The Boy Crisis: A Sobering look at the State of our Boys, by Warren Farrell Ph.D

[Xantippe]

Schools are the biggest reason of this, as Dr Farrell said. As women are infected by an imperfect feminism, they are shaping education to be hostile to boys. Boys thrive with competition. Women teachers have declared competition as bad. Boys are turned off from school at an early age because of their teachers’ hostility, either consciously or subconsciously, to the way they learn.

I have seen myself as a teacher that boys (on average) need competition more, BUT I wonder to what extent that applies to lower performing boys.

(I have to say that at my house, my daughter is the more competition-oriented of my older children, although my son is getting into it. There are actually a lot of academic contests if you look around–spelling bees, math contests, Junior Classical League conventions.)

The need for competition also raises the question of tracking, because competition is more interesting when you’re in a group that performs more or less at your level, so you have a chance of shining. In a class with a too big range of abilities, lower performers may just give up, because no matter how hard they work, they don’t have a shot at winning.

OK! I have watched the video and I have a lot of thoughts. First off:

–He’s not your standard Red Pill dude. Yay!
–He opens the video with some questions about do you have a son, grandson, nephew, and are you worried about his motivation, grades, addiction to video games? But he never really addresses that in any depth. I would connect the dots for him and say that video games are highly reinforcing. You “work” and you get paid, and the more you work, the more glory you earn. However, I have to point out that it’s not just low-performing boys who get sucked into games. Highly paid professionals (who are amply rewarded at their jobs) can play them for hours (often late into the night), and we just came back from a road trip where 4-year-old Baby Girl turned into a Minecraft addict over just a few days. Games are HIGHLY addictive, and keeping them in their place is one of the major tasks of modern middle class parenthood, even for parents of bright, academically successful kids.
–I think Farrell is kind of bad with regard to making it all about boys in general, rather than teasing out the differences. He doesn’t talk about class really at all, and class is very important in the modern US with regard to family structure. Modern middle class fathers are more involved with parenting than has been true for the last 100 years and more involved with the parenting of small children than probably ever, and he doesn’t talk about that at all.
–I have to note here that part of the reason that he doesn’t seem very aware of new developments in middle class parenting is that he’s an older guy (born 1943) and doesn’t seem to have any biological children. Wikipedia says he is divorced and remarried and has two step-daughters. So, no sons?
–I also think that he’s being rather bad about not talking about boys and learning disabilities or talking about them in an unhelpful way. I will try to talk about that later.
–He says that “we” don’t care about boys. That’s silly–in an average middle class family, their parents care A LOT and spend a lot of resources making sure they are kept busy, productive and out of trouble. Hence, the current US sports mania among middle class parents…
–He says something about how we are going to have a generation of boys who are less educated than their dads. Is that really so? Is it really the case that native born college educated fathers are having more and more non-college educated sons? What I think is instead happening is that the US has a lot more immigrants than we have in the recent past, which swells the number of less-educated young men.
–I have to mention a pet peeve–why is it that nursing is never counted as a STEM career?
–Farrell is very big on SAHDs. There are some issues here. First off, even SAHMs are often lonely and bored and overworked, even though there are vast oceans of other SAHMs. Being a SAHM of small children can be a ticket out of normal mainstream adult life. (I experienced that when Baby Girl was a toddler and am just now coming out of it–it made it much more difficult to maintain my other adult relationships, even just with the big kids’ friends’ parents.) I imagine that in a major urban area, there might be a critical mass of SAHDs, but in much of the US, being a SAHD is going to be very lonely. (I believe that CAF’s most prominent SAHD would agree–I remember him once saying that at one point, the only adult he talked to aside from his wife was the McDonald’s drive thru lady.) Needless to say, John Lennon’s experience of SAHDing is going to be very different from the average guy’s, both economically and interpersonally. Depression is a major issue with SAHMs, and I would expect that it is at least as bad with SAHDs.

More soon!

