All-American Boys: Abused, Medicated, Fat

It’s harder than ever to be an American boy these days.  (Yes, girls have it very hard too; future column.)

Two news stories - not related, or maybe so? - caught my eye this week; one about abuse of young male players in team sports, the other about the dramatic rise in the diagnosis of hyperactivity in boys.

In the midst of the final week of the college basketball national championships, yet another sports scandal; Rutgers University, the public state university of New Jersey, fired its basketball coach after a video went viral showing him over 2 years shoving and kicking his student players and aggressively hurling balls, verbal abuse, and homophobic slurs at the team. “You fucking fairies…you’re fucking faggots,” he yells during one session.

Readers shared their stories confirming this norm; one mother told of her 8 year old son’s soccer coach yelling at the boys after a losing game, “All right, girls.  Line up so we can take your dress sizes.”

US college sports, even high school sports are a huge business.  Coaches make larger salaries than principals or presidents. Half of all school aged boys take part in team sports, but the sports pages seem to be filled with stories not about great players but about abusive coaches, domineering parents, controlling alumni and corrupt school administrators, all desperate for a winning team.  What happens to the boys and young men in these settings?

Of course most coaches are good and caring teachers, not despots.  Taking part in sports is good for young people; it is associated with good grades, college attendance, adult income and job quality, says a 2009 University of Northern Iowa study.  But the same study found that “male high school athletes in particular report higher levels of alcohol consumption, drunk driving, sexist and homophobic social attitudes, gender related violent activity and same sex violence (fighting).” 

New York Times columnist Charles Blow cites this study, saying, “The Rutgers incident, in its own way, once again shines a light on the broader, poisonous culture in which masculinity is narrowly drawn, where physical violence is an acceptable outlet for male emotion, and poor performance is categorically associated with femininity.”

Blow reports on a new alternative program called “Coaching Boys into Men”.  Participants are “significantly more likely to report intervening to stop disrespectful or harmful behaviors among their peers, slightly more likely to recognize abusive behavior, and they report less violent and abusive behavior toward female partners.”

The other disturbing news about boys concerned Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder,  ADHD.  The Federal Centers for Disease Prevention and Control reported last week that nearly one in five (19%) of US boys have been diagnosed with hyperactivity at some point in their lives. (In Southern states the rates are higher, as high as 23%.)  This figure represents a 17% rise since 2007 and a 41% rise in the last decade.  2/3 of these boys take daily prescription drugs like Ritalin or Adderall, which help with symptoms but can lead also to addiction, anxiety and in some cases psychosis. 

Why the huge rise, 41%? Some say doctors are just getting better at recognizing and diagnosing ADHD.  But others report more parents taking their boys to a doctor because they are concerned about troublesome behavior and poor school performance. (Girls’ rates of hyperactivity and prescriptions are about half of boys’.)

I have friends with kids with ADHD, and it’s no fun.  They are genuinely struggling and need constantly to be monitored, admonished and medicated.  But as with the culture of abuse in boy’s sports, one wonders about cause and effect.  Does an educational system that requires sitting still and toeing the line really work for boys?  Various experts have advocated single sex public schools and more active, less-controlled educational projects to channel that boy energy, rather than medicating it. 

The creative solution that captivated me is Richard Louv’s 2005 book, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder.  Louv laments how our paranoid culture of hypervigilance and overscheduling of kids has virtually eliminated the chance for them to spend in nature doing free play, wandering, building tree houses, poking around.  He coined “nature-deficit disorder” not as a medical term, but as the current norm in childhood. But he then found studies, as in the journal Environment and Behavior that showed that kids with ADHD who play in outdoor green settings could concentrate and focus much better than those in indoor paved settings.  Outward Bound types of intense wilderness experiences were also therapeutic for boys and drug free.

So parents of boys; you have a choice.  Get your kids out and playing and walking, in what Rouv calls the restorative power of nature.  Or keep your kids indoors, over programmed and safe from bogeymen -  and medicated?

Oh, I forgot to bring up the boys’ plague of childhood obesity.  Boys don’t just risk  abuse by coaches and medication by parents; they’re also getting fatter and fatter.  From 7% in 1980, now 18% of US children 6-11 are obese, with similar figures for teens.  Over one third of children and adolescents are overweight or obese. Again, in southern states the figures are much higher; in Georgia it’s over 40% overweight or obese.

All you boys; turn off the TV, stop eating junk food, walk to school rather than take all those meds.  Think about going out for sports; good for your weight and future job prospects.  Just watch out for those coaches who call you fags and fairies.  You might grow up to be like them.

Copyright © 2013 Deborah Streeter