonable and generalised fear of “stranger danger”
which, in today’s highly anxious climate, parents seem unable to keep at bay,
even when they know that child abduction is no more likely today than it was in
their own youth. But perhaps the most significant reason for most of the
parents I speak to is the fear of being thought irresponsible.
In an increasingly
risk-averse society it has become the mark of a good parent to keep one’s child under
careful scrutiny at all times. As “responsible” parents have increasingly locked their children away, there has been a change in
the attitude of the public to unsupervised children. In the past few years,
communities in all areas of the country have become far less tolerant of boys’
outdoor play, even when it’s not particularly rambunctious.
A teacher told me
recently of a small group of boys who were playing behind her house during the
school holidays, making go-karts from bits of junk. She was stunned when a
letter was posted through her door by a neighbour, urging her to help to move
the children on. “They may be making go-karts today,” the letter explained,
“but they could be vandalising our cars tomorrow.”
Boys have a deep biological need to be
out and about.
According to evolutionary biologists, the brains of newborn human babies have
not changed significantly since Cro-Magnon times, so infant males are still
born with the genetic encoding of Stone Age hunters. As they grow their bodies
yearn to rehearse this masculine role: they need to run across fields, clamber
through the undergrowth, fashion tools and weapons, push boundaries, take
risks. If they don’t fulfil these needs, they are likely to suffer in terms
of
development: physically, emotionally, socially, cognitively.
Humanity has, of
course, come a long way since Stone Age times, not least because of our
remarkable and unique ability to pass on our culture to our young. Through the
ages this has made the human race more civilised, more democratic and more able
to live a peaceful, social existence. Part of the civilisation process has been
finding ways of gradually redirecting boys’ primitive male instinct to hunt
(and fight) along channels that suit the economic circumstances of the day. But
it is a gradual process and can’t be rushed.
Sadly we seem to have
reached a stage where adult citizens have “civilised” themselves out of a sense
of shared humanity. In a society driven by individualism, selfish consumerism
and rights legislation, it’s easy for powerful groups (such as neighbours with
no small children of their own) to assert their rights over those of less
powerful groups, and children are the least powerful members of society. When
adults deny children the right to play – out of fear, risk aversion or sheer
intolerance – they threaten the long-term health not only of those children but
of society itself.
Sometimes children realise this
for themselves, even if adults do not. When teachers in Newcastle banned the
game of tag [fangen], Hannan, one of the
teenage pupils affected, had this to say: “To be
honest, adults can be very stupid at times. They ban everything for health and
safety reasons. If they are going to ban very simple stuff like this, they
might as well lock all kids in empty rooms to keep them safe. Kids should be
allowed to experiment, otherwise when they grow up they will make very stupid
mistakes from not having enough experiences in childhood.” Even in the 21st
century we still have to civilise our young, balancing their natural instincts
with the requirements of society. This is what “bringing up” children means.
During the first 10 years or so, parents and teachers have to bring these Stone
Age babies up through 10 millenniums of human culture, civilising, socialising
and educating them for the world in which they will live.
The process has
always been more difficult with boys, since prototype hunters are less
naturally inclined to social niceties than their sisters, the prototype
nurturers. And as our urban, technology driven lifestyle moves us ever further
away from our biological heritage, it becomes even more of a challenge.
The sensible approach
– adopted in Scandinavian countries, with their outdoor forest schools and long
period of informal preschool education – is to acknowledge boys’ biological
drives and to take them into account, while gradually introducing all children
to the sorts of behaviour that society requires.
There is a general
awareness of children’s developmental needs among parents, politicians and the
public in the Nordic countries, which means that everyone takes a more
broad-minded and tolerant attitude to the undersevens?!, especially boys, and play is valued
as an essential part of their early learning.
Giving boys leeway [Spielraum] in the early years pays off
long-term. With time and space to develop physical, emotional and social
skills, they acquire greater levels of self-control and empathy. As time goes
by, they can therefore be expected to behave with greater consideration to their
more venerable neighbours.
Meanwhile, those
neighbours, having smiled indulgently at the little lads when they saw them
playing outside as toddlers, are unlikely to feel threatened by them as they
grow up. The early leeway pays off in cognitive terms, too: despite starting the formal teaching of
reading two years later [!] than we do in Britain, Sweden
and Finland regularly top the international league for achievement in literacy.
The contrast between
Scandinavian tolerance of children’s needs and current Anglo-Saxon practices
could not be more stark. In hyper-competitive hard-nosed Britain, the public,
parents and politicians all seem to feel that there’s no time to waste on
running about and playing. Our children, especially those wayward [widerborstig] boys, must be fast-tracked into “sensible” adult-like behaviour
as soon as possible. Since we are not prepared to provide the safe open spaces
needed for play, they also have to be fast-forwarded into a sedentary,
screen-based 21st-century lifestyle.
So from their very
earliest years many boys in Britain today have little means of fulfilling their
instinctive need for activity and risk. They are plonked from babyhood in front
of the television (or, in more aspirational households, Baby Einstein DVDs) to
watch other people moving about rather than getting down and dirty themselves.
At nursery, boys are
corralled with a host of other children, mostly indoors so that energetic play
is out of the question. Even outdoors there is often restraint: toddlers in the
nursery down the road from me are exercised on leads in our local park, three
children per nursery worker. This fulfils health and safety regulations – but
leaves their charges with less freedom of movement than the average family dog.
When proper school
starts – which
it does in Britain earlier than anywhere else in the world? – children must knuckle down
straight away to reading and writing. But when they are denied the
rough-and-tumble [balgen] activity
that develops physical coordination and control, many five-year-old boys are
simply unable to focus on a book or wield a pencil.
They find class
lessons, trying to sit still “on the mat” while the teacher explains the
mysteries of phonics, bewildering and intolerable. (“It wastes your time, sitting on the
mat,” one little
boy said to a researcher. “It wastes your life,” chimed in his mate dolefully.)
So boys who are too
immature to settle sufficiently often fail to pick up the basic skills that
underpin the three Rs of reading, writing and arithmetic, and then tumble into
a cycle of school failure, guaranteed to add to their antisocial tendencies.
As we move further
into the 21st century, our young men will need physical control, emotional
resilience and social competence to meet the challenges ahead; and one of those
challenges, unless we act very soon, will be dealing with the threat to society
posed by Ryan and the growing band of “lost boys”, as they follow the horribly
predictable downward spiral of school failure, teenage disaffection, violence
and crime.
If British society is
to keep up with the frantic pace of change, we must acknowledge not just where
we are going to but where we have come from. Every baby born is a link between
the future of the human race and its remote, primitive past; and if boys are
not allowed to be boys – for the first few years at least – a growing number of
them are likely to reject the cultural treasures that we have spent 10
millenniums acquiring.
Sue Palmer’s Detoxing Childhood:
What Parents Need to Know to Raise Happy, Successful Children (Orion,
£9.99) is out now