 

[ConfusedLucy]

13 minutes isn’t too long for me and I think this raised some interesting points. My initial thoughts, I think the winners and losers model is probably a better way to look at the situation for men rather than arguing whether or not women have it worse. We should be more concerned about the education system and job market as it does seem to leave large numbers of boys with nothing. I agree with what he says about how some men should be encouraged into the caring professions.

 

[PaulinVA]

I have seen myself as a teacher that boys (on average) need competition more, BUT I wonder to what extent that applies to lower performing boys.
…

The need for competition also raises the question of tracking, because competition is more interesting when you’re in a group that performs more or less at your level, so you have a chance of shining. In a class with a too big range of abilities, lower performers may just give up, because no matter how hard they work, they don’t have a shot at winning.

I think competition and tracking should be discussed separately.

Tracking is indeed a motivation killer if you cause young boys to think they are stupid. Dr. Sax uses teaching to read or math concepts as examples. In our desire to be more competitive as a nation, we are pushing academics further and further down, to the point where, in some cases, we are forcing kids to perform skills before their minds are developed enough to be ready. Many boys seem to be ready to ready after many girls. You can kill motivation in kindergarten and 1st grade not because of innate lack of skill but because of readiness.

Competition is more on a daily level. A classroom spelling bee has winners and losers, but gets the boys up in a line and doing something besides sitting for hours. Part of the competition isn’t who wins but the process. Although it is true that many a boy has studied something just to “win” the next classroom challenge.

 

[BlueEyedLady]

I’ve always really liked this guy. He’s a respectable scholar who is very concerned with getting to the facts and finding workable solutions. To anyone who may be concerned, he’s not a “red pill” personality or an angry, nonsensical blogger.

That’s not to say I agree with everything he’s ever said, but from what I’ve seen and read, I agree with 70-80%, and the other 20-30% falls well within the realm of “reasonable people can disagree, discuss, gain perspective, research further, and keep thinking and mulling it over”. He’s a guy I’d love to have lunch with.

I say all of this because it seems a lot of posters are rightfully wary of being directed to another sexist provocateur, and there’s really no reason to worry in this case. I haven’t had time to listen to his TED talk, but I have it bookmarked because I like Farrell and I love TED.

 

[EasterJoy]

I have seen myself as a teacher that boys (on average) need competition more, BUT I wonder to what extent that applies to lower performing boys.

…

The need for competition also raises the question of tracking, because competition is more interesting when you’re in a group that performs more or less at your level, so you have a chance of shining. In a class with a too big range of abilities, lower performers may just give up, because no matter how hard they work, they don’t have a shot at winning.

OK! I have watched the video and I have a lot of thoughts. First off:

–He’s not your standard Red Pill dude. Yay!
–He opens the video with some questions about do you have a son, grandson, nephew, and are you worried about his motivation, grades, addiction to video games? But he never really addresses that in any depth. I would connect the dots for him and say that video games are highly reinforcing. You “work” and you get paid, and the more you work, the more glory you earn. However, I have to point out that it’s not just low-performing boys who get sucked into games. Highly paid professionals (who are amply rewarded at their jobs) can play them for hours (often late into the night), and we just came back from a road trip where 4-year-old Baby Girl turned into a Minecraft addict over just a few days. Games are HIGHLY addictive, and keeping them in their place is one of the major tasks of modern middle class parenthood, even for parents of bright, academically successful kids.
–I think Farrell is kind of bad with regard to making it all about boys in general, rather than teasing out the differences. He doesn’t talk about class really at all, and class is very important in the modern US with regard to family structure. Modern middle class fathers are more involved with parenting than has been true for the last 100 years and more involved with the parenting of small children than probably ever, and he doesn’t talk about that at all.
–I have to note here that part of the reason that he doesn’t seem very aware of new developments in middle class parenting is that he’s an older guy (born 1943) and doesn’t seem to have any biological children. Wikipedia says he is divorced and remarried and has two step-daughters. So, no sons?
–I also think that he’s being rather bad about not talking about boys and learning disabilities or talking about them in an unhelpful way. I will try to talk about that later.
–He says that “we” don’t care about boys. That’s silly–in an average middle class family, their parents care A LOT and spend a lot of resources making sure they are kept busy, productive and out of trouble. Hence, the current US sports mania among middle class parents…
–He says something about how we are going to have a generation of boys who are less educated than their dads. Is that really so? Is it really the case that native born college educated fathers are having more and more non-college educated sons? What I think is instead happening is that the US has a lot more immigrants than we have in the recent past, which swells the number of less-educated young men.
–I have to mention a pet peeve–why is it that nursing is never counted as a STEM career?
…

