Don’t leave boys behind

Submitted by Mastodon on Fri, 2012-08-10 21:10

Article here. Excerpt:

'Part of the problem is cultural, which policymakers may not be able to address easily or at all. One Dallas principal I spoke with noted that as more families split up, more young boys live in homes without a father. The lack of a dad can create numerous problems, he pointed out, but it especially can create a problem for young boys who lack a male figure helping supervise them.

Divorce may be the only way forward for some families, but fathers in situations like that owe it to their kids to remain a part of their lives, helping create horizons for them. For one thing, young men with only a high school degree are more likely to suffer economically. Holly Hacker reported in December on a telling difference: Men with high school degrees suffer higher unemployment rates than men with either an associate’s degree or a bachelor’s degree.'

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Comments

"... but fathers in situations like that owe it to their kids to remain a part of their lives, helping create horizons for them."

Ever consider, before laying the blame squarely and solely on men, you should make sure the men who DO want to be involved fathers aren't so easily stripped of access from their children, reduced to supervised visits, or at best can get a handful of days a month, without the mothers co-operation?

a more appropriate way to phrase this would have been to say "but parents in situations like that owe it to their kids to ensure both parents remain a part of their lives, helping create horizon's for them"... But this doesn't lay all the blame on men, and we can't have that, right?

Regarding ADD... you claim you're not here to speak on the rates of ADD, then you proceed to speak on the rates by claiming families need to contend with a high rate of ADD. A look into the rates of diagnosis will find that, in affluent areas, where families tend to remain intact and fathers remain a significant part of the childs life, ADD diagnosis rates tend to be about equal in boys and girls, while in area's with high single motherhood, boys rates of ADD skyrocket. Could ADD diagnosis not correlate more in the single mothers inability to maintain discipline of the child and less to do with the children themselves?

Overall, I like the idea that we should be concerned for boys success as much as girls, and that ignoring the gap does nobody any good, It bothers me that, once again, it is boys themselves being blamed. If it was girls you were speaking of, it would be anathema to dare try holding them accountable for their own failures. I personally believe there is room for both self reflection and external examination. It's just a shame that these methods tend to be gendeed, with self reflection being the only allowable method of examining boys failures, and external examinations being reserved exclusively for girls failures.

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Submitted by Kratch on Sun, 2012-08-12 05:36