Comment by spodek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by spodek | Hacker News Reader

The comments here don't seem to capture the importance of the "Boy" part. Imagine we were mostly drugging girls. The headlines and reactions would be greater.

The story recalls how when Michelle Obama publicized #BringBackOurGirls, laudably promoting saving many innocent girls from kidnapping and worse, Boko Haram had been burning alive and hacking to death many innocent boys for years to little western outcry.

We keep changing our culture from the world our emotional systems evolved to handle. Then we declare groups sick who can't handle the change, which happen to be boys mostly, and drug them.

When we create problems for girls, we ask "what have we done?", recognize we're hurting them, and try to change the culture we created stop hurting them. We may take time, but we don't want to hurt them.

When we create problems for boys, we say "we'll fix you," as if they were broken. If boys' behavior was adapted to a different world than sitting in rows for most of the day, why don't we change the culture we created to stop hurting them?

This is a fantastic comment. To provide some anecdotal evidence (which I realize isn't much) I can compare where I grew up (Urban India) vs where I went to University (Urban North America) and can see some Stark differences.

There is a much more safety and risk averse culture here for kids growing up and there is an epidemic of over policing of children. Back home, I could run around and play in the streets without much parental oversight as early as the age of six. All I had to do was get back before dark and my parents made it very clear if I didn't there would be significant consequences (I was never beaten so you can make children understand it without the threat of corporeal punishment). However here, CPS can be called if you leave your child unattended in your backyard.

My theory is that since boys hitting puberty are driven towards riskier behaviour thanks to testosterone (they just have more physical energy than girls that needs to be expended and mundane activities rarely suffice), this policing culture that no longer fits that style of exploration takes it upon themselves to neuter young boys. It's a sorry state of affairs, but unfortunately I don't see a way to fix it without getting mired down in identity politics

> where I grew up (Urban India) ... I could run around and play in the streets without much parental oversight

Honestly, I grew up the same way, in suburban America - but thirty years ago. When my own kids were little, they wanted to go outside and play, and my wife almost had a heart attack when I suggested letting them. I told her that's how I grew up and she said what every mother I've heard of says now: "times were different back then". Yes, times are different... but not necessarily for the better.

We have a schizoid relationship with gender tropes. On the one hand, "girl power". On the other, "save the women and children".

Schools are a whole other pit of insanity. Most public schools can't enforce behavior norms, which are 90% a result of clueless parents. Their recourse is medicalizing the problem and addressing bad behavior with drugs. With my children we ended up opting to private school because you simply don't have that problem -- they address behavior issues and if it turns out to be a problem that isn't being fixed, the kid doesn't come back.

This is a result of 2008. ~3/5th of school districts are spending less per student today than they were in 2008 [0], and some are just now starting to crawl out of the Great Recession. There just aren't the resources to employ good admins, teachers, social workers, etc. in most of the US.

[0]https://www.cbpp.org/research/state-budget-and-tax/a-punishi...

The question I would have here is, what has changed in the last century or so that would make it that way? Regarding sitting in rows for most of the day, school methodologies I don't think have noticeably changed; at least, from what I see, it doesn't seem like a school in 1950 would be that much different than a school today.

From my perspective, the root of this is more yet another case of medicine being over-sold well beyond their intended purpose. In this case, energetic boys are the ones that get caught in the cross fire. But this seems overall like a systemic problem of current medicine, well beyond ADHD medicine... ranging from the over-prescription of antibiotics, to the roots of the opioid addiction crisis. Our medical system just plain and simple seems to dish out too many pills, even when the chances of help is marginal.

I'm guessing (to be fair) that many times this is due to patient demand, I just wish doctors would sometimes push back sometimes. People are looking for easy solutions to life's problems, and don't necessarily realize the whole picture that comes from medication (side effects and whatnot). Your child is energetic and a handle sometimes, right? That's often normal. You don't need to necessarily give your child powerful stimulants, what is essentially commercialized speed, to "cure" this, unless you are really sure of the diagnosis, in my opinion.

