Bringing up boys

There are a number of guides to bringing up boys -- from whole books to the brief summary below

Also worth mention is "Bringing Up Boys" by James C. Dobson

and "Raising Boys In The Twenty-First Century" by Steve Biddulph

There are also a number of articles from mothers and others that range from realistic to feminist nonsense

What I want to emphasize is that a lot will depend on the average boy.  There probably are a number of behaviours that are common around the middle of the range but many boys will fall outside the mainstream range.  And the smarter the child is and the older the child gets all the simple generalizations about boy behaviour fall way

I knew one boy, for instance, who would never run despite one being tempted by the generalization that all boys run a lot.  The boy was a very bright bookish sort so was just not interested in physical activity.  And I am not talking about myself.  I ran quite a lot in my childhood.

So the point I want to press here is that the category "boy" is just too wide.  There are many different types of boy. The well-known authors generally write sensibly and do lay down a template that many boys will tend to follow with good results. But we must never insist on some behaviour we have read about in books.  Most boys, for instance will enjoy going camping but a minority will loathe it.  There is no "one size fits all"


It's easy to see why boys get a bad press. Male toddlers are noisy and hyperactive. Pre-teen boys are immature, can't concentrate, won't sit still. Teenage boys are so negatively perceived that if you didn't actually know any, you'd think they were all drug addicts and vandals.

According to child development expert Elizabeth Hartley Brewer, author of Raising And Praising Boys (Vermilion, £7.99), the root of the problem is not boys themselves, but the way we react to them.

'From earliest childhood, we give boys far more negative feedback than girls, and then tell them off when they live up to the negative image of themselves we've given them. We're not very good at celebrating boys for being boys.'

Here's how to give your boys a break:

Age 0-5

Praise boys for the things they're naturally good at
Have realistic expectations for behaviour and skills
Make plenty of opportunities for physical activities
Make time to read and talk to your son

Age 5-11

Reward their efforts – don't criticise their mistakes
Recognise boys' need for self-respect
Do things together
Make space for fathers

Age 12-16

Respect your son's privacy
Keep talking, listening and hugging
Praise, often - but don't engage in false flattery
Trust your son to do things his way - don't spoon-feed him

SOURCE 





‘Conspiracy Theory’: NYT’s 1619 Project Faces Scrutiny From Scholars, Historians

Over the course of this week, the New York Post has published a series of op-eds attacking the 1619 Project—the controversial and erroneous history of America from The New York Times. Today, the New York Post features an op-ed by David Bobb, president of the Bill of Rights Institute. Bobb recently spoke to The Daily Signal about the 1619 Project. An excerpt from his interview is below and the full transcript is available

David Bobb: I’ve read the 1619 Project [and] went through the lesson plans. I was struck by one in particular. It was what’s called erasure poetry, and it asks students to take the Declaration of Independence and to block out all of the sections so that the remaining words would be the poem that they wanted to create themselves.

Think of what that exercise treats and really trains the minds of our young people to say, that the Declaration is a document mainly to be obliterated.

The Declaration was the thing that gave Frederick Douglass the hope and realization that he was a person deserving of rights and dignity.

The Founders were not perfect—no human being is—and I think the remarkable thing that we need to impress upon young people is not that we had, in the founding of the United States, an answer and a kind of determination of everyone’s rights in their fullness. We didn’t. But we did lay down the marker and we said that all human beings are created equal.

That was a marker that both indicted some of the Founders’ own actions as slaveholders, and set a standard by which Americans and future generations could look to and try to aspire to. The 1619 Project gets none of that aspirational element.

I think when you look at Allen Guelzo and Jim McPherson and James Oakes and Gordon Wood and others that have come to criticize that, and then be utterly dismissed by the editors of that project as irrelevant. “Well, who anointed them as our preeminent historians?” That’s been some of the response.

I think the debate that’s ensued is a good one and that’s the kind of thing that I think students can actually enter into.

One of those people that I just mentioned, Allen Guelzo, is a contributor to the Bill of Rights Institute’s Comprehensive History of the United States, that we just debuted at the National Council for the Social Studies.

We believe in viewpoint diversity, and what I lament about some of our publications, including the 1619 Project, is there’s not even a pretense of viewpoint diversity. It’s just saying this is it, and, unfortunately, it can amount to a conspiracy theory.