More soon!

Nursing is not considered a STEM career? WHY? Is it because the chemistry and physics required are not “major’s” level courses, but given at a more appropriate “elementary” level? (Nurses need to understand there is such a thing as torque, for example, but they don’t have to be able to get into a bunch of math about it that will never have anything to do with their profession.)

I’ve taught high school recently, and I can attest that video-game addiction is not gender-specific. The type of games runs very strongly along gender lines, but not the addiction itself.

I can also attest that there are students of both sexes who fall into the “need” category that is more typical of students of the opposite sex. Those students tend to be more severely penalized for that academic “non-compliance” than students who also suffer from the same non-compliance to classroom standards that don’t take their differences into account.

For instance, a classroom has to have some standards of propriety, but those standards may excessively impose quiet all of the time. That’s hard for students who are quiet only with effort…that is, it is hard for those students to sustain that effort for a very long time. In my experience, girls who are loud or given to physical horseplay will tend to be penalized more, whereas girls who simply talk too much might not be penalized as much as boys who talk too much. Teachers really have to make an effort to not be gender-specific about who gets a “mulligan” and who doesn’t.

There is such a thing as a blatantly sexist classroom–that is, where a boy who acts the same way as a girl will be penalized more for the same transgressions, given less encouragement while going through the same challenges, and yet rewarded less for the same successes, or vice versa. I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about classes where the students who act along the lines “expected” for students of their sex get more understanding than students who act as some of their classmates do but get different treatment because of their sex.

I’d say all of the above probably applies to stay-at-home parents, too. Having said that, a SAHM is not a SAHD, and not just because dads do not have the medical challenges that go with pregnancy and childbirth–fluctuations in hormones, etc. Mothers and fathers have many overlapping and mutually reinforcing aspects to their roles, but they are not interchangeable even when they do the same things for and with their children. It cannot be helped that the sexual identity of children and their views of each sex will have a lot to do with their experiences with each of the parents who gave them DNA.

 

[hwriggles4]

I don’t post here as often as I used to (I logged in today to do some outreach for some retreats), and I have to admit that this is the first time I heard a “TED Talk”. I think I will look at “TED Talks” a little more now - seems to have some good ones.

I do some work in men’s ministry, and I am glad I took the 15 minutes to watch the video.

Things I liked:

First, I agree that boys are often “sidelined” in public schools, particularly if the graduating high school classes are large (i.e. mine had 746). I recall if there were say, four girls running for class president, a boy would shy away from doing that. Boys are also easily distracted in public schools too, and I do agree that in certain subjects, boys do better with a man teacher (although I did have a few “coaches” who were a joke when they taught a subject) sometimes, but I did have some good female math and science teachers, as well as English.

Second, STEM education seems to be working. I did participate in plenty of science fairs (I’m a guy), but the honors science students at my high school were required to participate. In the 1980s when I was in high school, the girls that were good at science were often encouraged to go only into medicine (i.e. MD’s, Optometry, D.D.S., Vet School, Psychiatry, etc.), not to engineering. Girls that were good at mathematics were often steered to accounting.

Today, I’m an engineer myself (in many ways, it’s my second career), and I find that there are several women engineers coming out of college within the last 10 years, particularly in civil and environmental. One lady engineer (who’s also a friend) tells me that electrical engineering is still pretty much “male dominated”, but she also told me that engineering can be hard for women, because a woman’s brain functions differently than a man, which is one reason some women have trouble with math, mechanical reasoning, etc.

