8
DETOX
We have already considered many strategies to counteract the five factors that are derailing so many boys and undermining the motivation of many young men. Now we’re going to pull those strategies together.

The First Factor: Changes in Education

If you and I had the resources and the authority to remake education, we could at least set a course that might assuage the harm being done to boys and girls by twenty-first-century educational practices. The first thing we’d do would be to restore kindergarten as kindergarten, so that every child’s first experience of schooling could be a positive experience. We’d push the emphasis on literacy and numeracy back to where it belongs, out of kindergarten and into first and second grade. We’d put Kenntnis and Wissenschaft back in balance, so that kids wouldn’t be asked to learn about frogs and tadpoles until they’ve had some opportunity to play with real live frogs and tadpoles—not merely images on a computer screen. We’d give teachers more freedom to reintroduce competitive formats, preferably using team strategies, to engage children who flourish in those settings without disadvantaging kids who don’t need that approach.
But you and I are not likely to have that authority or those resources any time soon. What can we do in the meantime? How can you do what’s best in the world we’re living in right now?
First: know what’s going on in your school. If your school’s kindergarten is like most kindergartens today, with an accelerated curriculum focusing on reading and math skills, you should seriously consider not enrolling your son until he is six. That one-year delay can make a world of difference. Visit the school before your son reaches kindergarten age. Talk to the principal. If possible, spend some time observing a classroom. Those activities should give you a good idea of the school’s academic expectations and the strategies they employ to achieve them. If the teacher says, “We expect all our kindergarten children to be reading by February at the latest,” that’s a clue that your five-year-old son might not thrive at that school.
Look at the kids. Are they having fun? Is there a playful mood in the room? Do they have a chance to run around? Do they have some contact with nature, preferably outdoors, every day? Looking at goldfish through the glass pane of an aquarium does not count as “contact with nature” for this purpose. Remember that Kenntnis requires that a child touch, smell, and really experience the natural object. Just looking at nature through glass, or through the bars of a cage, isn’t sufficient.
Second: Once your child is enrolled in school, if you see that the school is not providing a good learning experience for him, then team up with your fellow parents. Talk to your parent-teacher association (PTA), parent-teacher organization (PTO), parent-teacher-student association (PTSA), or whatever your school calls this group. Don’t approach the principal or other school administrators by yourself. There’s power in numbers. Recruit half a dozen like-minded parents and approach the principal as a group. One parent is just an annoyance. Six parents can’t be ignored. Six parents acting together can change things. I’ve seen it happen. That’s just as true at the high school level as it is at elementary school.
Find out how students are tested. If the only assessments that count are pencil-and-paper tests assessing Wissenschaft, then the leadership of that school may not understand the all-important balance between Kenntnis and Wissenschaft. Does the school offer outlets for team competition within the school—not just athletically, but also academically? (Please reread chapter 2 if you’re fuzzy on the rationale behind these recommendations.)
A few simple changes might accomplish a great deal. In Nebraska, for example, school leaders statewide have introduced testing formats that emphasize experiential learning, Kenntnis, rather than book learning, Wissenschaft. Elementary school students in Nebraska are now being tested on their knowledge of electricity not with a pencil-and-paper test, but by being given an electric circuit to assemble: if they assemble the circuit correctly, a small motor on the circuit board begins to whir, and a bell sounds. Nebraska educators are pleased with the results. Now other educators from as far away as California, Hawaii, and Vermont are coming to Nebraska to see how it works. “Any state can do [what Nebraska is doing],” says George Wood, director of the Forum for Education and Democracy, a nonprofit organization that supports the Nebraska initiative. “It’s just a matter of whether they have the courage.”1 Unfortunately, the United States Department of Education prefers the pencil-and-paper tests. What’s novel about the Nebraska initiative is that administrators are using the experiential tests instead of pencil-and-paper tests. There’s already plenty of emphasis on pencil-and-paper tests throughout the curriculum. The Nebraska school administrators are trying to restore some balance between experiential methods and didactic methods, even—or rather, especially—in testing and assessment.
If your son is struggling at school, but your school seems to be doing a good job regarding the balance between Kenntnis and Wissenschaft, and the academic demands are not developmentally inappropriate, then you might also consider trying to establish a single-sex classroom for him. Single-sex education allows the school to create an alternative culture in which it’s cool to study, in which team competition for academics is the most natural format imaginable, and in which restoring Kenntnis to its rightful place is likely to yield immediate positive results. Because of a recent change in federal regulations effected jointly by Senator Hillary Clinton (D-New York) and Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas), single-sex education is now fully legal in American public schools.2 More information about the nuts and bolts of establishing a single-sex classroom—how to organize your fellow parents, how to approach the school leadership, what resources are available, and so forth—is available at www.BoysAdrift.com.
There’s a lot at stake. I personally have been involved with schools that have made tremendous improvements in boys’ engagement in school with relatively minor changes in school format. For example, at elementary schools in Waterloo, Iowa, and in Chicago, teachers have reported extraordinary gains in boys’ achievement simply by making sitting optional. In these classrooms, some boys sit at their chairs; other boys stand; a few boys crouch on the floor. At the Midwestern conference of the National Association for Single Sex Public Education (NASSPE) in Chicago in October 2006, teachers Betsy Stahler and Jill Renn shared with us how the boys’ performance at their Chicago school soared after they introduced this new policy—sitting is optional—along with adjustable-height desks, which can be lowered to a comfortable height for the boy who prefers to work on the floor, and raised above standard height for the boy who prefers to stand.3 At another school, in Waterloo, Iowa, boys from low-income families are on fire with enthusiasm for schoolwork—and their teacher, Jeff Ferguson, told me that a big reason for that enthusiasm is simply that the boys don’t have to sit down if they don’t want to. They can stand, or they can lie on the floor—whatever they like, as long as they are not bothering or distracting their neighbor.4 These classrooms are all single-sex, incidentally. A sitting-is-optional policy is typically more difficult to implement successfully in coed classrooms.
But please remember: If you are asking your school to make changes, avoid an adversarial approach. Remember that teachers and the administrators fundamentally want what you want: they want girls and boys to be excited about learning. Lend your principal this book. Buy your son’s teacher Richard Louv’s Last Child in the Woods, an excellent testament to the power of nature to enrich children’s lives.
American parents are not alone in their concern about their boys’ education. There’s growing focus internationally on the disengagement of boys from schools. Parents in other countries have come up with imaginative strategies that are beginning to bear fruit—most of which are unknown to us in the United States. One particularly exciting innovation is the rapidly growing Waldkindergarten movement in German-speaking Europe: Germany, Austria, and northeastern Switzerland.
Waldkindergarten means literally “forest kindergarten.” These are kindergartensr that have no building, no walls. The children meet the teacher in a local park or wooded area, every day, all year round. They may spend a day, or several days, just studying a dozen trees: sniffing each tree, playing in the leaves if it’s autumn, learning about the seasonal cycles and life cycles of these trees, making a seesaw out of fallen limbs on an old stump.
The first questions American parents ask when they hear about Waldkindergarten is: “What do they do when the weather’s bad? What if it snows? What if there’s a heavy rain?” The answer the Germans give is always some variation of Es gibt kein schlechtes Wetter, nur ungeeignete Kleidung: “There’s no such thing as bad weather, just unsuitable clothes.”s If you watch these children playing in the snow, you realize how true that is. We parents don’t like blizzards because bad weather slows us down. But five-year-olds love blizzards. With proper supervision, a five-year-old playing in snow is in no more jeopardy than a five-year-old on a playground in summertime.
Roland Gorges, a professor of education at Darmstadt College (just south of Frankfurt), assessed children in fourth grade, several years after they left the Waldkindergarten. He found that boys who start school in a Waldkindergarten are much less likely to be diagnosed with ADHD, and typically are more attentive in school in fourth grade, compared with boys from the same neighborhood who attended a conventional kindergarten.5
The Waldkindergarten movement is one of the fastest-growing education trends in Europe right now.6 American educators and parents would do well to learn about it. You can find out more about Waldkindergarten (in English) and related initiatives at www.BoysAdrift.com.

