On the evening of the first day of school, hundreds of New York City parents gathered at Trinity School on the Upper West Side to hear Rosalind Wiseman talk about how to save their sons.
Wiseman is the author of “Queen Bees and Wannabes,” on which the movie “Mean Girls” was based. The standing-room-only crowd was there to hear about her new book, “Masterminds and Wingmen: Helping Your Son Cope With Schoolyard Power, Locker-room Tests, Girlfriends, and the New Rules of Boy World.”
The atmosphere wasn’t exactly riddled with anxiety — mothers exchanged air kisses and stories about “ashrams” and “ranches” they’d visited over the summer — but the talk was of deep concern to the audience members; many took feverish notes.
Every day’s paper has stories about bullying, suicide, hazing, sexual assault, drugs and alcohol destroying lives. Could these someday be stories about our sons?
Wiseman tells me that a woman posting to her Facebook page said that knowing Wiseman had written a book about boys made her feel “as though a rock had been lifted from her chest.”
But why? What’s so tough about raising boys? Isn’t it girls we’re supposed to worry about? Aren’t they the ones with the self-esteem problems, who stay silent in class, struggle with body-image issues and fall prey to aggressive boys?
Well, no. Not so much.
In “The War on Boys,” Christina Hoff Sommers showed how schools have been eliminating the positive outlets for boys’ aggression — cutting down on recess, where they could burn off enough energy that they didn’t squirm through class, then suggesting drugs like Ritalin to calm them down. And no longer assigning the kind of adventure books, for instance, that might excite boys about literature.
As Sommers wrote in The Atlantic last week, “American boys across the ability spectrum are struggling in the nation’s schools, with teachers and administrators failing to engage their specific interests and needs. This neglect has ominous implications . . . for the boys’ social and intellectual development.”
Today, she notes, American women earn 62 percent of associate’s degrees, 57 percent of bachelor’s degrees, 60 percent of master’s degrees and 52 percent of doctorates. And in a knowledge economy, that has resulted in significantly lower rates of employment for men.
So what can we do for our boys to stave off what Hanna Rosin calls “the end of men”?
Sommers suggests changing schools to be more welcoming to boys’ interests. But Kay Hymowitz, author of “Manning Up,” which describes the perpetual adolescence that 20- and 30-something men seem to exist in, says there is “probably not much to be done” in society as a whole. As the role of women has changed, the role of men has grown less clear, and there is no obvious path to changing that.
But Wiseman at least has some tips for parents.
Perhaps her most important insight is that girls and boys are different — something that is often forgotten (or vehemently denied) by educators and modern liberal parents.
Wiseman offers plenty of discrete pieces of common-sense advice based on her interviews with hundreds of teens and her own experience as the mother of 10- and 12-year-old boys:
* The fact that your son likes to play violent video games does not make him a psychopath.
* Don’t bombard your teenage son with questions about his day the second he gets into your car.
* You can let your son play on a varsity team when he’s a freshman, but don’t be surprised if hanging out with kids a lot older than him creates problems.
* If your son gets a sext message, tell him to delete it immediately.
* If the school calls to report some disciplinary infraction, don’t shoot the messenger.
* Try to have conversations with your son while walking or playing sports. It will make him feel more comfortable talking to you.
No, none of this is a “philosophy” of parenting, but practical advice is a good start — especially when most of us now live apart from the extended families and tight communities that once would have provided that advice.
Wiseman says her goal is to have children “treat themselves and others with dignity.” Fair enough, but then what?
Toward the end of the book, she has a “section” headlined “Should girls be allowed in his bedroom?” Below is one word: “No.”
Just a few weeks ago, The New York Times reported on the rising number of parents who let their teens sleep with boyfriends or girlfriends in their homes. When I asked Wiseman about this, she was incredulous.
“This is my house. I don’t want my child having sex in my house while I’m there.” Worried perhaps she sounded a little prudish, she went on: “At least they should follow the time-honored tradition of pleading with your parents to leave the house for two hours. They should have to work for it.”
Finally, she offered this, “There have to be boundaries.”
But when it comes to turning our boys into men, we seem to have drawn those boundaries in all the wrong places.