That is the thing that we see in Howard Zinn, where here’s history in a box, here’s the people who did all of the wrong and we’re going to blame them, and here’s the people that do all of the right and, in fact, that’s not the way that history works.

What you have to do, I think, is have an intellectually honest conversation. What we found is that teenagers are capable of doing a lot, and if you treat them as curious and engaged interlocutors, oftentimes they rise to the occasion.

The thing that I find is that the teachers all across the country mainly do not engage in conspiracy mongering. They’re mainly interested in trying to wrestle with these questions and put really important ideas in front of their students and then rely on those conversations to help propel those students into the fullness of citizenship.

SOURCE 






The 'Transgender' Agenda: The Tip of the Totalitarian Spear
What public schools are doing to children in the name of tolerance is intolerable  

In their pursuit unassailable power by any means necessary, American leftists have decided that tolerance and tyranny are interchangeable terms. Nothing says that clearer than their efforts to force feed the “transgender” agenda to children in school — without parental knowledge or permission.

On January 26, the California Teachers Association (CTA) held a meeting where members decided to change existing policy and add “transgender and binary youth” to the list of students who can leave class for medical reasons — absent their parents’ permission. “While the updated policy does not include ‘hormone therapy’ explicitly, the rationale discussed by CTA’s civil rights committee in making the policy change indicates that’s the final goal,” the Epoch Times reports.

The Epoch Times learned of this development when concerned teachers reported it to the news site. And while the changes have not been made publicly available, CTA spokeswoman Claudia Briggs confirmed the new policy reads as follows: “CTA believes comprehensive school based health care clinics are needed to bring caring and responsive services to young people. The clinics shall provide cisgender, transgender and non-binary youth equal and confidential access to decision-making rights for students and their families.”

These changes arise from a statement printed by the CTA Report of Board of Directors, Committees, and Items of New Business in June 2019. It is equally provocative: “Current interpretation of California state law does not allow trans students to begin gender identity confirming hormone therapy without the consent of both legal guardians, however it does allow for cis minors to receive hormones (e.g. birth control) without the barrier of parental permission. This inequity of decision-making forces some children to go through the wrong puberty and can negatively impact the child’s mental health.”

Note the incrementalism. The CTA wants to frame hormone therapy per se as a civil-rights issue, not a medical one. Thus the same progressives who succeeded in usurping parental rights regarding birth control — which in many states extends to minors getting actual abortions without parental permission or knowledge — now demand the “right” to usurp parental rights regarding life-altering hormone therapy in pursuit of “sex change.”

Of course, the CTA insists that hormone therapy is identity confirming rather than the rejection of chromosomal and biological reality — the “sexual dysphoria” — it really is.

“Teachers and others public school educators adopted this policy, belief statement, to ensure that all students have equal rights regardless of zip code, skin color, language they speak and who they love,” Briggs insists. “The intent of the policy is not to circumvent parents or guardians.”

Nonsense. California’s Family Code 6925, in place since the 1990s, allows minors to receive birth control and/or abortions without parental consent. And in 2013, the state enacted Assembly Bill 1266, a.k.a. the “School Success and Opportunity Act.” It states that school employees are not allowed to inform parents about a child’s “gender identity” unless the child gives consent. Moreover, while “The California Healthy Youth Act & 2019 Health Education Curriculum Framework” allows parents to opt out of sex education, it requires them to expose their children to materials that discuss gender, gender identity, gender expression, and sexual orientation.

The ostensible reason? The framework states, “Dispelling myths, breaking down stereotypes and linking students to resources can help prevent bullying, self-harm, feelings of hopelessness, and serious considerations of suicide.”

If there is anything more “mythical” than the idea that a boy can become a girl, or vice versa, simply by saying so, one is hard-pressed to imagine what it is.

In Wisconsin, parents are pushing back. They are suing the Madison school district, alleging its transgender policy is unconstitutional. The policy, enacted in 2018, states that a person’s gender identity can be male, female, a blend of both or neither, and determined by that same self-identification.

The intent of the policy? To “disrupt the gender binary” with educational material that will teach children gender is a choice. Even more insidious? While parental consent is still required to change a student’s name and gender in official district records, students are “unofficially” allowed to do so without it. And while all teachers and district staff are required to address those students by their chosen names and pronouns and are prevented from revealing these duplicitous machinations to parents or guardians.