Several years ago, I went on a few dates with a veterinarian. She told me that as of 2006, the majority of vet school (almost 3 to 1) was now female.

Things I didn’t like:

First, he didn’t highlight that shop classes have been eliminated at several public schools. I recall eighth grade (early 1980s) where the majority of the boys took shop (I did) as an elective and the majority of the girls took home economics. This gave the boys some fraternity, and the girls some carmamaderie amongst themselves. If the boys didn’t have a positive male role model, this was a place where a boy could learn how to fix and build a few things - as a homeowner, a laborer, or a dad, this really is beneficial.

Second, I do agree that boys are under-performing academically, but there are MANY boys that are not “college bound”. One thing I see today in the educational realm is today a child in public school is either an honors student or is remedial - the “regular kid” seems to be ignored. Many men do well in careers as electricians, HVAC technicians, auto mechanics, construction trades, plumbing, surveying, information technology etc., which don’t require a four year degree, can have a significant return on investment (ROI) if the boy (man) is motivated. MANY of these professions pay more than a guy who got a BA in History or English and had trouble finding a job after graduation.

Third, he didn’t emphasize anything on sports. Boys often were judged (particularly around the age of 8 to 14) on how well they played sports when I was a kid. If a kid wasn’t good at sports, he often was (sadly) ostracized by boys who were, and he was picked on. This is one reason some boys have self-esteem issues. I experienced some of this myself, because I had a hard time with some sports. Although if a boy isn’t good at sports, quite a few will try to find something else to excel at.

Fourth, I do think schools need to spend a little more time teaching basic social skills, particularly with the decline of two parents at home, or parents just being busy (a dad or mom who is an attorney sometimes works 60+ hours a week). I even remember as a little kid in the 70s, we often saw the old Coronet films, and had discussions about “courtesy”, “please”, “thank you”, “basic manners”, particularly in kindergarten through second grade.

 

[Xantippe]

More!

–As has been pointed out before me, conventional classroom education has never been boy-friendly. See, for example, Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn–they did not love school.
–Some years ago, I followed a blog called Kitchen Table Math, which was created by two moms of middle school boys, who were discovering that middle school (even a “good” public middle school) was very hard on their boys. The organizational load was very heavy (probably developmentally inappropriately heavy), the math teaching methods were often perversely complicated, the projects were endless, and it essentially turned into at least a part-time job to keep their boys on track. (Happy ending–one of the boys eventually went to an all boys’ Jesuit high school where he thrived and last I heard, he wanted to become a math teacher.)
–Given that these various blog efforts are mostly run by mothers, I really have to question the idea that “we” throw boys away. As the old joke goes, what do you mean “we”, kemosabe?
–I think Farrell’s treatment of his subject really suffers from the fact that he probably hasn’t had any kids at his house for a long time, has probably never raised any boys, and doesn’t have first-hand experience of contemporary schools. (The latter, by the way, is also a big problem with a lot of mainstream contemporary writers who talk about school issues–all of their current information is second and third-hand, and they’re mostly going off their own experiences of 20-40 years ago.)
–I’ve been googling Warren Farrell ADHD and Warren Farrell autism and not really coming up with anything interesting. He leads with ADHD in the intro to his TED talk, but then doesn’t come back to it at all. This is mystifying. I also note that he used pictures of Adam Lanza (the autistic Sandy Hook shooter), Elliot Rodger (the mentally disturbed Santa Barbara killer whose mother said he had Asperger’s) and Dylan Roof (who seems to have similar issues) as examples of typical boys let down by contemporary culture. WF was explicitly opposing the idea of looking at their mental health issues as opposed to society letting boys down. I feel like that’s a weird and unhelpful approach to those individuals.
–All in all, I just don’t feel like WF knows enough about the specifics of contemporary parenting culture, socioeconomic differences, schools, or ADHD and autism or other disability issues. He’s got his hammer, and everything looks like a nail.

