'Always Worrying About Boys'

Article here. Excerpt:

'Some people suggest that boys have very different brains from girls and have inherently weaker verbal skills. They should be given "informational texts" to read instead of the classics or any material containing emotion, which they aren't good at either. Leonard Sax, president of the National Association for Single Sex Public Education, suggests that literature teachers should not ask boys about characters' emotions but should focus only on what the characters actually do.

But science is proving that none of this is true. The alleged great differences between the brains of boys and girls are a myth. Lise Eliot, associate professor in the Department of Neuroscience at the Chicago Medical School, did an exhaustive review of the scientific literature on human brains from childhood to adolescence. She reports in her book Pink Brain, Blue Brain that there is "surprisingly little evidence of sex differences in children's brains."

As for boys' inability to handle emotion, that's another canard. In fact, boys have to learn to suppress emotions, and too often our culture instructs them well. Harvard psychiatrist William Pollack, the author of Real Boys, notes that our strict "boy culture" demands emotional rigidity, and by the second grade erodes the interpersonal skills that come naturally to boys. He says that boy babies are actually more expressive and vocal than girl babies. "We now have executives paying $10,000 a week to learn emotional intelligence. These [sessions] actually target skills boys were born with."'