The Second Factor: Video Games

In chapter 3, we considered four strategies to help your son reengage with the real world, so that he will have less need for the artificial world of video games. Any intervention is more likely to be effective if you provide an alternative outlet for whatever boyish impulse you are trying to redirect. So if you are going to restrict your son’s access to video games, you need to direct him to an alternative that is more exciting, more real, than anything video games can offer. Let me tell you about RaceLegal.

RaceLegal

The morning of February 17, 2008, I unfolded my copy of the Sunday Washington Post to see a horrifying photograph of a white Ford Crown Victoria surrounded by debris, while emergency personnel carried a hastily-wrapped corpse past the car. Young men had been drag racing on an underutilized public road in Maryland, not too far from my home. The street racing community had gotten out the word that there would be a race. A crowd of more than fifty adults had gathered in the pre-dawn darkness to watch. The driver of the Crown Victoria wasn’t part of the race and had no idea that people were standing in the street to watch the drag racers speed away. There were no barriers on the street, though, and nothing to stop the oncoming car from plowing into the crowd of spectators at full speed. Eight people were killed, and many more were injured. All the dead were men.
Street racing has been a major problem in the Washington area for a number of years now. Despite the best efforts of area police to crack down on the problem, each year there’s a new toll of dead and injured, and the toll is rising. There has to be a better solution.
There is. The solution has a name. It’s called “RaceLegal,” or “Beat the Heat,” or “Top Cop Racing,” or “Street Legal Drags.” Here’s the story.
In 2002, San Diego was experiencing a surge of deaths and injuries due to teenage boys racing their cars on city streets. That year, fourteen teenagers were killed and thirty-one were seriously injured in street racing accidents. Stephen Bender, then a professor of epidemiology at San Diego State University, said that street racing had become an “epidemic”—and as an epidemiologist, he knew exactly what he was talking about when he used the word “epidemic.”
Professor Bender secured funding to launch a legal alternative to street racing, which he named RaceLegal. He obtained permission to use the access road for Qualcomm Stadium, the huge stadium owned by the San Diego Chargers football team, as a venue for the races. Any teenager could race: all they needed was a valid driver’s license and proof that they had the owner’s permission to race the car. Initially, few drivers showed up. Boys didn’t see the point of paying to race at the stadium when they could race for free on city streets. So San Diego made the punishment for street racing more severe. Undercover cops began videotaping the races; then they would show up at racers’ homes with a tow truck. “We handcuff them, put them in jail, impound the car for thirty days for $1,000, suspend their licenses for one year, fine them $1,500 and put two points on their license,” said Sgt. Greg Sloan, who headed the unit. “If you get caught street racing for a second time, your car is forfeited forever—even if it’s your parents’ or a rental—and you get [more] jail time.” The county prosecuted 290 cases under the law in 2001, 155 in 2002, 60 in 2003, and fewer in each subsequent year until 2007, when the program was shut down altogether for lack of business. The key was to create that “closed-loop system, including enforcement and a legal outlet,” said Lydia DeNecochea, program director for RaceLegal. “We’ve had a real turnaround.”7
San Diego County officials now credit the RaceLegal program with a 98 percent drop in injuries and deaths due to street racing. “There is no doubt in my mind, nor among my colleagues, that the viable legal option of the RaceLegal program has contributed to the dramatic decline of illegal street racing,” said Captain Glen Revell of the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department. “And we see it as a decline in racing as well as deaths and injuries. We don’t see the organized events we once did.” Officer Scott Thompson of the San Diego Police Department agrees: “RaceLegal has been truly overwhelmingly effective in addressing the problem.”8
Professor Bender’s idea is catching on. In Noble, Oklahoma, teenage drivers pay $15 to race on Friday evenings at the Thunder Valley Raceway Park. “Beat the Heat” events on the second Friday of every month match high school kids racing their own cars against Noble’s police officers driving police cruisers.9 “Beat the Heat” now has similar programs operating in thirty states around the United States, as well as in Ontario and British Columbia.10 A similar program in Tampa, Florida, is called “Top Cop Racing.”11 In Redding, California, “Street Legal Drags” regularly attracts about 200 drivers for each event, with more than 2,000 spectators.12
I have seen parents squirm uneasily in their chairs when I praise the RaceLegal program. Some parents are understandably less than enthusiastic about allowing teenage boys with no special training to race at speeds reaching 100 mph. I remind these parents that RaceLegal uses a straight track just one-eighth of a mile long, with no turns. Professor Bender’s program has never had any driver seriously injured during a RaceLegal event. More to the point: Telling boys not to race on the street just isn’t effective unless you provide a legal alternative.

What Does This Have to Do with Video Games?

Here’s the connection: RaceLegal and programs like it are the best answer to the question, “What do I do after I’ve thrown my son’s PlayStation and Xbox in the garbage?” If your son has been playing a motocross video game for hours, take him out to a motocross track, rent him a motorbike, and let him take some lessons doing the real thing. He may complain. He may say that he prefers the sanitized video game version over getting on an actual bike and going around an actual track. Challenge him. “Video games are just an imitation. Video games are just pretend,” you might remind him. “This is the real thing. You’re a big boy now. You can do this.”
Boys who prefer the video game version over the real thing are making a choice very similar to boys who prefer online pornography to interacting with real girls. In fact, it’s often the same boy: the boy who spends hours every day on his video game addiction is commonly, in my experience, at risk for preferring online pornography to real interactions with real girls.
If your son is addicted to first-person-shooter role-playing games such as Grand Theft Auto, you might think that this strategy can’t be applied. After all, you can’t very well let him loose on the streets and tell him to go carjack some late-model sports car and then murder police officers. But these boys usually have at least a smidgen of Nietzsche’s will to power (see chapter 3), and often more than a smidgen. They don’t shy away from physical confrontation—or at least they like to think they won’t. Sign this boy up for a contact sport that involves real contact, such as football or rugby. Colliding at full speed with another boy, hitting him so hard “that the snot flew out of my nose and I couldn’t breathe” (as one boy enthusiastically described it to me), goes a long way toward satisfying the same urge that otherwise might drive that boy to play Grand Theft Auto.
This point is counterintuitive to many parents, especially mothers. “Why would any boy, especially my son, want to collide with another boy so hard that snot flies out of his nose and he can’t breathe?” The answer is: because some boys are like that, and he’s that kind of boy.13 Celebrate the fact. Co-opt that desire to hit hard and use it to help your son become an athlete, instead of a video game addict.
In Why Gender Matters, I quoted an experienced school counselor who said, “you can’t change a bully into a flower child. But you can change him into a knight.” I would adapt that insight in the context of video games. “You can’t change a video game addict into a kid who loves chatting on the phone for hours. But you can change him into a competitive athlete.”