 

[Xantippe]

Nursing is not considered a STEM career? WHY? Is it because the chemistry and physics required are not “major’s” level courses, but given at a more appropriate “elementary” level? (Nurses need to understand there is such a thing as torque, for example, but they don’t have to be able to get into a bunch of math about it that will never have anything to do with their profession.)

I’ve taught high school recently, and I can attest that video-game addiction is not gender-specific. The type of games runs very strongly along gender lines, but not the addiction itself.

I can also attest that there are students of both sexes who fall into the “need” category that is more typical of students of the opposite sex. Those students tend to be more severely penalized for that academic “non-compliance” than students who also suffer from the same non-compliance to classroom standards that don’t take their differences into account.

For instance, a classroom has to have some standards of propriety, but those standards may excessively impose quiet all of the time. That’s hard for students who are quiet only with effort…that is, it is hard for those students to sustain that effort for a very long time. In my experience, girls who are loud or given to physical horseplay will tend to be penalized more, whereas girls who simply talk too much might not be penalized as much as boys who talk too much. Teachers really have to make an effort to not be gender-specific about who gets a “mulligan” and who doesn’t.

There is such a thing as a blatantly sexist classroom–that is, where a boy who acts the same way as a girl will be penalized more for the same transgressions, given less encouragement while going through the same challenges, and yet rewarded less for the same successes, or vice versa. I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about classes where the students who act along the lines “expected” for students of their sex get more understanding than students who act as some of their classmates do but get different treatment because of their sex.

I’d say all of the above probably applies to stay-at-home parents, too. Having said that, a SAHM is not a SAHD, and not just because dads do not have the medical challenges that go with pregnancy and childbirth–fluctuations in hormones, etc. Mothers and fathers have many overlapping and mutually reinforcing aspects to their roles, but they are not interchangeable even when they do the same things for and with their children. It cannot be helped that the sexual identity of children and their views of each sex will have a lot to do with their experiences with each of the parents who gave them DNA.

Those are some very good points. I feel like there’s no substitute for actual recent experience, which you have.

About the STEM and nursing thing–I’ve just started noticing this. There’s a lot of tut-tutting about the difficulty of getting women into STEM–as if being a nurse or a doctor or radiology tech didn’t count at all.

 

[CradleJourney]

–He says something about how we are going to have a generation of boys who are less educated than their dads. Is that really so? Is it really the case that native born college educated fathers are having more and more non-college educated sons? What I think is instead happening is that the US has a lot more immigrants than we have in the recent past, which swells the number of less-educated young men.

An article touching on this point -
denverpost.com/2017/06/04/men-women-college-proportion/

I have three teen sons now and for me the biggest current issue is that there are few “common man” role models for them in the public sphere. It’s sports stars (who often are reported more for their problem behavior than the good many do), or wicked smart nerds (Hawkins, DeGrasse, etc.), or college drop-out millionaires (Gates, etc). In fiction, it’s all superheros. Cannot think of one television show at the moment that features (even peripherally) a married, family-raising, male role model in a positive way. Mostly they are either single (NCIS) or good hearted goof-balls (Kevin can wait).

In real life, the men around them - while good family men - pretty much are either blue-collar trade (which is HARD work, not exactly inspiring to a young guy), or college with student loan debt (as mentioned in the article not exactly attractive).

If real life men seem to be unhappy in their choices and there’s no model out there for them to follow - it isn’t hard to believe that boys will indeed become adrift. Easier to simply video game (which many adult many do as well) and simply get by.

My views - worth what you paid for them!

 

[Xantippe]

Boys are also easily distracted in public schools too, and I do agree that in certain subjects, boys do better with a man teacher (although I did have a few “coaches” who were a joke when they taught a subject) sometimes, but I did have some good female math and science teachers, as well as English.