“There is no compelling government interest in keeping secret from parents that their child is dealing with gender dysphoria,” the lawsuit says.

Oh yes there is. Above all else, “fundamental transformation of the United States” requires an all-out assault on this nation’s traditions, mores, customs, and culture. Nothing is a firmer bulwark against that transformation than the nuclear family, buttressed by thousands of years of common understanding about biology and sex. Thus, the intrusion of the state into matters that should be none of its business must be relentless — and ever-expanding.

None of this would be possible without collaboration by a medical community that is totally ethically compromised. Surgical procedures such as double mastectomies are performed on otherwise healthy 13-year-old girls and chemical castration is sought for boys as young as seven. The medical community views these as life-enhancing efforts rather than medical malpractice and child abuse.

Nothing makes that reality clearer than testimonials complied by the Kelsey Coalition that reveal the extent of the damage inflicted on parents and the children themselves by medical professionals, whose default position is transition — even to the point where such transition includes performing surgery on autistic children — and school officials who counsel parents to “medically transition” children as young as 11.

Victim Sydney Wright recounted her personal experience with this agenda, explaining that she was once “a beautiful girl heading toward high school graduation. But after taking testosterone for a year, I turned into an overweight, prediabetic nightmare of a transgender man.”

This dynamic is made possible by a progressive-controlled public-school system that has used the removal of religion from the classroom to remove of all morality, making rebuttal of the progressive agenda virtually impossible. Thus, the same school nurse that can point a 13-year-old to the nearest abortion clinic is largely precluded from telling that same child that abortion is wrong.

Moreover, cowardice and intimidation abounds: A number of school officials, medical professionals, and parents would rather submit to virtually anything in lieu of being called “transphobic” courtesy of a Transgender Mafia that has even hammered ostensible allies like Martina Navratilova and others for daring to suggest that “trans” women should not be allowed to participate in women’s sports.

In a better world, the “T” would face expulsion from the LGTBQ community, and children would be required to wait until adulthood before making life-altering decisions. In this one, a reordering of reality itself — in pursuit of totalitarianism — must be accommodated.

Americans must be clear on that last point. If reality itself can be determined solely by self-identification — “my truth” on steroids — then two plus two can eventually equal five, as more and more concessions become incrementally demanded. Thus above all else, a government-enforced transgender agenda must be seen for what it truly is: The tip of the totalitarian spear.

SOURCE 






Only ‘limited’ evidence for trans kids’ medicine but inquiry too ‘dangerous’?

Comment from Australia

The evidence for life-altering medical intervention in youth gender clinics suffers from “gaps” and “limitations” but a national inquiry would be “dangerous”, federal Health Minister Greg Hunt has been told.

The inquiry urged by more than 200 doctors and clinicians “would further harm vulnerable patients and their families through increased media and public attention,” the Royal Australasian College of Physicians said in a letter to Mr Hunt on Friday.

In August, after this newspaper began reporting concerns about the safety and ethics of “transgender” medical treatments for vulnerable minors, Mr Hunt sought “urgent” advice from the college, which covers paediatricians.

It has since emerged the college had lobbied with paediatrician Michelle Telfer — whose Royal Children’s Hospital gender clinic in Melbourne spearheads the pro-trans “affirmative” treatment model in Australia — for easier and quicker underage access to hormones and less oversight by the Family Court.

On Friday, Mr Hunt’s spokesman said the minister would review the college’s advice and consider what might need to be done.

There is intensifying global debate about the reasons for an exponential rise in often already troubled teenagers, mostly girls, diagnosed with gender dysphoria (distress at being “born in the wrong body”) and asking for puberty blocker drugs, opposite-sex hormones and surgery such as mastectomy.

On Thursday, the former British minister for mental health and suicide prevention, Jackie Doyle-Price, called for “more control over gender treatment for children”, citing litigation involving a regretful “detransitioner”, Keira Bell, 23, who said the NHS Tavistock gender clinic in London “should have challenged me more” over medical transition.

“Puberty is not the time for anyone to consent to life-changing treatment,” Ms Doyle-Price said in a tweet.

This week brought the launch of a new global body, the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine, which argues that the low quality of the evidence for the affirmative model has been obscured by dramatic but unsupported claims that young people are likely to kill themselves if denied hormones and surgery.