I think a pretty obvious starting point is the supposed decline of recess in schools. I couldn't find any numbers on how many schools had recess as a normal part of their day or rates. However it does seem as though in many schools, certainly more than ever before, there isn't any recess time.

Which is sad because a very common trope (especially for young boys) is recess being their favorite "class". It is also pretty well documented to help in all kinds of behavioral issues as well as being a valuable learning environment in its own right.

http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/131/1/183

This is definitely a starting point. I'm not finding any hard numbers for a "decline" either -- the one table I found (from 2005) indicated the average was about 27 minutes a day. (https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2006/nutrition/tables/tab15.asp) and this hasn't changed too much recently (see 2017 data -- https://www.aft.org/ae/spring2017/ramstetter_and_murray), but I'm having trouble finding any studies with past data from, say, the 1950s and 1960s. Little nuggets of data I'm finding suggest more that the problem is inconsistency -- half an hour might be "okay", but some schools don't even implement any recess at all... which for many little children sounds like it would be awful.

Most of the research out there seems to support the idea that recess or other unstructured play is quite beneficial, for quite a number of reasons, so it's quite possible that half an hour is not enough. I'd certainly suspect more recess would do a lot more good for energetic children than powerful stimulants!

Hmm, that seems like an odd way to represent how much recess time kids have. I'm not familiar with elementary schools, but I'd guess that class periods are somewhere between 30 minutes and an hour. The average kid is getting less than 30 minutes of recess time which seems to indicate that this average takes into account kids who don't get recess time at all.

If recess periods for schools that have it are an hour long, then less than half of the kids actually have recess. Anyway, what a frustratingly useless statistic since I didn't know how they got it.

Push for early academics. Girls need somewhat less physical movement on average and at that age have somewhat more developed fine motor skills and attention. The sooner you expect kids to read and write, the harder for boys it is compared to girls. Good news would be that pushing reading for later wont harm girls, but would help at least some boys.

>, from what I see, it doesn't seem like a school in 1950 would be that much different than a school today.

Maybe it's what we don't see? Enforced truancy laws may be a possibility. If you were a 'problematic' child back in the day, it's very likely you would be kicked out and not get any education. Now schools wanting to maximize their federal payments use law enforcement to punish truant students.

This doesn't do much for political debate, but I'd say boys and girls just face different issues today.

Girls face what is left (in many places 100%) of our old male dominated culture. This means (for a variety of complicated reasons) they'll make a little more money and feature more prominently in the ranks of power.

But, some of the places where they're disadvantaged as boys (eg schools generally, to a small extent), boys tend to get less attention on their problems. There's also a "sins of their father's" effect, where typically male behaviour is often seen as negative... especially sexual behaviour. Rowdiness too, which may be the reason here.

Hard to know where it'll go, but in a worst case scenario male sexuality gets repressed the way female sexuality was/is. I doubt it will go anywhere near that far.

Schools as an institution... I think there's clear evidence (drugs being one) that the system works a little better for girls.

We could do better in theory, but practically I think it's just going to happen how it happens.

Well stated. In the west, we have veered from one extreme (pro-male) to another extreme ( pro-female ).

One example is false rape accusations. People say false rape accusations are bad because it makes it that harder for women who have been raped to be believed. No mention of men whose lives are destroyed by false rape accusations. Even when it's women lying about rape, the focus is on other women and how it harms them. Never about the males who are languishing in prison or have their lives destroyed by false accusations.

Another example is female dominated professions. The media seems to be obsessed with "diversifying" male dominated professions like engineering/software development. But nobody talks about diversifying female dominated professions. 77% of public school teachers in the US are female. This is a government job. Shouldn't the media be focusing on the lack of diversity in education? To put this in perspective, google ( a focus of the media's crusade for "diversity" ) is 69% male and 31% female.

And then there is nonsense like "toxic" masculinity. Can you imagine if people talked about "toxic" femininity? They'd be branded a bigot and attacked mercilessly.

Ok, sure, yeah, I guess I can agree that if a false accusation actually happens, all sides' stories should be heard. Weird as it is for you to bring it up that way.

