In the opening pages of Mark Twain's classic novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck explains how tough it is to live in a house with the Widow Douglas, who is intent on "civilizing" him. Finally, says Huck, "when I couldn't stand it no longer I lit out."

We all recognize and love Huck as the classic "boys' boy" who hates captivity and craves adventure, the riskier the better. So here's the question: If Huck Finn were a real kid and alive today, would we love him just as much? Or would he be hauled in for testing, diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADHD) and dosed with Ritalin?

Quite likely. Then again, so would many of the males I've known and loved. I grew up with a brother whose idea of a good time was to toss cherry bombs into the school toilets and tape a Playboy centerfold inside the roll-down map in geography class. (Today, he's a biomedical engineer.) My boyfriends were of the same testosterone-driven ilk. Even my husband, Dan, a brainiac computer jock who loves nothing better than to bake his own pastries, recently showed our sons how to build race cars powered by propane-filled plastic soda bottles. (Do not try this at home.) Now he's designing a tennis-ball cannon.

Dan's eleven-year-old son, Drew, has been a perpetual-motion machine from infancy. By first grade, Drew's inability to pay attention prompted his teachers to recommend a battery of psychological and neurological tests. The results were inconclusive, but he was diagnosed with 'borderline' ADHD.

He's in the sixth grade now, bright and creative as ever, but still struggling to stay focused. Recently, Drew announced that his elementary-school teachers -all women except one - have been sexist. "You wouldn't believe what the girls get away with," he insisted. "They giggle and pass notes, but if a boy even raises his voice, he gets sent to the principal."

Now, I would be the first to concede that Drew can be a handful, and I sympathize with his teachers, who are routinely managing more than twenty-five kids in a single classroom. Yet I know there's truth to his accusation. School these days does put boys at a disadvantage; increasingly, it's a place where girls excel and boys rebel.

It's not that girls have no problems," says Jayne Fisher, M>S>, a Massachusetts educational consultant, "but our rosters swell with boys who are having trouble." Indeed, elementary-school boys are three times as likely as their female classmates to be diagnosed with ADHD. As they get older, boys are more likely than girls to drop out of high school, and fewer of them enroll in college.

Clearly, then, Drew is far from alone. But why, exactly are so many boys in trouble? Are we discriminating against them simply for being...well, boys?

The Masculine Mystique

In my multiple roles as elementary-school lunch lady, playground monitor, field-trip chaperone and just plain parent, I've accumulated an anthropologist's wealth of details on kid behavior. So here's the big news flash: Boys really do learn differently from girls. On the school playground, the girls often wander about, heads bent together in conversation, while their male schoolmates engage in all manner of one-upmanship: If they aren't sweating on the basketball court, they're instigating noisy games of tag or swiping one another's hats. There's an Alpha male in the pack somewhere, and they're determined to find him. Or better yet, to be him.

Even the more sedentary boy joys are action-packed: In countless video and computer games, the mission is to muster enough firepower to reduce dancing skeletons to piles of bone and gold.

All of this thrill -seeking, naturally, doesn't cease when they get to class. Whenever I've been a classroom volunteer, it's mostly the boys who interrupt and talk out of turn, or who vie noisily for more time at the computer. As my daughter's third-grade teacher observed, "Even if the class is just going to lunch, there's always a boy who can't walk down the hallway without trying to get the shoe off the kid in front of him."

In the past few decades, we've shaken up our educational system to meet the needs of girls, to allow them to express their "voices," as gender guru and Harvard psychologist Carol Cilligan, Ph.D., puts it. And, as the mother of two daughters, I'm deeply grateful. Yet, ironically, most elementary schools give boys very little leeway to be themselves - particularly if being themselves involves classic "boys will be boys" behavior, such as competitiveness, aggressiveness, outspokenness or endless motion.

Consider, for example, the fact that we still expect our six- to-eleven-year-old sons to sit for hours at a stretch, reading and writing, at a time in their lives when adventure calls. The new order of education also asks them to collaborate on projects, discuss their points of view and generally engage in teamwork- all worthwhile skills, but ones that represent a feminine model of learning. Boys at this age are on a developmental rung that requires stabs at individualism and independence. Yes, boys will be boys - because they're wired that way. It's unfair to hold them to a standard they aren't designed to meet.

Research also indicates that boys are more easily distracted than girls. When psychologist Diane McGuinness, Ph.D., author of Why Our Children Can't Read (Free Press, 1997) examined the behavior of preschool boys and girls, for example, she found that girls spent an average of seven minutes on a teacher-organized activity - boys, just three minutes. Boys also interrupted what they were doing an average of four times in twenty minutes, usually to go off and watch what other kids were doing. "When you put boys into a classroom situation where they're supposed to focus on one task," says McGuinness, "it's frustrating for them."

And guess how that frustration gets expressed? Through excessive hyperactive behavior, poor impulse control and inattention - in short, the textbook definition of ADHD.

A Culture of Commotion

"We used to have the idea that boys ere kind of wild but that we could tame them through interactions," says Barney
Brawser, Ed.M., who started the Harvard project on Women's Psychology, Boys' Development and the Culture of Manhood
with Carol Gilligan in 1995. "In today's culture, however, there is little to tame our boys and everything to pump them up."

