Leonard Sax has been called the Al Gore of the gender crisis. The Washington, DC-based family physician and psychologist will discuss his two books “Boys Adrift: Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men” and “Girls on the Edge: The Four Factors Driving the Crisis for Girls” on Wednesday, November 17, at High School South.
A decade ago, Sax began to notice a distressing trend in his practice. Parents were concerned about their unmotivated, underachieving sons. In talking to teachers and parents across the country, he discovered that this was a national phenomenon that crosses social, racial, and economic lines. Drawing on the latest research and his vast experience with boys and their families, he argues that a combination of social and biological factors is creating an environment that is literally toxic to boys and deterring them from real-world pursuits. These factors include:
Teaching methods. Profound changes in the way children are educated, including a misguided overemphasis on reading and math as early as kindergarten; schools that are geared towards girls; and the shift away from competitive formats have had the unintended consequence of turning many boys off to school.
Video games. Sax argues that the destructive effects of video games are not on boys’ cognitive abilities but on their motivation, their ability to develop patience and delay gratification, and their connection with the real world. In an interview with Matt Lauer on the Today Show, Sax shared anecdotes of boys who said they would rather play video games than go to a party and meet girls, and one set of parents told him they had offered to pay for their son to go hiking out west for four weeks in the summer and he replied he would rather stay home and play video games.
Prescription drugs. According to Sax, overuse of and overreliance on medication for ADD and ADHD may be causing irreversible damage to the motivational centers in boys’ brains.
Endocrine disruptors. Environmental estrogens from plastic bottles, children’s toys, and food sources may be lowering boys’ testosterone levels, asserts Sax, making boys’ bones more brittle and throwing their endocrine systems out of whack.
Devaluation of masculinity. Shifts in popular culture have transformed the role models of manhood, Sax says. It is no longer “cool” to be good at school. Forty years ago we had Sidney Poitier and Father Knows Best, writes Sax. Today we have Bart Simpson. “Boys are not being given a clear idea of constructive masculinity.”
In “Girls on the Edge” Sax singles out four issues that he believes contribute to what he sees as an epidemic of angst and an ill-defined sense of self among U.S. girls:
Confusion over sexual identity. Girls are confusing sexuality with premature sexualization. Girls are trying to look sexy and attract attention at a much younger age. Sax asserts that this has the unintended consequence of disengaging them from their own emerging sexuality, often leading to a confused sexual identity.
The cyberbubble. Excessive social networking is replacing real friendships. In this era of texting, sexting, and Facebook, Sax says girls can easily become stuck in a “cyberbubble” in which they are hyper-connected with their peers but disconnected with themselves.
Obsessions. Sax explores how the pursuit of thinness, a fit body, or other notions of perfection lead to disaster. Some girls, writes Sax, are anxious about grades or about sports. Others fixate on what they eat. And at least one in five American girls are now deliberately harming themselves — cutting themselves with razors, burning themselves with cigarets. Without a strong sense of self, girls become vulnerable to obsessions.
Environmental toxins. As in “Boys Adrift,” Sax examines how chemicals in our midst may be dangerous to growing girls. He believes that these “endocrine disruptors” may accelerate girls’ physical maturity faster than their emotional maturity. Girls who begin puberty too early may be at increased risk of drug and alcohol abuse, anxiety, and depression as teenagers.
Sax graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1980 with a bachelor’s degree in biology. He graduated from Penn in 1986 with a Ph.D. in psychology and an M.D. degree. In 1990 he launched a private medical practice in suburban Montgomery County, Maryland, about 30 minutes northwest of the District of Columbia. In 2008 Sax retired from medical practice to devote himself full-time to issues of gender in education, and to leading NASSPE, the National Association for Single Sex Public Education, the non-profit organization he helped to launch in 2002. He has been featured on CNN, PBS, the Today Show, Fox News, NPR’s Talk of the Nation, and more. He lives with his wife and daughter in Chester County, PA.
In both “Boys Adrift” and “Girls on the Edge” Sax offers prescriptive strategies for helping the parents of boys and girls become proactive in countering the negative effects of educational, societal, and environmental toxins, both literal and figurative.
From suggesting that we return a boy’s first educational experience — kindergarten — to one that is more positive (“let boys play with live frogs and tadpoles before asking them to learn about frogs and tadpoles from images on a computer screen”) and delay the academics of school to first or second grade to questioning the use of plastics in bottles and children’s toys to encouraging both boys and girls to become involved in communities that bridge the generations, Sax shows an alternative side to every hot button issue on the gender differences agenda.
In his lecture Sax will provide tips and strategies for weaning sons away from video games and improving their schooling and motivation, and effective strategies to help daughters deal with stress and anxiety.
Parenting Lecture, West Windsor-Plainsboro PTAs and PTSAs, High School South Auditorium, 346 Clarksville Road, West Windsor. Wednesday, November 17, 7:30 to 9:30 p.m. Leonard Sax, psychologist, family physician, and best-selling author of “Boys Adrift” and “Girls on the Edge,” argues that a combination of social and biological factors is creating an environment that is literally toxic to boys and creating a crisis for girls. Free for WW-P PTA/PTSA members; $5 for non-members.
