Our uptight, risk-averse world is denying boys the outlets they need to grow up into civilised, successful adults, writes Sue Palmer
Ryan was eight when he tried to kill himself. He saved up his Ritalin tablets until there seemed to be enough for an overdose, then knocked them back and waited to die. Later, after he had been very sick, his mum asked why he had done it. “Because I’m too naughty,” he said. “I’m just a nuisance to everyone.”
Ryan is constantly in trouble at school and at home. He has been diagnosed with ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), a “developmental disorder” involving problems with concentration and self-control. ADHD did not exist as a medical condition until 40 years ago but is now thought to affect about 5% of the population. The vast majority of sufferers are male.
Last year I published a book called Toxic Childhood, looking for reasons behind recorded increases in children’s behavioural and learning difficulties over the past 20 or so years. I concluded that rapid social and cultural change – junk food, poor sleeping patterns, a screen-based lifestyle, marketing pressures, family upheavals – were interfering with healthy development.
It was clear from my research that behavioural and learning difficulties hit boys hardest. Educationally, for instance, many now fall at the first fence and never recover: boys are three times as likely as girls to need extra help with reading at primary school, and by the time they reach GCSE they trail behind in almost every subject on the curriculum. Indeed, less than a century after women’s emancipation, female students significantly outnumber male ones at British universities.
Behavioural disorders such as ADHD are about four times more likely to affect boys and so are the emotional, behavioural and mental health problems that, according to the British Medical Association, now beset 10-20% of our children and teenagers. As these sorts of problems in teenage boys all too often lead to school failure, disaffection and antisocial behaviour, there are powerful reasons for trying to solve them.
So I’m now researching another book to find out why the modern world seems particularly toxic for boys. It’s already clear that the sort of behaviour we require from our offspring in an uptight, urban, risk-averse and increasingly bureaucratic society comes far less naturally to infant males than to their sisters.
Take the “naughtiness” that is wrecking life for Ryan and those around him. There have always been naughty boys, but in the past the activities of scamps, scrumpers and scallywags were usually shrugged off as high spirits. Fictional rascals, like Huck Finn and William Brown, clearly viewed themselves as heroes, not suicidal victims.
The big difference between Ryan’s miserable existence and that of youngsters in the past is that, until the end of the 20th century, much of boys’ boisterous behaviour went unnoticed and unrestrained by adults. There was time, space and freedom for lads to run off steam. Even when shades of the prison house did close around the growing boy, the time at the edges of the school or working day was still his own and the local woods and hills were his natural habitat.
This is not simply a case of “blue-remembered hills” – the tendency of adults to romanticise childhood. There have, of course, been periods in the past when children were mercilessly exploited and probably had little time or energy to play, but most historical accounts of boyhood, even recent urban ones, involve a degree of freedom to roam that seems unthinkable today. . . .