The Third Factor: Medications for ADHD

In chapter 4, we saw how easy it is nowadays for a boy to acquire the label of “attention deficit.” We saw how changes in education over the past three decades have contributed to a twenty-fold increase in the prescribing of medications for ADHD. Thirty years ago, elementary schools didn’t expect a five- or a six-year-old boy to sit still and be quiet for hours at a stretch. Today they do. The result, as child psychiatrist Dr. Elizabeth Roberts recently observed, is that “Parents and teachers today seem to believe that any boy who wriggles in his seat and willfully defies his teacher’s rules has ADHD.”14 Rather than question the wisdom of a curriculum that requires five-year-old boys to sit still and be quiet, it’s easier just to prescribe the medication. After all, what’s the harm?
We also saw the harm done by such an approach. We also learned why an empirical trial of medication for ADHD is a bad idea. The “try it, you’ll like it” school of medicine is not a good choice when it comes to prescribing these medications for your son.
So what should you do when the school suggests that your son has ADHD? First of all, insist on a formal assessment by a qualified professional who is not biased in favor of diagnosing ADHD. In most cases that person should not be your child’s primary care physician, because primary care physicians—pediatricians and family physicians—are not usually well-versed in the diagnostic subtleties involved in distinguishing ADHD from other explanations for why a boy might be inattentive or “hyper” in the classroom. Too often, primary care physicians—particularly in affluent suburban communities—may suggest a trial of medication “just to see if it works.” Bad idea.
Many school districts employ psychologists specifically to do this type of assessment. Unfortunately, I have found that these psychologists are generally not a good choice. They usually have too many kids to evaluate and not enough time to evaluate them. More important: if the psychologist agrees that the boy has ADHD, then his or her job is done, that child’s name can be crossed off the list of kids who need to be assessed, and everybody’s happy, at least as far as the psychologist’s colleagues in the school district are concerned.
If your son attends a private school, a similar process takes place. I have found that the psychologists recommended by private schools never find fault with the school; instead, they almost invariably agree with the teachers’ assessment that the boy has ADHD.
If the psychologist disagrees with the teachers’ assessment and questions the diagnosis of ADHD, that psychologist may quickly get into trouble. That’s because very often, when a boy isn’t paying attention, the problem is not with the boy but with the way he is being taught. You need a psychologist who has the courage and the independence to say to the school: “This boy doesn’t have a problem. The school has a problem. The school is making developmentally inappropriate demands on this boy, and the school must change its ways.” If a five- or six- or seven-year-old boy can’t sit still and be quiet without fidgeting, he doesn’t necessarily have ADHD. He shouldn’t be put on medication just to keep him still. Instead, the school should recognize that expecting all young boys to sit still and be quiet simply isn’t compatible with what we know about child development. If you move that child into a boy-friendly classroom (see chapter 2 for more detail about what that means), then that boy may do very well.
This statement is not conjecture. I have been involved with schools in Chicago; Waterloo, Iowa; Deland, Florida; and elsewhere, encompassing boys from many different socioeconomic and racial backgrounds, where boys previously labeled as “ADHD” have become high-achieving, academically proficient students—without medication—simply by changing a gender-blind classroom into a boy-friendly classroom. This transformation does not require any change in class size or per-pupil funding, just an improved awareness on the part of the faculty regarding what constitutes a boy-friendly classroom.
I used to stop right there. I used to say to parents, “Find a courageous psychologist to evaluate your child.” If the parents couldn’t find one, they were welcome to come to my office. Because I am both a medical doctor and a psychologist, I am qualified to do the formal assessment—which may take four hours or more, over two visits—and I can also prescribe medication, if that should be necessary.
It’s getting harder to find a psychologist willing to challenge the steamroller that’s pushing so many kids onto medications. Medication is quick and easy—or so it seems to many parents. It’s certainly easier than switching schools, and easier than trying to get your child’s school to change its ways. Most important, the medication often “works,” making the child is less fidgety and more attentive. What’s not to like?
What’s not to like, as we saw in chapter 4, is that these medications may damage a crucial area of the brain responsible for drive and motivation. What’s not to like is that young children are being medicated to make the teacher’s job easier—not because it’s in the best interest of the child, but because it simplifies classroom management.
So if you’re not convinced that your son needs to be on medication, and you can’t find a courageous psychologist in your neighborhood, what can you do?
You may have to do some part of the assessment yourself. So let’s call this next section:
A parent’s guide to neurodevelopment assessment, with special attention to ADHD, for boys in elementary school (middle school and high school come next).
In assessing whether your child or any child has ADHD, you need to understand the five official criteria for diagnosing ADHD, adapted here from the official source, the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, 4th Edition (DSM-IV). A child must meet all five criteria to be diagnosed as having ADHD.
1. Hyperactivity/impulsivity or inattention. This criterion is generally the easiest to meet. The key point I stress is that it is a necessary but not sufficient criterion for the diagnosis of ADHD. Many boys are hyperactive and/or impulsive and/or inattentive, but that finding alone does not justify the diagnosis of ADHD.
2. Onset before seven years of age. Problems severe enough to cause significant impairment must have been present before age seven.
3. Multiple settings. Impairment due to hyperactivity and/or impulsivity and/or inattention must be present in multiple settings, not just one or two. In young children, this criterion is key to determining which child truly has ADHD. All of us are inattentive from time to time. If you ask me to sit for an hour listening to a lecture about the history of needlepoint, I’ll be inattentive. A boy who is only occasionally inattentive probably doesn’t have ADHD. If your son’s reading and language arts teacher says that he fidgets and doesn’t pay attention, but his science teacher and gym teacher and math teacher all say he’s doing fine, then it’s unlikely that your son has ADHD. Even if most of the teachers report problems, but your son’s Boy Scout troop leader and your son’s soccer coach report no problems, I would still be hesitant about making a diagnosis of ADHD. Children who have problems only at school but not in other settings generally do not have ADHD. Moving that child to a different school—or changing the way the school teaches your son—may fix the problem.
4. Significant impairment in social or academic functioning. What constitutes significant impairment? One boy I saw recently is occasionally inattentive in school and out of school. He’s in third grade, he has plenty of friends, and his grades are mostly B’s with a few C’s. This boy is not significantly impaired. Significant impairment doesn’t mean getting B’s instead of A’s.
The joke I hear in many affluent suburbs is that every child in town is either gifted, or learning-disabled, or both. Some parents just don’t want to hear that the reason their child is getting B’s and a few C’s is because he’s just not that smart. They would rather hear that their child has ADHD and needs medication rather than that their child is merely average, or God forbid, below average.
5. Not attributable to another disorder. Sometimes a child is inattentive, impulsive, and/or hyperactive for reasons that have nothing to do with ADHD. Family problems are a common trigger. At one school I visited—Foley Intermediate School in Foley, Alabama—a teacher, William Bender, told me about a student, let’s call him Damian, who had been an OK student the previous year, in third grade, but this year—fourth grade—he had become impossible. Damian would act out, run around the classroom, defy reasonable requests by teachers and staff, or just sit in his chair like a lump ignoring everything that was said to him. Damian had been assigned to Mr. Bender’s all-boy classroom, where he found it easier to talk about why he was acting out so much. “I figure if I’m bad enough, they’ll call my father to come whup me,” he said with a smile. Damian’s father had abandoned the family the previous summer. The father called once a month, or less.
Mr. Bender took Damian for a walk around the school building.t “Let me tell you something, Damian,” he said.
“I need you to hear this. Your daddy doesn’t call very often. When he calls, he wants to hear good news about you. He wants to hear that you’ve been a good boy, that school’s going good, that everything’s great. If all he hears is your momma complaining about how bad you are, then I guarantee you that he’s not going to want to come back. I’m giving it to you straight, son.” Mr. Bender knew that boys this age don’t want anything sugarcoated.
Damian shaped up. His “attention deficit disorder” vanished as quickly as it had appeared. But please don’t take this story as providing any sort of guidance in counseling the children of divorced or separated parents. That’s not why I included it. Indeed, some professional counselors would take issue with Mr. Bender’s comments to Damian. Some might be concerned that Mr. Bender was encouraging a false hope that Damian’s father might return. I include Damian’s story simply to emphasize that a hyperactive, impulsive boy may be hyperactive and impulsive for reasons that have nothing to do with ADHD.
I’ve seen similar cases involving childhood depression—which can mimic ADHD almost perfectly—as well as bipolar disorder. That’s what the fifth criterion is all about: excluding other diagnoses. Before you take any action, remember that not all children who have a deficit of attention have attention deficit disorder!
 