But female dominated positions aren't "diversified" because it's one of the few places where a woman actually gets a shot at a job. This is the entire purpose behind "diversification": minorities and oppressed groups don't get a fair shot at normal jobs, so they have to get lumped into jobs that society thinks is "appropriate" for them. So, while I think you are misguided in your criticism, I agree that we should root out why exactly women are relegated to being the majority in only a few select stereotypical positions.

"Toxic masculinity" is not nonsense. I'm a male and it's easy for me to see what toxic masculinity looks like. Misogyny, homophobia, violence, and other forms of oppression are all traits men overwhelmingly exhibit more than women. If women acted like this we would label it and talk about it and we wouldn't be called bigots (except by the people trying to deny that it exists).

> Ok, sure, yeah, I guess I can agree that if a false accusation actually happens, all sides' stories should be heard.

You misread what I wrote. My point was when it is proven that a false rape accusation is made, people turn the focus to how the proven false rape accusation hurt other women, not how it hurt the man who was falsely accused.

People say that false rape accusations are bad because it makes it harder for actual rape victims to be believe. What people should be saying is false rape accusations are bad because it hurts the falsely accused.

> Weird as it is for you to bring it up that way.

No. It's weird you misinterpreted a fairly straightforward point I was making.

> But female dominated positions aren't "diversified" because it's one of the few places where a woman actually gets a shot at a job.

One of the few places? This is hilarious. You are doing exactly what I said. You are spinning discrimination against men into victimization of women.

> I'm a male and it's easy for me to see what toxic masculinity looks like.

I'm sure you are.

> Misogyny, homophobia, violence, and other forms of oppression are all traits men overwhelmingly exhibit more than women.

That sounds very sexist. What's the difference between you and sexists decades ago saying women's "toxic femininity" needed to be "cured" with hysterectomies?

> If women acted like this we would label it and talk about it

There are just as many misogynous, homophobic, violent and "other forms of oppression" women out there.

It's so funny. I bet you are the first one to talk about how there are no differences between men and women right? We are pretty much the same. Right? And yet you claim that men are "toxic".

> One of the few places? This is hilarious. You are doing exactly what I said. You are spinning discrimination against men into victimization of women.

"Spinning" would imply this is propaganda, or that I'm using some disingenuous or deceptive tactic. But instead, I simply pointed out that there is probably a cause behind the "dominance of women in certain professional fields", and that it may in fact be related to women's oppression. You can disagree all you want, I don't really give a shit, because you aren't interested in finding out if this is or isn't the case - you aren't even capable of doing research to find out if this is some ridiculous "spin" or made up story, or find any backstory to it at all.

> There are just as many misogynous, homophobic, violent and "other forms of oppression" women out there.

First of all, just as many misogynous women as men? So there are just as many women who hate women as there are men who hate women? Sounds weird. Why would they hate themselves, especially in large numbers? And just as many homophobic women? So why isn't women beating up other women for being gay such a cultural trope as it is for macho male culture? Why are there so few women at nationalist, white supremacist, neo-nazi, and similar rallies? And I'll just post this Wikipedia page (I know you're not going to read it, but again, I don't care): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence_against_women 1 in 4 women experience domestic violence in their lifetime, compared to 1 in 7 men. And 1 in 7 women experiencing at least an attempted rape in their lifetime compared to 1 in 37 men. Women are also more likely to be murdered by an intimate partner than men. And 1 in 6 women have been stalked in their lifetime compared to 1 in 19 men. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_violence_in_the_Unite...

You had a valid point about listening to the stories of men who are accused of rape and the subsequent aftermath thereof, and then you threw it all away by being an MRA shill and an uninformed troll. And here I am, correcting your dumb ass, because some idiots on this forum are actually upvoting you like you have a valid point.

Man. Humanity is a garbage fire.

All men killed by drones count as combatants.

Why dont American mothers love their sons more? or at least the same as their daughters? (emphasis mothers because in America they have overwhelming influence on the childs upbringing).

Heck, Howard Glasser himself shows that giving a boy more love is a viable method to manage a boys hyperactivity.

I wonder how much a coincidence that the last three presidencies(first family) before Trump had no sons, only daughters and whether this influenced subtly our perception and bias towards daughters over sons.

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