Violent Games Are Good For Boys

I've been hammering on issues around children's mental health on this site for pushing three years now and have long made the point that much of the medicating of children in our culture (and I mean prepubescent here) is happening to boys. I've also made the point that kids in general, and boys especially, simply don't get enough play outdoors (for a bunch of reasons, obviously), don't play sports enough and so on compared with my generation. Now, there's a new book out that, in part, agrees with me and a few other braves souls in the realms of child psychology. It's called "The Trouble With Boys" and it's written by a Newsweek staffer, Peg Tyre.

According to Ars Technica:

"The idea for the book began when Tyre, a senior writer for Newsweek at the time, wrote a 2006 cover story for the magazine, called 'Boy Crisis.' The article focused on how boys were falling behind in school and what educational institutions were doing to address the issue. The figures are certainly worrying, according to Tyre: 'Boys get expelled from preschool at four times the rates of girls,' she writes. 'They are prescribed the lion's share of ADHD medication, they get most of the C's and D's in middle school, and they drop out of high school more than girls. Currently, only 43% of undergraduates in the United States are men." So what's the solution? Tyre's suggestion is simple enough: let boys be boys by simply letting them engage in the aggressive fantasies that come to them naturally.'"

What Tyre found was that violent video games, contrary to received wisdom, were actually beneficial to boys and didn't turn them into Columbine killers. Boys cogitate around violence. So do men, to lesser degrees, but it's generally just something in our internal mythologies and our hunter-gatherer cores that has got to be acted out in some fashion or we end up as lumps of mush or sociopaths. I don't claim that to be true for all boys and men, but it's true for plenty. Not everyone gets this. As the Ars Technica writer notes:

"If you've been around schools or youth organizations recently, you've probably seen how even playfully aggressive behavior is often demonized by both parents and other adults. A case in point from my own experience: when I served as an assistant scoutmaster for my Boy Scout troop at a summer camp in 2003, a number of parents complained about the fact that the Rifle and Shotgun Shooting merit badges were available as part of the camp's curriculum. They believed that teaching teenage boys the standard safety, care, and operation of firearms was wrong.

"Five years earlier, such complaints were unheard of, even in a suburb directly over the hill from Berkeley. This attitude, though, seems to have permeated the entire country."

Ah, how special the smarty-pants Bay Area can be.

I grew up miles away from that unnamed suburb in an age when kids of both genders played outside constantly and boys got in rock wars and dirt clod fights (when they weren't playing sports) and no one thought anything was particularly bad about that, even when their kid came home with a gashed scalp. Seriously. And boys of that early Gen-X time almost all knew how to use small guns, with or without a merit badge.

While some readers might think that sounds like a barbarous time, consider this: 6.6 percent of American boys now take psych meds of some kind, twice the rate among girls, compared with the 1970s when almost zero boys took a psych med of any kind (girls didn't take them either) and we were considered within behavioral norms. Now, we want our kids quiet and pliable, not that we didn't when I was a kid, but we used discipline and reinforcement then instead of Ritalin and Seroquel.

I'm not saying this to stigmatize the rush to turn kids into a generation of mentally-disordered kids, but to point out that we've made an epochal shift in our culture in how we regard childhood behavior, especially at school, and that it doesn't seem to be working out so swell for boys and young men. That males are so outnumbered by females among college graduates now worries me greatly. One commentator speculates that ADHD meds are making boys act like girls.

I suppose conservative critics would just ascribe all of this to feminism run amok and the "wussification of America," as a guy I know puts it, but I think these things are often more complicated than that. Besides, men are actually going along with this program--at least when they are present in a family--and I'm not sure why. Sure, there are post-whatever feminists such as the New York Times' Judith Warner who think all the fuss about kdis and boys being doped up is mere narrative.

But I can't see where steering boys away from contact sports, making sure they know nothing about guns and fishing, and keeping them away from violent video games while sticking them on Adderall and Prozac has produced an outstanding generation of young men. I almost never use the term epidemic, but I can assure you that there is an epidemic of young men in this country getting young women pregnant and then taking off on them and the kid. It's complete wuss behavior. That ought to tell you as much as the rate of psych med use. It ought to tell you that something has changed dramatically in our culture about being a man, and a boy.

I'm not silly enough to think video games are key to all of this--they are but an interesting measure of where culture stands--but it is an interesting thesis Tyre has there.