Of course I’m not really suggesting that you can learn everything a professional needs to know about neurodevelopmental assessment by reading this book. But I think you should at least know some of the terminology and definitions provided here so that you can be a more informed and more capable guardian of your son’s best interests.
Speaking of terminology and definitions, you will find other scales and other instruments to assess ADHD. In the United States, the Connors Rating Scale is a very popular instrument used to “diagnose” ADHD. I put “diagnose” in quotation marks because the Connors Scale doesn’t diagnose anything. It is simply a checklist of characteristics sometimes associated with some aspects of ADHD. But even if a child scores across the board in the ADHD column on the Connors Scale, that child does not necessarily have ADHD. The diagnosis of ADHD is established only if the five criteria listed above are met. I’m not saying the Connors Scale has no role. I do find it of some use as a screening instrument. I’m just putting you on your guard: don’t let anybody substitute their favorite screening instrument for the formal DSM-IV criteria.
Let’s suppose that your son has been assessed and you’re convinced that he does in fact meet all five criteria for ADHD. Once the diagnosis is confirmed, it is appropriate to consider medication as one facet in the program of treatment your consultant has prepared. If you and your consultant are convinced that medication is necessary, I generally recommend starting with one of the safer medications that have been proven effective in the treatment of ADHD in children, a medication such as Strattera or Wellbutrin. Avoid the use of the stimulant medications: Adderall, Ritalin, Concerta, Metadate, Focalin, Daytrana, and their generic equivalents, amphetamine and methylphenidate. If Strattera alone isn’t effective, consider adding a low dose of Wellbutrin, or vice versa. Hold the stimulant medications in reserve. In my experience, the boy with true ADHD who needs 30 mg of Adderall every day to function well at school will often do just as well with 25 mg of Strattera and 5 mg of Adderall. The lower the dose of Adderall or other stimulant medications, the lower the risk of toxicity.
Many doctors are impatient with this approach. Most of the doctors treating children who have been diagnosed with ADHD start with the stimulant medications. Adderall is the most-prescribed medication for ADHD in the United States, followed by Concerta, Metadate, and generic Ritalin. But all these medications pose a risk to the brain that Strattera and Wellbutrin do not pose.

How Often Does a Teenage Boy “Develop” ADHD?

I was asked to evaluate another boy, who had been a star pupil in elementary school. This boy, let’s call him Brad, had earned nearly straight A’s and seemed genuinely to enjoy almost every subject. Then middle school began, and Brad started to disengage. He stopped raising his hand in class. His mother had to nag him to do homework, which she had never had to do before. Several teachers mentioned that Brad seemed to zone out in class. He just wasn’t paying attention, wasn’t concentrating, didn’t seem to care.
“We read up about ADHD online, and he seems to fit the criteria,” his mother said to me.
“Was he having problems like this earlier, a few years ago?” I asked.
“Absolutely not. He was always an honors student in elementary school. In every subject.”
Then he doesn’t fit the criteria, I wanted to say. Specifically, he doesn’t meet criterion #2, “onset of impairment prior to seven years of age.” But I didn’t say that. Instead, I asked his mother, “What’s going on with his social life?”
She gave me a strange look, as if to say: funny you should ask. “His social life has dried up since he started middle school. He used to have two or three good friends. Megan and Ashley were over all the time, Caitlyn would be over once or twice a month. Now—nobody. And the phone never rings.”
“Are Megan and Ashley and Caitlyn at his middle school, in his grade?”
“Yes, that’s what’s strange about it. His best friends from elementary school are all in middle school with him, but they just don’t seem to be friends anymore.”
To make a long story short: Brad doesn’t have ADHD. He’s a gender-atypical boy, a boy who would rather read a book or write a poem rather than play football or tell fart jokes. Such boys often do very well in elementary school, where they often have at least several good friends—usually girls. In middle school, the girls realize that your popularity is largely determined by who you hang with, and the gender-atypical boys are rarely the cool kids. So the girls leave, and these boys are left alone. Sometimes the isolation motivates them to succeed academically, to “show everybody” how smart they are. Sometimes the isolation disengages them from school altogether, as happened with Brad.
After evaluating Brad myself, I concluded that he doesn’t have ADHD. He’s on the border between dysthymia (a mild form of depression) and full-blown clinical depression. He misses his friends. He feels devalued—because his peer group has devalued him. These are serious issues that need serious attention. Ironically, Brad improved substantially after another doctor prescribed Adderall, not because Brad had ADHD but (in my assessment) because of the antidepressant effects of Adderall. A better and safer choice, in terms of medication, would be Desyrel. Desyrel is just as effective as Adderall as an antidepressant, and Desyrel is many times safer than Adderall.
More important, however, Brad needs counseling—and his parents need some help—in developing a new life strategy. I addressed some of the challenges facing gender-atypical boys in chapter 9 of Why Gender Matters. The main point I want to make here is that when a previously successful boy is first “diagnosed” with ADHD after age ten, the correct diagnosis is seldom ADHD.

