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Comment by _pmf_ | Hacker News Reader

Not having to go into the eternal toxic hell that is school for a lot of boys, I can see how quarantine is attractive.

My friend and I were recently discussing how both our middle school kids seem much happier since the lockdown. We speculated it is stressful to be constantly trying to appear cool and normal in the school environment several hours a day, especially for introverted kids who have no break to be alone and recharge.

Yeah but please let pass a bit more time...I think is too early to say mental health is ok

I took a second to think about how I'd respond to a survey that asked these questions.

I'd lie. I don't want to get singled out for home abuse or bullies. There are people that have it worse. And having to talk to people that are powerless to remove bullies is a huge mental drain.

School is tough for sure, but it can be seen as a place to learn coping strategies against shitty people. In remote learning (or homeschooling), kids are sheltered from these problems until later in life, where they have to compete against much higher baseline level of competency and in situations where stakes are higher. So, maybe school is bad, but no school is worse?

I think you will have bullies in every situation. Had to deal with them in sports too.

How is school only toxic for boys?

OP didn't say it was only toxic for boys, just that it is for a lot of them.

He may have been referring to research that suggests girls generally cope better with the American school system's structure and approach than boys:

https://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/06/stop-penal...

Yet. Teenage girls have a depression rate that has been rapidly increasing through the years. Currently at 20%. Which would suggest the increase in the use of social media is the main cause. Especially when this study did nothing to correlate against it with its weak argument for sleep which if you look at statistics on depression had no effect on it.

It is possible that op school had different social issues among boys then among girls. It is possible that op had no experience with girl-on-girl interactions while having bad experiences with boy-on-boy interactions.

I had to read a couple of books about teen girl psychology to understand just how badly teen girls bully and mistreat each other. It was a real eye-opener.

But then the bullying never really goes away for either gender. It's disguised and legitimised as various commercial, professional, political, and social activities, but the motivations are similar - just more covert.

Though some people continue bullying into adulthood, many of us have more control of our situations as we grow older, and in we can often avoid situations where we will be bullied. Students usually have so little control of their situation that they are really stuck and can't get away from bullies. School can be a special kind of hell if you don't fit in and can't get away.

But it is not like every single female group had massive bullying problem. Just like there are plenty of boy groups who don't bully each other.

This is like saying "I had no idea how severely boys beat or insult each other". It is absolutely true that such problem exists among boys. But you still have a lot of groups where boys don't beat each other.

If anyone is looking for how interaction between teen girls look like, this parody made by The Onion is the best depiction I've ever seen: https://youtu.be/XUT8ec24anM

What books if I might ask?

Still, girls need more social interactions than boys in general, as the mental issues are different.

According to other research boys are coping mentally better with COVID than girls.

Then again, boys had more social interactions during lockdown due to online gaming being way more prevalent among boys. For many boys, they kept gaming and thus socializing largely as before. Girls social was more in person or composed of general "keeping in touch" and not much was happening to talk about.

I purposefully shown some online games to my daughters so they can socialize with friends. But looking around, it was quite exceptional move for parent of girls. They had more schoolmate boys playing with them although they normally socialize more with girls. And some of those girls were the ones I told the parents about the option. I did not asked single boy to join, they were already gaming.

I took this to mean that he was referring to his own experience of being a boy and going to school.

Maybe he's not a native speaker and he's interchanging boys for children/kids.

That's my guess, based on his comment history he's not native.

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