Second, STEM education seems to be working. I did participate in plenty of science fairs (I’m a guy), but the honors science students at my high school were required to participate. In the 1980s when I was in high school, the girls that were good at science were often encouraged to go only into medicine (i.e. MD’s, Optometry, D.D.S., Vet School, Psychiatry, etc.), not to engineering. Girls that were good at mathematics were often steered to accounting.

[snip]

Things I didn’t like:

**First, he didn’t highlight that shop classes have been eliminated at several public schools. **I recall eighth grade (early 1980s) where the majority of the boys took shop (I did) as an elective and the majority of the girls took home economics. This gave the boys some fraternity, and the girls some carmamaderie amongst themselves. If the boys didn’t have a positive male role model, this was a place where a boy could learn how to fix and build a few things - as a homeowner, a laborer, or a dad, this really is beneficial.

Second, I do agree that boys are under-performing academically, but there are MANY boys that are not “college bound”. One thing I see today in the educational realm is today a child in public school is either an honors student or is remedial - the “regular kid” seems to be ignored. Many men do well in careers as electricians, HVAC technicians, auto mechanics, construction trades, plumbing, surveying, information technology etc., which don’t require a four year degree, can have a significant return on investment (ROI) if the boy (man) is motivated. MANY of these professions pay more than a guy who got a BA in History or English and had trouble finding a job after graduation.

Third, he didn’t emphasize anything on sports. Boys often were judged (particularly around the age of 8 to 14) on how well they played sports when I was a kid. If a kid wasn’t good at sports, he often was (sadly) ostracized by boys who were, and he was picked on. This is one reason some boys have self-esteem issues. I experienced some of this myself, because I had a hard time with some sports. Although if a boy isn’t good at sports, quite a few will try to find something else to excel at.

Fourth, I do think schools need to spend a little more time teaching basic social skills, particularly with the decline of two parents at home, or parents just being busy (a dad or mom who is an attorney sometimes works 60+ hours a week). I even remember as a little kid in the 70s, we often saw the old Coronet films, and had discussions about “courtesy”, “please”, “thank you”, “basic manners”, particularly in kindergarten through second grade.

Yeah, coach/teachers can sometimes be unimpressive.

I bet the schools are scared to death that someone’s going to lose a finger in shop. I’d be scared myself if it was a school with discipline problems.

I have heard about the death of shop, but I have a few data points in the other direction. My kids’ small private school has just announced that because of the huge masses of kids who want to take woodworking and have been taking it over and over again, they’re going to institute a seniority rule to determine who gets a seat in the class. (This is a very hotsy totsy college prep school.)

Similarly, my nephew goes to a good suburban public high school and he’s really been enjoying himself in his woodworking class. In fact, I believe he’s been asked to TA for the teacher the next (!) time he takes it. My nephew is on his school’s robotics team (robotics teams are a big deal now at good US schools), so there’s a lot of synergy between his woodworking class and his robotics team work. (His school is in an area with a lot of engineer parents and he wants to do some sort of engineering.)

There’s also a big push for science fair, at least locally, which tends to involve a lot of tinkering.

That’s a good point about not talking about sports. I think it may be a bit less gruesome today because parents often steer kids toward sports they can do better in, but now girls get to be bad at sports, too…

I think you’re right about social skills. There are a lot of “kids today” who just aren’t well socialized.

 

[Xantippe]

An article touching on this point -
denverpost.com/2017/06/04/men-women-college-proportion/

I have three teen sons now and for me the biggest current issue is that there are few “common man” role models for them in the public sphere. It’s sports stars (who often are reported more for their problem behavior than the good many do), or wicked smart nerds (Hawkins, DeGrasse, etc.), or college drop-out millionaires (Gates, etc). In fiction, it’s all superheros. Cannot think of one television show at the moment that features (even peripherally) a married, family-raising, male role model in a positive way. Mostly they are either single (NCIS) or good hearted goof-balls (Kevin can wait).

In real life, the men around them - while good family men - pretty much are either blue-collar trade (which is HARD work, not exactly inspiring to a young guy), or college with student loan debt (as mentioned in the article not exactly attractive).