The Fourth Factor: Endocrine Disruptors

Cargill is a large multinational corporation, with roughly 150,000 employees in sixty-three countries around the world. In September 2005, I spoke to employees at their international headquarters just outside Minneapolis. I learned that Cargill has developed an alternative to plastic made from corn. This material is called PLA (polylactic acid). I drank spring water from a bottle made of Cargill’s PLA. That bottle is indistinguishable from regular “plastic,” except that you don’t taste that subtle plastic taste you get from plastic bottles made from PET, polyethylene terephthalate. Most plastic bottles in the United States and Canada are made from PET.
I met at length with Ann Tucker, director of marketing for NatureWorksPLA, the division of Cargill in charge of developing and promoting the new material. Ms. Tucker used to work for the plastics industry, but she came to Cargill because, as she said, “I want to be on the side of the good guys.” Although she and her colleagues are well aware of the health risks of plastic bottles, they are reluctant to stress that point in their marketing because they don’t want to offend potential megaclients such as Coke and Pepsi. Instead, they emphasize the fact that their material’s cost is stable, whereas the price of PET is rising. PET is made from petroleum. Petroleum is expensive and its price is unstable. Corn is cheap. We rely on other countries for most of our petroleum. We can grow all the corn we need right here in North America. You can link to more information about Cargill’s PLA at www.BoysAdrift.com.
Environmentalists are of course also concerned about the dangers of endocrine disruptors. Environmentalist Web sites such as www.ourstolenfuture.com and www.noharm.org emphasize the risks of environmental estrogens found in plastics and other commercial products. My concern about some of the environmental groups, however, is that they seem to regard big business as the enemy. I think that view is short-sighted. Cargill isn’t the enemy here. Cargill is, as Ms. Tucker observed, on the good guys’ side. Coke and Pepsi aren’t the enemy either. They will introduce safer, more environmentally friendly PLA “plastic” bottles promptly—if enough people insist that they do so. There are some subtle differences between a bottle made from PET and a bottle made from the environmentally friendly PLA. For example, the PLA bottle should not be put into plastic recycling, because it’s not plastic. A separate composting process needs to be available for the PLA bottle. That wouldn’t be hard to establish in your community, or even in your backyard—but big companies are loath to invest the necessary time and effort to educate the consumer. You and I have to drive the conversion of the bottled water and soda industry from PET bottles to bottles made from PLA and similar corn-based products.
Stay informed. Visit Boys Adrift’s Web site, www.BoysAdrift.com, for the latest updates on environmental estrogens and links to sites with up-to-date recommendations.

The Fifth Factor: The Loss of Positive Role Models

Keep in mind J. R. Moehringer’s key insight, which we discussed in the last chapter: “Manhood is mimesis.” A boy is likely to become the kind of man he sees around him. A boy needs role models of healthy masculinity (just as girls need role models of healthy femininity). If you don’t provide him with healthy role models, he may choose the unhealthy role models offered by the marketplace, from rap music or television or movies or even video games. The challenge is analogous to nutrition. Left to their own devices, not many boys will choose broccoli and Brussels sprouts over french fries and ice cream. That’s why they need parents. It’s the job of the parents to guide their son to make the right choice.
In 1997, as a “lame duck,” California governor Pete Wilson proposed establishing single-sex academies within the public school system. The program was eliminated by his successor after just two years. The Ford Foundation awarded a grant to three scholars—Amanda Datnow, Lea Hubbard, and Elisabeth Woody—to assess the effectiveness of the short-lived program.
As a general rule, when researchers evaluate the effectiveness of an educational program, they look at parameters such as grades, test scores, attendance, and discipline referrals. Did the program improve grades and test scores? Did more kids show up for class? Did they behave better in class? Datnow, Hubbard, and Woody asked none of those questions, although they did describe their eighty-six-page report as “comprehensive.” Instead, they focused on whether or not the single-sex program strengthened or weakened gender stereotypes.
These three authors condemned the single-sex initiative on the grounds that it strengthened gender stereotypes. Teachers who failed to deconstruct sexist power relations for their students were criticized. One teacher who received particularly severe criticism was a man who had dared to speak to his students—all boys—about what it means to be a productive man. The teacher had said:
We talked about strength, and we talked about self-control and being able to control your emotions and making sacrifices for others. You know we talked about if you have a family and you only have enough money for two cheeseburgers, you’re not going to eat. . . . You know you’re going to feed your wife and your kids and you wait.15
 
Datnow, Hubbard, and Woody censured this teacher and castigated the tendency of other teachers to reinforce traditional gender stereotypes. They were disappointed that boys “. . . were told that they should learn to be strong men and take care of their wives. In most cases, traditional gender role stereotypes were reinforced, and gender was portrayed in an essentialist manner.”16
This teacher was trying to provide the boys with a healthy image of what a man should be. He told them that the husband, the father, should wait to eat until he’s taken care of his wife and kids. He was valiantly trying to give those boys some leadership, some guidance, some idea of what it means to be a man.
Not all traditional gender roles deserve to be condemned as gender stereotypes. There are life-affirming gender roles and there are gender stereotypes that are harmful and destructive. The “dumb blonde” is a negative and destructive gender stereotype, as is the “dumb jock.” But no one should condemn as a gender stereotype the ideal of the husband and father who sacrifices himself for the sake of his wife and children. Instead, that ideal should be affirmed as a role model.
“Deconstructing” all images of the ideal husband and father is not likely to result in a father who insists on his wife sharing equally in all sacrifices. The result is far more likely to be a selfish young man who doesn’t feel any strong obligation to the children he has fathered. In the United States, more than one in three babies is now born to an unmarried mother (35.7 percent to be exact). The growing trend away from married couples with children cuts across all racial and ethnic boundaries. As we discussed in chapter 6, married couples with one or more children now constitute only about one-quarter of households.17
To become a man, a boy must see a man. But that man doesn’t have to be his father. In fact, ideally, it shouldn’t be only his father. Even if your son has a strong father or father figure in his life, he also needs a community of men who together can provide him with varied models of what productive adult men do.

Restore the Bond Between Generations

We’ve seen that enduring cultures use gender-separate communities to pass the norms of that culture from one generation to the next. Women teach girls. Men teach boys. That doesn’t exclude the possibility of men teaching girls and women teaching boys, of course. But there is no enduring culture where boys have been taught the rules of social behavior exclusively or even primarily by women. And there’s something even more basic that should be stressed in that truth: enduring cultures have strong bonds across the generations. In contemporary American culture, we’re seeing those bonds dissolving rapidly, in the span of a single lifetime. The Washington Post recently featured a series of interviews with men age sixty and over, which the writer notes is “the last generation of black men who share the memory of being deliberately taught how to walk in the world.” For these men, “working hard is the basis for everything,” it’s “dignity and manhood.” These men remember what the community was like just thirty years ago, when the young men would congregate at older men’s houses. Prince Georges County (a middle-class, predominantly African-American suburb of Washington, DC) had many boys’ clubs that were popular and well patronized back then. “The neighborhood was like another mama and daddy,” says one of the older men. Nobody locked their doors.
Then in the 1970s the boys’ clubs shut down. Things changed. The teenage boys didn’t want to talk to the older men anymore. Drugs began making inroads into the community, followed closely by crime. Now these older men are disgusted by the lack of motivation they see in the teenage boys and young men. Some of these young men “wouldn’t take a job as a pie taster in a pastry factory,” complained one of the older men.
Certainly there were many more factors at play here than the closing of the boys’ clubs. But when the boys’ clubs shut their doors, there was no other convenient venue remaining where grandfathers, fathers, and teenage boys from different families could come together, shoot the breeze and share their experiences.18 The typical American teenager doesn’t hang out with middle-aged adults on the weekend anymore. The typical American teenager hangs out with other teenagers.
In the story I told in chapter 6—about the young Native Alaskan men who went off to hunt the sea lion, and wounded it but didn’t kill it—the key point was the severing of the bonds between the generations. Cutting those bonds has an effect similar to cutting a boat loose from its anchor. The young men lose direction and purpose. They seek the pleasure of the moment. They avoid responsibility.
That’s already starting to happen in our own culture. Parents have the power to stop it. If you belong to a church or synagogue, talk to your pastor or priest or rabbi about arranging an all-male retreat. Traditional Judaism, the various Christian denominations, as well as Islam, all have long traditions of gender-separate activities. All these traditions embrace the truth that children and teenagers must be taught by adults, not by one another.
If you’re not comfortable with any faith community, contact your local chapter of the Boy Scouts. Or, as we discussed earlier, get your son involved in year-round competitive sports. Or sign him up for activities with the Izaak Walton League (www.iwla.org) or other outdoor nature conservancy organizations that have programs targeted at getting young people involved with the outdoors. Or if your son thinks he might like to hunt, help him to join a local skeet-shooting club where he can learn to shoot and (more important) make connections with a community of men of all ages with similar interests. Just enter the word “skeet” and the name of your state in Google and you’ll find dozens of clubs to choose from, whether you live in New York or Idaho or Florida or Alaska.
Don’t wait for your son to make this choice. If he’s like most of the boys I work with, he may need a push. That’s OK. Just choose an activity in which he can interact with grown men, where he can have opportunities to see how they live, how they relax, how they serve their families and their communities. In most cases, even a not-quite-perfect choice, perhaps even the wrong choice, will be better—will be more likely to engage your son in the real world—than no choice at all.