Thirty years ago, for instance, unsupervised play was a routine feature of childhood: Kids went outdoors after school and burned up excess energy by playing tag and climbing trees. But today, free-for-all childhood time has been steadily replaced by organized after-school programs, or, for the ever-swelling ranks of latchkey kids, a dizzying range of electronic diversions. Boys now have few places to tussle and race. At many schools, even physical education and recess have been dramatically cut back.

Meanwhile, the shortened attention span bemoaned by teachers is exacerbated by the general culture. We take our information and entertainment fast-food style - in short, salty blips that are forgotten as soon as they're swallowed.
And we never do just one thing at a time. Our children grow up seeing us cook dinner while we talk on the phone as the TV blares.

All of this hubbub not only hurts our boys' ability to concentrate, it undercuts any effort to define a new model of masculinity. As Brawer points out, "Many boys today learn about manhood not from their fathers' articulating values,
but from TV and movies - places where manhood has four main ingredients: materialism, violence, sports and sex."

Brawer believes that men's issues and the raising of boys are in a place comparable to where women's issues were thirty years ago. Everything about gender identity is open for reexamination, as we try to figure out what remnants of the old patriarchy should be salvaged as a healthy part of a boy's development, and what parts should be scrapped as sexist and outmoded.

The Ritalin Riddle

Unfortunately, we've been going for the quick fix. When boys don't adapt, we're prepared to medicate them until they do. The drug of choice is usually Ritalin. An amphetamine-like stimulant that enables kids to focus, Ritalin is now prescribed to about two million American children aged five to twelve who have been diagnosed with ADHD. (Americans use Ritalin five times more than the rest of the world.) By some estimates, 6 percent of all school-aged boys in the United States are now on the drug.

Can this pathology really be that prevalent? Absolutely not, says Thomas Armstrong, Ph.D., a former special-education teacher and author of The Myth of the A.D.D. Child (Plume, 1997).
"Simply put, what teachers are calling ADHD today is often what we considered 'all boy' behavior thirty years ago," says Armstrong. "If there was more of a male liberation movement, there would be an outcry about this."

Armstrong has a point. ADHD is diagnosed on the basis of pen-and-paper rating scales completed by the child's parents, teachers, pediatrician and - if the child is lucky - a psychologist. (The vast majority of Ritalin prescriptions are written by pediatricians or family practitioners.) As such, an ADHD diagnosis is extremely subjective. An energetic mother who enjoys hiking and biking with her son, for example, is much less apt to judge her child hyperactive than a mom whose son drives her nuts because he won't sit still in a restaurant. And even assuming that ADHD is a legitimate diagnosis, it may be that girls suffer from it just as much but that no one notices because their symptoms are different and manifest themselves at a later age. "The girls are more likely to become withdrawn, have social difficulties and suffer from low self-esteem. In extreme cases, they may end up on drugs, having eating disorders or getting pregnant," says Madeleine Nathan, Ph. D., a child psychologist from Newburyport, Massachusetts. "Meanwhile, the boys exhibit more obvious behavioral problems. The extreme ones light fires, get into fights and eventually crack up their cars."

As Armstrong points out, ADHD is a disorder that "pops up in one setting, only to disappear in another." Up to 80 percent of kids with attention disorders, he says, don't appear to have them when they're engaged one-on-one with adults. Nor do they show excessive hyperactivity or impulsive behavior if they're free to choose learning activities that interest them and can pace themselves. In other words, maybe it's not the boys who are flawed but our expectations of them.

Considering the Alternatives

It would be lovely if those of us with sons who have been labeled "hyperactive" could remake the world to suit them. But, for the moment, we have to adapt to this one. As such, the Ritalin solution is tempting, to say the least. But parents whose sons have behavior problems should exhaust other alternatives before turning to medication.

"You can sedate anyone to get him to behave," points out Terry Real, author of I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression (Fireside, 1998). "Ritalin is being over prescribed today because people don't know what to do with destructive boys in school. It's criminal to place a child on Ritalin without testing him first."

In our own case, with Drew, we decided to try to resist. Instead, we have encouraged physical activity such as basketball and karate lessons, enrolled him in a camp to help develop his social skills, and talked often with his teachers. We try to give free rein to his artistic and musical talents, and encourage his uncanny ability to develop complicated strategies for winning our family marathons of Risk, Stratego and Monopoly. Things around our house get pretty hectic at times, but so far, we've managed to keep him off medication.

Above all, says Armstrong, parents of active, energetic boys should trust their instincts. "Think hard about all you know about your son," he suggests, "and don't allow comments about his short attention span or high energy to be negative."

I am pondering Armstrong's advice as I go to the window to watch Drew and my ten-year-old son, Blaise, race up the rungs of our backyard jungle gym. Just as I'm about holler, "Slow down before you fall and break you necks!" the boys turn and wave, grinning.

"This is Mount Everest," Drew shouts, one arm raised high in triumph. I swallow my words and give him a thumbs-up instead. Because Drew is absolutely right: It is a great place to climb.

Reprinted with Permission

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