I just finished reading two books recommended by an acquaintance: Why Gender Matters: What Parents and Teachers Need to Know about the Emerging Science of Sex Differences (Broadway Books, 2005), and Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (Basic Books, 2007). The author of both books is Leonard Sax, a family physician and a psychologist.

In Why Gender Matters, Sax takes on the dogmas of gender-neutral child-rearing and social constructionism (the view that differences between girls and boys derive from social expectations with little or no input from biology), and presents a compelling account of the enormous price that children and society have paid for these modern experiments. Under the pervasive influence of blurred distinctions between male and female, particularly the erasure of gender distinctions in school program and curriculum, many children feel “less rooted” in their identity as boys or girls than at any time in our memory.

The neglect of gender in the raising and education of children has resulted in a loss of direction for the growing child and especially the adolescent. The adolescent today is like an explorer without a compass in a trackless wilderness, unsure of the path or the destination.

Consequences include dramatic increases in anxiety and depression among even young children, an elevated sense of instability and threat in their personal lives, and massive confusion about their own identities and about how to relate to one another. Click to continue »