A Word of Warning

In the previous chapter, I said lots of favorable things about traditional cultures such as the Navajo and the Masai and Orthodox Jews. Now we must say something unkind, but true, about these cultures: they are sexist. A Navajo woman can never become a medicine man. An Orthodox Jewish woman can never become a rabbi or a cantor.
Many enduring cultures—cultures that have remained intact for hundreds of years—are sexist. That’s unfortunate. Those traditional cultures often push girls and boys into pink and blue cubbyholes. We don’t want that. But I don’t think the solution is to ignore gender. Three decades of pretending that girls and boys are exactly the same, except for their genitalia, have not created a paradise of gender equity where boys respect and honor girls. They have given us, instead, Eminem and 50 Cent and Akon: musicians whose best-selling songs degrade and disparage women in ways that would have been unthinkable 30 years ago. Our cultural neglect of the significance of gender has—as the Dartmouth panelists correctly pointed out—resulted in a young adult culture that has veered off the deep end.
There has to be a third way. There has to be some alternative besides ignoring gender on the one hand, and pushing children into narrow and limiting gender roles, on the other.
This third way must begin by recognizing the importance of gender, by embracing and celebrating the gendered nature of the human experience. We must use this new understanding of gender not to reinforce old-fashioned Leave It to Beaver notions of gender roles but rather to broaden horizons for both girls and boys.
Joseph Campbell popularized the notion that cultures are defined in large part by the myths they tell.19 I think there is considerable truth to that idea. If we’re going to combat this fifth factor—if we’re going to recreate an idea of “real men” that advantages boys without disadvantaging girls—then we must give careful thought to what stories we are going to tell boys and young men.
We must tell true stories that affirm real men and the value of real masculinity, without disrespecting women or devaluing women’s accomplishments and importance.
Allow me to share one such story with you.

One Story

Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain was born in 1828, in the small town of Brewer, Maine. He entered Bowdoin College, about one hundred miles away, in 1848. Toward the end of his time at Bowdoin, he heard Harriet Beecher Stowe read aloud from the manuscript for the book that became Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Although Chamberlain had never witnessed slavery first-hand, Stowe’s book made a profound impression on him. He became convinced that slavery was an offense against God that it was the duty of Christians to abolish.
After graduating from Bowdoin in 1852, he returned home to study at Bangor Theological Seminary, just across the Penobscot River from his hometown of Brewer. In 1855, he finished his studies at the seminary and married Fannie Adams, the daughter of a local minister. Together they would have five children. That same year, Chamberlain accepted an offer to return to Bowdoin College as an instructor in rhetoric, religion, and languages. He was fluent in German, French, Latin, and Greek.
With the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, Chamberlain wanted to join the war on the side of the Union and against slavery. Unlike most of his fellow Northerners, Chamberlain actually believed that white men should fight and die for the cause of freeing black slaves. He asked Bowdoin College for a year’s leave to sign up. His request was denied. Instead, the college offered to provide him a year’s travel with pay in Europe to study European languages, classical and modern. Chamberlain accepted the offer. He left the college—and promptly volunteered his services in the army.20
Fast forward to July 2, 1863, the second day of the battle of Gettysburg. We find Professor Chamberlain, now a full Colonel, leading the 20th Maine on the top of a small hill just south of Gettysburg: Little Round Top. The men of the 20th Maine were stationed at the extreme left flank of the Union lines. Colonel Chamberlain’s knowledge of military tactics was drawn more from reading about the Peloponnesian Wars in the original Greek than from any contemporary manual of nineteenth-century military tactics, but he understood the significance of his regiment’s position, securing the left flank and occupying the high ground. He realized that if the Confederates could displace his men and take up positions on Little Round Top, the Confederates would be perfectly positioned to cannonade the main body of the Union forces from the flank and the rear. In that event, the Union forces would most likely have to surrender. The Confederates would be able to take tens of thousands of Union prisoners, and there would be no Federal forces remaining between Lee’s Confederate army and the District of Columbia. Many historians believe that the fate of the United States hinged critically on the outcome of the battle for Little Round Top.21 If the Confederates could overwhelm the 20th Maine and take that hill, they would win the battle and perhaps the war.
Five times on that July day, the men of the 15th Alabama Regiment stormed up Little Round Top, and five times they were repulsed by the 20th Maine under Colonel Chamberlain’s command.22 After the fifth charge, Chamberlain learned that most of his men had run out of ammunition. “Every round was gone,” Chamberlain was told. Each man had only been issued sixty rounds at the beginning of the fighting that morning, and the five Confederate charges had exhausted their supply.
What to do? Withdraw, and cede the high ground—and probably the battle, and perhaps the whole war—to the South? Or continue to fight?
Fight with what?
“Bayonets!” Chamberlain shouted. A single word, according to eyewitnesses, but every man understood what it meant: fix bayonets and charge.
It is a fearsome thing to order two hundred men with bayonets to charge more than five hundred men with rifles, but that was Chamberlain’s order, and his men obeyed him. Not only did they obey, but they charged forward like madmen. The men “took up the shout and moved forward,” wrote another eyewitness, “and [with] every man eager not to be left behind, the whole line flung itself down the slope through the fire and smoke and upon the enemy.”23 The Confederates, seeing wild men with bayonets screaming and charging down the hill, concluded that they were facing superior numbers (although they weren’t)—so the men from Alabama retreated. “We ran like a herd of wild cattle,” one Confederate later admitted.24 And then night fell.
There is more to the battle of Gettysburg than the story of Little Round Top, of course, but Chamberlain’s courage and audacity in that moment is still a meaningful story to tell boys today. Perhaps more important for our purposes than the story of Little Round Top, though, is another of Chamberlain’s exploits, almost two years later at Appomattox.
General Grant had selected Chamberlain to accept the formal surrender of Confederate colors on April 12, 1865. As Confederate General John B. Gordon was leading the Confederates to surrender—disheartened, sick, many of the men wounded, and all of them wondering what awaited them at the hands of the victorious Union forces—Chamberlain, on his own initiative, gave this command to his men: “Attention! Carry-arms!”
Chamberlain’s men snapped to attention and presented their arms as a show of respect to the defeated Confederates. General Gordon, in reply, wheeled his horse around and commanded his men to dip the Confederate colors in answer to Chamberlain’s courtesy. There was “not a sound of trumpet or drum, not a cheer, nor a word nor motion . . . but awful stillness as if it were the passing of the dead.”25
Chamberlain’s salute was reported in Northern newspapers, inciting some controversy. Many on the Northern side felt that it was inappropriate for Chamberlain to have commanded his men to salute the defeated Confederates. Some apparently might have liked it better if Chamberlain’s men had heckled or abused the rebels. But Chamberlain’s education—rooted in the classics—led him to value the magnanimous gesture above the pettiness of revenge or spite. In chapter 7, we discussed the definition of a gentleman. Chamberlain’s story adds one more line to the definition: A gentleman is magnanimous in victory.
There are many true stories of heroic men throughout American history. I like to tell the story of Joshua Chamberlain for several reasons. First, his story is not particularly well known. For most of the twentieth century, the story of Joshua Chamberlain was an obscure footnote familiar only to historians. There is no statue of Chamberlain at Gettysburg (although there is a small monument to the 20th Maine). He had to wait thirty years before he was finally awarded a medal for his bravery at Gettysburg, in 1893.
The second reason I like to tell this story is that Chamberlain was not a superhero. His deeds were modest in comparison to those of George Washington or Robert E. Lee or Abraham Lincoln or Theodore Roosevelt. And that makes it easier for boys and young men to relate to him. It’s hard for a young man to imagine being George Washington or Abraham Lincoln. The demands on those men were so exceptional, the burdens so acute, that it strains the imagination to think, “How would I have acted in that situation?” Chamberlain’s predicaments were simpler and easier to comprehend.
I remind boys that Chamberlain didn’t have to fight at all. Bowdoin College wanted him to take a year off to go on an all-expenses-paid tour of Europe. He could have done so with no loss of honor. He chose to put himself in harm’s way because he thought that it was the right thing to do, because he believed it to be the duty of Christian men to fight against slavery—even though many, perhaps most, of his fellow Christians at that time would not have agreed with him, and he knew it.
Another aspect of Chamberlain’s story that I stress to boys and young men today is that Chamberlain was a great leader of men precisely because he was a scholar and a seminarian. He was not a professional warrior or tough guy. He wanted to join the fight not because he was big and strong—he wasn’t—but because of his beliefs, which were grounded in his education. He knew what really mattered. And he didn’t give orders for other men to fight while he remained safely at home. He himself went and fought.
 
