Boys Adrift

John Vandervelde - Program Director

One way we feel we can help encourage, challenge, motivate, and inspire parents (and others who work with young people) is to pass along resources like books, websites, and articles that we have found to be helpful to us.  We have a section of our website dedicated to this, it can be found here.

Today I'd like to recommend a book to you that has proved very interesting to my self and many other here at HoneyRock.  It is a book called "Boys Adrift" by Leonard Sax.  I encourage you to pick up a copy and check it out.

A Summary of "Boys Adrift" by Leonard Sax - this is taken from Sax's blog:

I have been a practicing physician for 21 years. For the past 17 years,
I have worked in a suburb of Washington DC. Ten years ago, I began
noticing something odd. I'd find a particular family where the daughter
was motivated, hardworking, and successful - while her brother was an
under-achiever. I've now documented this pattern hundreds of times just
in my own practice. Emily is a straight-A student determined to get
into a good college, while her brother - just as smart as Emily - has
none of her drive.

In the past seven years, I have visited over
200 schools around the United States, Canada, and Australia. I have met
with teachers, spoken with parents, and listened to children and
teenagers from every demographic group. I've found that this pattern -
"driven girls, directionless boys" to use Professor Judy Kleinfeld's
phrase - is becoming more common everywhere you look. You'll find it in
cities, in suburbs and in rural areas; among White, Black, and Latino
families; and in affluent, middle-income and low-income neighborhoods.
Boys whose families have recently immigrated from East Asia or South
Asia - from Japan, China, Singapore, India, Pakistan, etc. - appear to
have some degree of immunity to this emerging epidemic. But the longer
those boys live in this country, the more likely they are to begin
manifesting this weird syndrome of apathy and lack of motivation.)

What's going on?

I've
spent every available moment for the past seven years researching this
question. I've published scholarly articles for the American
Psychological Association and the American Academy of Family
Physicians. I've written op-eds for newspapers such as the Washington Post, the LA Times, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune and the Philadelphia Daily News;
and I've corresponded with more than a thousand parents and their sons.
I've seen this question grow from my own personal mission to become a
national topic of debate and the central theme of movies such as Failure to Launch.

And
now, finally, I think I've figured it out. I've identified five factors
which are driving this phenomenon. And I've seen what works: what
parents can do to turn this thing around and get their sons back on
track.