Article 9
Boys will be Boys
Developmental research has been focused on girls; now it’s their brothers’ turn.
Boys need help, too, but first they need to be understood.
BY BARBARA KANTROWITZ AND CLAUDIA KALB
IT WAS A CLASSIC MARS-VENUS EN-
COUNTER. Only in this case, the woman
was from Harvard and the man—well,
boy—was a 4-year-old at a suburban Bos-
ton nursery school. Graduate student Judy
Chu was in his classroom last fall to
gather observations for her doctoral dis-
sertation on human development. His
greeting was startling: he held up his fin-
ger as if it were a gun and pretended to
shoot her. “I felt bad,” Chu recalls. “I felt
as if he didn’t like me.” Months later and
much more boy-savvy, Chu has a differ-
ent interpretation: the gunplay wasn’t
hostile—it was just a way for him to say
hello. “They don’t mean it to have harsh
consequences. It’s a way for them to con-
nect.”
SOURCES: DR. MICHAEL THOMPSON, BARNEY BRAWER. RESEARCH BY BILL VOURVOULIAS—NEWSWEEK
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Article 9. Boys will be Boys
Researchers like Chu are discovering
new meaning in lots of things boys have
done for ages. In fact, they’re dissecting
just about every aspect of the developing
male psyche and creating a hot new field of
inquiry: the study of boys. They’re also
producing a slew of books with titles like
“Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons From the
Myths of Boyhood” and “Raising Cain:
Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys”
that will hit the stores in the next few
months.
What some researchers are finding is
that boys and girls really are from two dif-
ferent planets. But since the two sexes
have to live together here on Earth, they
should be raised with special consideration
for their distinct needs. Boys and girls have
different “crisis points,” experts say,
stages in their emotional and social devel-
opment where things can go very wrong.
Until recently, girls got all the attention.
But boys need help, too. They’re much
more likely than girls to have discipline
problems at school and to be diagnosed
with attention deficit disorder (ADD).
Boys