 
Let me tell you another true story, one that is happening right now, a story whose ending has not yet been written.
John Nicolas was born with all the advantages. His parents were happily married, his father was a successful family doctor, they lived in a nice house in a comfortable suburban neighborhood. Nevertheless, John was not a good kid. He got in trouble a lot. He wasn’t a good student. His parents and his teachers wondered why he couldn’t seem to live up to the excellent example of his two older sisters, who always worked hard and earned good grades.
In eighth grade, things went from bad to worse. John set a new record for poor performance at the private school he attended, the Woodland Country Day School in Bridgeton, New Jersey. He failed every class. The school administrators politely suggested that John repeat eighth grade at the local public school. “The public schools have more resources for boys like John,” they said.
John began using drugs heavily. “I was a pillhead,” he told me. “Mostly Percocet, occasionally Vicodin or Darvon.” He stole the drugs from his father’s office. At first he only used them himself, then he also began selling some of the pills at the school. He was caught. That led to his first suspension from school. He was caught again, and suspended again. Then he was caught once more, this time red-handed in the act of selling pills, by a narcotics officer. He was charged with possession and distribution of a controlled dangerous substance. The school district initiated proceedings to have him expelled; he was, after all, failing all his eighth-grade classes. Again. He was told that his court hearing would be in ten days.
Seven days later, at about eight o’clock on the morning of January 15, 2004, two armed police officers arrived at John’s house. They came to his room, handcuffed him, and drove him to the police station. There two Salem County sheriff ’s deputies were waiting to take him to the Salem County Courthouse. He was shackled, wrists and ankles, as he entered the courtroom. The hearing was going to take place three days early.
The judge was stern. Because there were earlier instances of drug offenses in John’s school record, the judge did not consider this criminal charge to be a first offense. Instead, John learned that he was going to be sentenced to the juvenile detention center. The length of his sentence there would be determined at a subsequent hearing.
The next seven days John spent in a small cell with one cellmate. They shared one stainless steel toilet. No door. No privacy. “If you have to defecate, you defecate right there sitting on the toilet, with people walking by the cell and your cellmate looking at you,” John told me. (Incidentally, John really did say defecate, not some other word. By the time I spoke with him, early in 2007, he had become a real gentleman.)
During that week, John’s father spoke with the administrators at a boys’ school, the Phelps School in Malvern, Pennsylvania (near Bryn Mawr and Haverford). Although Phelps is an elite college prep school, not a military school or reform school, Dr. Nicolas knew that the school had been successful in rehabilitating other boys like John: bright boys who had gone off track for one reason or another. The school administrators agreed at least to talk with John, to see whether he might be a suitable candidate for the school.
At the court hearing the following week, the judge offered John one last chance: if he would attend the boys’ school, and behave perfectly, he would not be sent back to the juvenile detention center. But if he had even one unexcused absence, or the slightest breach of rules, he would go straight back to detention, very likely until his eighteenth birthday. Remember, this boy had been caught in the act of selling narcotics.
First, John had to persuade the school to take him. He met with the director of admissions, Mr. Chirieleison, who agreed to accept him as a student at Phelps. “My parents said it was a miracle. We’re Greek Orthodox, and his name, chirie eleison, means ‘Lord have mercy’ in Greek. We recite that at every service.”
“Do you agree with your parents? Do you think it was divine intervention?” I asked.
“No, I don’t,” John said. “I’m not that religious.”
Religious or not, John was now enrolled at Phelps.
“I hated it,” he told me. “I didn’t know anybody. I was angry that I had to go to this school I’d never heard of. I blamed everybody except myself.” He finished eighth grade at Phelps, earning B’s and C’s (a huge improvement over his previous three semesters).
Ninth grade went better. He began focusing on class more, and he started making friends. “I never had a brother. Now I began to realize I had lots of brothers. We were like all in it together, we did stuff together. I started to feel the camaraderie.”
John began to take part in the life of the school, and told me:
At all the schools I’d been at before, I felt like I always had to put on a show for somebody. For the girls, I guess. And for me, the easiest way to impress the girls was to be a spaced-out pillhead. I know it sounds stupid. The girls probably weren’t even that impressed. But at a coed school, you’ve got to wear a mask. You’ve got to be a jock or a skater dude or a pillhead or something like that. I was ashamed to just be who I was. I just felt that I always had to play the game of being somebody special, somebody interesting. But a few weeks into ninth grade, all that just started to fall away. I started to believe I could just be who I was. I didn’t have to impress anybody.
 