“Given the lack of evidence of benefits of these treatments on long-term mental health, and the evidence of alarmingly high rates of post-treatment suicide, the use of affirmative care outside of rigorously designed clinical trial settings is inconsistent with ethical medical practice,” the SEGM spokesman, US-based endocrinologist William Malone, said on Friday.

Before the rise of the affirmative model and teenage-onset dysphoria, the condition typically occurred in a small, stable percentage of pre-school boys, with the vast majority coming to accept their bodies as they matured and many emerging as gay or bisexual.

Philip Morris, president of the National Association of Practising Psychiatrists, which supports a national inquiry, said he found it “very surprising” for a medical college to claim it would be “dangerous” to hold “a balanced, comprehensive inquiry into the most effective and safe treatments for gender dysphoria”.

“An inquiry that comes up with consensus on the best treatments would give confidence and support to parents and children.”

Dr Morris said the health minister would be “very disappointed” with the college, having asked it for a verdict on what was “clinical best practice”.

“(The letter) gives him no advice about the competing merits of the affirmative approach versus supportive, more conservative treatments of children with gender dysphoria; it provides him with no information on the safety and effectiveness of puberty blockers and opposite-sex hormones in children and adolescents.”

Treatment side-effects include infertility, loss of sexual desire, cardiovascular problems, and possible cognitive impairment.

‘Validation’ for Dr Telfer

Friday’s letter from the college warning Mr Hunt not to hold a national inquiry was welcomed by the gender clinicians’ lobby AusPATH, and RCH chairman Rob Knowles and chief executive John Stanway.

RCH said the letter had “validated” Dr Telfer’s work, and backed the college’s appeal for more public funding to spread gender clinic services, especially in rural and regional areas.

In the letter, RACP president Mark Lane said young people with gender dysphoria suffered “extremely high” rates of self-harm and attempted suicide. The college did not supply any evidence when asked.

Canadian psychologist Ken Zucker, a world authority on gender dysphoria and editor of the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior, has dismissed as “pure dogma” the affirmative model line to parents hesitating on the brink of treatment for their child, “Do you want a live son or a dead daughter?”.

“If you are depressed, your suicidality risk is going to be elevated, but you see that in kids who are depressed but don’t have gender dysphoria,” Dr Zucker told The Australian last year.

“The idea that adolescents with gender dysphoria are at a higher risk of suicide per se is dogma — and I think it’s wrong.”

In his letter, Dr Lane said youth gender dysphoria was “an emerging area of healthcare”, and the evidence on treatment outcomes was “limited”, and this was similar to the state of affairs with conditions, such as rare cancers, affecting a small number of patients.

He suggested federal funding for long-term research; a new “national framework” for consistent, high quality care across the country; and new “evidence-based fact sheets” on treatment.

“To facilitate a high level of informed consent, patients and families must be provided with information about the limitations of available evidence regarding gender dysphoria,” he said. “For example, there should be an informed discussion of the burdens and benefits of treatment options in a way each child or adolescent can understand.”

‘No merit or courage’

Sydney clinical psychologist Dianna Kenny, a critic of the affirmative model, said the college’s statement was “so politically correct as to lack any scientific merit or moral courage”.

Professor of paediatrics John Whitehall, another critic, said it was odd for the college to not want “public attention” for the issue of medical transition of under-18s.

“I would have thought there is already a great deal of attention, though all one way (in favour of the affirmative model),” he said.

“The RACP boasts of interest in public health and that usually involves full and frank discussion of all side-effects as part of preventing harm. Here, it is essentially (saying), ‘Be quiet and accept the experimentation’.”

In a 2018 submission to the National Children’s Commissioner, which was reporting on progress under the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child, the college said taxpayers should subsidise puberty blocker drugs (which cost $5000 a year for each trans youth) as well as trans surgery, while “gender identity” should be taught in schools and medical courses at university.

The college did not answer a question about whether its advice to Mr Hunt was affected by any conflict of interest.

SEGM’s Dr Malone said there were rare circumstances in which untested treatments might be used as a last resort but challenged the college’s comparison between gender dysphoria and cancer.

“Gender dysphoria is not a fatal disease: no single, quality study has demonstrated that gender dysphoria causes suicides in young people,” he said.

“Treatment with hormones and surgeries to halt puberty deny young people a chance for natural resolution of gender dysphoria.”

SOURCE  

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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