If real life men seem to be unhappy in their choices and there’s no model out there for them to follow - it isn’t hard to believe that boys will indeed become adrift. Easier to simply video game (which many adult many do as well) and simply get by.

My views - worth what you paid for them!

Interesting.

I’ve heard that the issue is not that fewer boys are going to college compared to the past, but that they aren’t going there in the numbers that girls have started to. See the chart labeled “Women Outpace Men in College Enrollment.”

pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/03/06/womens-college-enrollment-gains-leave-men-behind/

Women are going more, while the numbers for men are flat–the men aren’t going less than they used to. Also, the differences are very small for Asians–86% of women go versus 83% of men. In general, you get very different results for different demographics.

The Denver Post article makes me cringe. ““I just wanted to see what I wanted to do with my life and college was never a part of that,” said Maxwell, currently an employee at a Parker liquor store. “It might cost me financially down the road, but I never really saw myself as getting rich anyway. So I don’t see it as much of a loss.””

Oh, man.

Edited to add: They have another guy with a much more favorable life story of going a non-traditional route and succeeding at it.

 

[Xantippe]

I wanted to add that Warren Farrell’s claims about society sacrificing boys in war and treating them as expendable is at least 40 years out of date, if it was ever true.

Especially since Vietnam, the US has measured US blood out in teaspoonfulls.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualties_of_war

The US public is unwilling to deal with substantial casualties–if you’ll remember the news coverage during George W. Bush’s presidency, the growing casualty numbers in Afghanistan and Iraq (the media liked to talk about “grim milestones”) were what helped to sour the public on US involvement there.

 

[EasterJoy]

I wanted to add that Warren Farrell’s claims about society sacrificing boys in war and treating them as expendable is at least 40 years out of date, if it was ever true.

Especially since Vietnam, the US has measured US blood out in teaspoonfulls.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualties_of_war

The US public is unwilling to deal with substantial casualties–if you’ll remember the news coverage during George W. Bush’s presidency, the growing casualty numbers in Afghanistan and Iraq (the media liked to talk about “grim milestones”) were what helped to sour the public on US involvement there.

It remains true that only males have to register for the draft. It has also become true since WWII that antibiotics and other medical advances have seriously changed our relationship with death. Far more men used to die in war than now, true, but far more women used to die in childbirth, far more children didn’t reach the age of five, and far more people of every age up and died from some flu or other communicable disease that happened to pass through. We don’t see “casualties” as we once did because we aren’t constantly confronted with how we need to be ready to die any day as we once were.

I believe that the emotional devastation of World War II directly contributed to the alienation and rebellion of the baby boomers when they reached adolescence and adulthood. The Greatest Generation went through a hard and insecure childhood during the Great Depression and paid a very steep price to win that war. They tried bravely to hold it all together quietly, but when you’re carrying around the baggage that comes from going from high school to battlefields as brutal as those in WWII, that is a tall order. It wasn’t realistic to believe that generation could just come home, have families, and not have any of that affect their parenting of the probably the most affluent generation amid the most social change ever. The soldiers didn’t come home to the same country they left. For better and for worse, everything was different.

 

[PaulinVA]

I wanted to add that Warren Farrell’s claims about society sacrificing boys in war and treating them as expendable is at least 40 years out of date, if it was ever true.

I thought his bringing that up, about the country depending on young men shedding blood, therefore youth violence isn’t a big deal, was very weird and didn’t correlate to anything else he said.

 

[Rau]

I’m not sure what Heidi’s reasons are, but here are mine.

1: I generally don’t want to disturb others in the household by having the sound on.
2: Hearing Loss + Poorly Captioned Youtube = Little Learned

Just something to consider in regards to videos.

Try headphones.

 

[Rau]

Not to be a snit, but I rarely watch anything online that’s longer than 2 or 3 minutes. And even then I fast forward to the end. Too many other enticing options to click through, I guess.

Attention deficit struggles?

 

[Xantippe]

Attention deficit struggles?

That’s really funny!