 
“But couldn’t that change have taken place at any good school?” I asked.
“I’d been to other good schools. Those schools near my home were fine. They’re good schools. They’re not to blame for me becoming a pillhead. For me, I think, any coed school would have been the wrong choice.”
A few weeks into ninth grade, things were really going well for John. That was when he heard the news about Jimmy.u
Jim had been a friend of John’s since elementary school. They both hated school. They both got in trouble. But while John was popping pills, Jim was experimenting with more serious drug use, IV drug use, heroin. John remembers the day in ninth grade when he learned that Jim had committed suicide. “I never saw the note, but I heard from Jim’s brother what was in it. Jim had written that he was a horrible person. He wrote that he was a piece of shit. He wrote that he hated his life. He told his parents he was sorry. He was hanging, dead, when they found him.”
Jim’s death paradoxically helped to push John along the right road. He began studying in earnest. His grades went way up. “I didn’t have any distractions. There were no girls in the class. You don’t have to impress the girls.” I got the message that some of John’s previous bad behavior had been a result of his trying to live up to the bad boy persona. And some of it, of course, was the drug addiction. But Phelps was different. “It’s like having 150 brothers. They’re looking out for you, you’re looking out for them.”
John started weight training. He lost fifty pounds. He weighs 185 pounds now—fifteen pounds less than he did in eighth grade—but he’s four inches taller. He was elected class president, then he decided to skip eleventh grade so he could go straight from tenth grade into his senior year. That way he would graduate the same year that he would have if he had never flunked eighth grade.
“What do your sisters think of all this?” I asked.
“They’re in shock and awe. They ask, ‘What happened to you?’ I just tell them that I went to Phelps and that made the difference.”
“But why? How would things have been different if you had gone to a coed school?”
John’s answer was immediate. “I have no doubt that if I’d gone to a coed school I would still be using drugs. I would probably be dead or in jail by now.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Phelps has given me a sense of purpose. A sense of who I am. I don’t have to be afraid of who I am. I can be proud. And like I said before. I didn’t have to play the game, wear the mask.”
John’s story isn’t over yet. He’s doing well now, but the real test will come next year when he goes to college. He won’t be under the close watch of his friends and his teachers. He’ll have plenty of opportunities to buy the drugs he used to use.
John believes that his return to normalcy could not have happened at a coed school. I’m not totally persuaded on that point; I’ve visited some outstanding coed schools that have accomplished some amazing things with kids from very diverse backgrounds (Deerfield Academy in western Massachusetts comes to mind). But I think we have to respect John’s opinion. After all, nobody knows his situation better than he does.
On a Tuesday evening in December 2006, I met with a group of parents in the auditorium of the Arlington Central Library in Arlington, Virginia. The place was packed (I felt flattered). The parents listened attentively as I described the five factors that I believe are disengaging boys from school—and in a broader sense, from life, from the real world of striving and achievement and loss. I outlined how we might turn the situation around, encouraging more boys to succeed or at least to try harder, without disadvantaging girls—because, after all, it’s in the interest of young women as well as young men that we change the course we are now on. Young women need good men, reliable and hard-working men, not bullies or slacker dudes.
Now it was time for the questions, which I knew from experience are always more challenging than the formal part of the presentation.
“Dr. Sax, my son is intelligent, and curious, but he says school is a waste of time. He says only girls care about doing well in school. What can I do to change that?”
I responded with some stories about public schools that have adopted the single-sex format. I described how the single-sex format—particularly at schools that use team competition—has led to a surge in boys’ motivation to achieve.
Another parent had doubts. “Dr. Sax, you’re really pushing this thing with single-sex education. But the real world is coed. School should prepare kids for the real world. Single-sex education just isn’t the real world.” That’s a reasonable objection, I acknowledged, but the research suggests a different reality. In most coed schools, the focus is on who’s cute and who likes whom. In a single-sex school, it’s easier to focus on academics. At a single-sex school, being cute isn’t as important—either for girls or for boys.26 In that sense, the single-sex format is actually better preparation for the real world than the coed format is.
“I’m persuaded by what you said about video games,” another parent said. “But what about my son’s friends? He goes over to their house and plays all the video games you’ve been warning us about.”
“You can’t do this by yourself,” I said again. “Call up the parents of your son’s friends. Ask what video games their boys are playing. Work with your school to create a community of parents who share your concerns about video games. Ask the parent-teacher association to host a forum to educate other parents about the hazards of video games. Get the word out.”
“Dr. Sax, I have to admit I’m kinda freaked out by what you said about Adderall,” one woman said. “My son was on Adderall for three years, when he was ten until he was thirteen. We stopped the medication when he started ninth grade. But I’m nagging him so much now. I nag him to do his homework. I nag him to go outside and get some exercise. I even nag him to call his friends. If I didn’t push him, I think he might just stay in his room all the time with his computer and his video games and his television.”
“Let me share two thoughts with you,” I answered. “First, consider moving his computer and his television out of his room and into a public area, like the kitchen or the dining room. When he’s alone in his room with the door closed, surfing the Net, you really don’t know what’s going on. But if he’s in a public place, then it’s easier for you to keep an eye on what he’s doing. Don’t be coy. Tell him that you have a responsibility to know what he’s doing all the time that he’s online, and the easiest way for you to honor that responsibility is for him to be in a public area of the house.”
“But is my son’s brain damaged forever because he took Adderall for three years?” the mother asked.
“We don’t know. All we know is that young laboratory animals who took these medications were lazy when they grew up. We don’t know for sure how that finding translates into our species at all. We don’t know what dose of these medications is safe, if any. We don’t know how long a boy can take the medication before some damage occurs.”
“That’s not very reassuring,” she said.
“But remember, Dr. Carlezon didn’t try to rehabilitate those laboratory animals,” I added. “He didn’t take them bike riding or take them on hikes in the mountains or encourage them to read good books. Speaking of books, there’s a book coming out in a few weeks that you will definitely want to read. It’s by a science writer named Sharon Begley. She presents some very interesting research suggesting that the brain can heal itself, even in adulthood.27
The brain has more power to grow and to change than we previously imagined. Get your son away from the video games and get him outdoors. That’s a good first step.”
“He used to love mountain biking,” she said. “My husband still goes mountain biking, but my son hasn’t gone with him for a long time. Maybe he and his father could start doing that again.”
I nodded. It was hard to know what else to say.
“I was stunned by what you said about plastic bottles,” another woman said. “I thought it was so healthy to drink bottled water. What am I supposed to do about that—for my children, and for me?”
“We’re fortunate, here in the Washington area,” I said. “Just walk into any Whole Foods Market in the area. You’ll find water in glass bottles. They’ve got every beverage you can imagine in glass bottles. The people who buy for the Whole Foods chain are well aware of these concerns and they’ve provided plenty of safe, environmentally friendly alternatives— not just beverages but also prepared foods, poultry, fish, meat, produce—everything that you eat or drink.”v
It was getting late. Many parents had to get home to relieve the babysitter and put their kids to bed. I stayed and chatted with a group of parents until the janitor came to kick us out around ten p.m.
I’m encouraged. We don’t have all the answers. Far from it. But I think we’re at least asking the right questions. Parents who are adopting these strategies are sending me success stories from every corner of the country, from every demographic group, involving young boys, tweens, teenagers, and young men. Many parents have already figured out one or more of these factors on their own, before they hear me speak, but they welcome the research. “I knew video games were bad for my son, but I couldn’t convince anybody else. It’s good to have these studies, hard data, to share with other parents,” one father told me.
If you’ve stayed with me this far, you know that we have a lot of work to do. No one person is going to be able to do this alone. We have to work together.
So please let’s get in touch with one another. I’m doing about fifty public events a year right now, an average of about one event per week, talking with teachers and meeting with parents all around the United States, Canada, Mexico, England, Scotland, Australia, and New Zealand. I hope you’ll consider coming to one of my events. You’ll find my full itinerary at www.BoysAdrift.com. Let’s meet. Let’s talk. You can also send an e-mail to me at leonardsax@prodigy.net.
We all want the same thing: a healthy world for our children and our grandchildren. We all realize that “healthy” means more than just having enough food to eat and clothes to wear. It means our daughters and our sons living lives that are meaningful and fulfilled.
So let’s stay in touch.