Dr. Leonard Sax, a physician, psychologist and author says he knows why boys are having trouble growing into men; and it’s not their fault. He lists five things that he says, contributes to boys who refuse to grow up: current teaching methods, over-diagnosis of Attention Deficit Disorder and ensuing medication, endocrine disrupting chemicals from plastics and food, video games and societal devaluation of masculinity. His ideas, expressed via a report through the AP newswire are likely to cause some controversy, but Sax, appears unfazed. He says younger people don’t remember a time when things were different.
Sax’s gripe with current teaching methods is that kids are being taught too early; Kindergarteners are being taught stuff that used to be taught in first or ever second grade. The result, he says, is boys who feel disenfranchised and wind up being diagnosed with ADHD, which Sax says, is a mistake. Parents, teachers and even doctors are reaching for a medical cure to what used to be thought of as antsy pants. He even cites statistics, saying that as recently as 1980 just 0.4 percent of children were diagnosed with ADHD. By 2009, that number had grown to eight percent, and not because more children have it, he says.
Sax also says that more and more evidence is showing that the plastics so-ever-present in our lives is causing endocrine related problems in both genders. Young girls are growing older faster and young boys are being emasculated.
There’s also the problem of video games which let boys act out, well, boyish fantasies, which in effect allows them to grow up without having to actually do so.
And finally, he says, society itself has devalued the very meaning of masculinity. Before, boys and men were “allowed” to behave in masculine ways, now they are not. He cites as an example of where boys are no longer allowed to throw snowballs at anyone, or write about the glamour of war. Before, it was seen as normal; now it’s seen as cause for alarm. Such attitudes, he says, go against the stuff that boys are made of and cause problems for them in trying to put the world into an order that makes sense to them.
Sax, once a family practitioner, has embarked on something of a crusade, writing books and going on tours where he appears at speaking engagements touting, what he feels, is the loss of masculinity in men, and the repercussions to our society as a result of it.