4 Troubled Teens Blog

A gender expert who serves as a professor at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks has released a study that she says documents the degree to which boys' problems are going unrecognized and untreated.

An article by Tom Spears of the Ottawa Citizen provided the following details about the controversial findings of Prof. Judith Kleinfeld:

Girls do have their troubles, she agrees: They suffer more depression, eating disorders and thoughts of suicide.

"The difficulties of boys, however, which span far more areas, have been generally ignored. It is boys who are performing at strikingly lower levels in literacy," she writes in the journal Gender Issues. It is boys who are more likely to quit school early, to be in special education, to have behaviour problems and be suspended or expelled.

Boys are far more likely to skip their homework, arrive at school without books or pencils and cause a disturbance that gets them kicked out of class. Boys are more likely to commit suicide or to be arrested.

"Policy attention has focused on the supposed underachievement of females in mathematics and science but these gender gaps are small," Prof. Kleinfeld wrote in Gender Issues. "In contrast, substantial gender gaps are occurring in reading and writing, which place males at a serious disadvantage in the employment market and in college."

Labels: boys, girls, gender gap

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Young men who have childhood histories of physical abuse are four and a half times more likely than non-abused boys to use sexually coercive behavior against females. However, the majority of young men with such histories do not exploit girls in this way.

Sexually coercive behavior includes pressuring, persuading, insisting, manipulating, lying, or using physical force to force a partner to have sex when she does not want to.

Professor Erin Casey and her colleagues at the University of Washington studied 5650 men, all of whom participated in three interviews from ages 16 to 22 years old. All participants were heterosexual and had experienced sexual intercourse at least once.

Only 5.6 percent of the participants reported using sexual coercion against a female. However, this group was much more likely to report a childhood history of sexual or physical abuse.

"The higher the frequency of childhood abuse, the more likely a young adult was to engage in sexually coercive behaviors," Dr. Casey said, emphasizing that 55 percent of the men who had been abused did not grow up to use sexually coercive behaviors. She found no link between alcohol problems and sexually coercion.

This study appeared on the ScienceDaily website.

Labels: sex, boys, abuse

Posted By: Aspen Education Group 0 Comments

Two studies - one from Great Britain and another from Florida State University - both point to a biological basis for certain delinquent behaviors in teenaged boys.

The British study, which was conducted by researchers at Cambridge University, found a connection between the hormone cortisol and anti-social behaviors among boys ages 14 to 18 years old. This study appeared in the journal Biological Psychiatry.

The human body produces cortisol when undergoing stress. Cortisol is believed to make people become cautious and control their tempers and violent impulses when they find themselves in difficult circumstances.

The Cambridge researchers recruited 165 boys, some of whom were youthful offenders. The boys underwent cortisol level tests before and after they played a computer game rigged to make them angry. In most boys, cortisol levels rose. However, in boys with a history of difficult behaviors, cortisol levels tended to fall.

The Florida State research team analyzed data about family, friends, and genetics that had been collected from 1,816 middle school and high school students. The researchers found that boys who possess a certain gene variant were more likely to associate with delinquent friends. This did not hold true for girls with the variant.

"This research is groundbreaking because it shows that the propensity in some adolescents to affiliate with delinquent peers is tied up in the genome," said Dr. Kevin Beaver, an assistant professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice.

However, the team also found that environment plays a role in whether boys associate with delinquent peers. The boys with the gene variant who came from "low-risk" (nurturing) families did not tend to associate with delinquents.

The Florida State study appeared in the Journal of Genetic Psychology.

Labels: behavioral_issues, boys, anti-social

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Scientists studying brain images of adolescents found that the brains of the most aggressive males have different levels of activity in certain brain centers compared to boys who show only normal aggression.

Scientists from the University of California in San Diego used functional magnetic brain imaging to study adolescent boys who are "reactively aggressively."

"These kids tend to overreact - they punch someone or kick a door, but afterwards, they regret it," said Dr. Guido Frank, one of the lead researchers.

When these boys looked at pictures of threatening faces, there was greater activity in their amygdala, the part of the brain linked to fear, and lower activity in their prefrontal cortexes, the part of the brain involved in reasoning and decision-making. Dr. Frank said that this might mean the boys are more likely to overreact with fear but less likely to use reason to control themselves. These images can only predict risk for violence and aggression, and so far, no one knows how to use such information.

This study was presented at a conference of the Society for Neuroscience in San Diego.

Private boarding schools for boys can be the best environment for boys acting out at home and school. Find one at www.schoolsforboys.com.

Labels: aggression, brain_chemistry, boys

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Boys perform more poorly in school than girls because they play too many video games, according to a study from Statistics Canada's Community Health Survey.

• The study found that 76% of the boys had played video games in the previous three months compared to only 35% of girls.
• About 16% of the boys played more than 11 hours of video games a week during that time compared to only 2% of the girls. 
• The long hours that the boys spent playing video games cut down on time spent reading.
• Among the heaviest users of video games, 27% said they had not read anything over the past three months. 
• Children who spent a lot of time watching television or on the computer tended to read more often than the most active video gamers.

Among the children ages 12 to 19 years old, twice as many girls --or 45% -- read for 11 or more hours per week compared to the boys. 

"Given the amount of time that young boys spent playing video games versus the amount of time that they read, the data may offer some insight as to why boys are performing less well than girls in high school," according to Jack Jebwab, author of the study.

Excessive video gaming and obsessive Internet use have been identified as risk factors and symptoms of a range of problematic issues among children, adolescents and teens.
 

Labels: video_games, internet, boys

Posted By: Jane St. Clair 0 Comments

Boys who eat more fish than average are less likely to be depressed, according to a new study from Japan.

• Researchers studied 3,067 boys and 3,450 girls ages 12 to 15 years old.
• Based on their scores on a scale from the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression, 22% of the boys and 31% of the girls were depressed.
• Having a diet high in fish provided some protection to boys against being depressed, but the same was not true for girls.

The study was published in the journal Pediatrics.

Labels: depression, diet, nutrition, boys

Posted By: Jane St. Clair 0 Comments