Steve Biddulph raising boys wtaf?

I'm not particularly convinced about the boys are naturally more rough and tumble and girls are quieter.

We send our child to a preschool which is age 1 to 7 (many classes and not in the UK) and in the week we had a big family picnic for the entire cohort and parents. Around 60 children and parents in a nature centre where all play equipment is pretty natural (think forest school).

There didn't appear to be from what I could see any differentiation in how loud, mud covered, fast moving and prone to hurling themselves off things between the two sexes.

I see a bigger difference between my son and my nephew who are the same ages. My son is never still, wants to play rough and tumble at every opportunity and can't see a flight of stairs without seeing how high he can jump from it. I have no idea if he can do jigsaws as he just uses the pieces as frisbees. His cousin will get out a jigsaw, sit down, complete it and then put it away.

Aren't these books over 20 years old now? I thought he was a very annoying man.
I never trust childcare books written by people like him.

I didn't realise I'd revived a 10 year old thread!

I think I read something about daycare in Australia being much more basic at the time he was writing than it was in the UK. But I have to say that bit did put me off. I did read it-but my baby boy is 21 now, so my memory is faulty!

I am put off by the title of the books, despite having two girls and one boy.

My two girls are as different to each other as they are to my boy.

As for childcare - they all went to child care from about the age of 6-10 months, dd1 and ds were fine; dd2 hated it. All of them are very well behaved in social situations.

Dd1 is, and always has been, the most sporty and competative of all three of them.

Reading a book about the differences between boys and girls just doesn't seem relevant to me and my family.

I quite liked it, esp the stuff about older boys/teens. Was a bit on the fence over the childcare sections. Tbh there is childcare and childcare - I have seen (non-UK) daycare settings where I wouldn't leave a dog so any kind of research is going to depend on demographics and time period (my mum tells stories about the nursery she went to in the 1950s that would curl your hair). Equally I don't think all children are suited to large settings from a young age, whilst others will thrive. On the other hand Mr Biddulph does go on and on about the need for 1-1 care which makes you wonder how and second or subsequent children survive.

I found it really helpful. My DS was in a nursery unit attached to a school and they seemed to want all the children to behave like girls (yes, I know that's sexist), sitting colouring, playing quietly, co-operating etc. DS really could not do that. Reading the book helped me realise I wasn't mad and that the nursery were expecting things of him that he just wasn't capable of. We took him away and sent him to a much more realistic playgroup.
Have passed my copy to my DiL though and although it is on the bookshelf I'm pretty sure it hasn't been read!
I think staying at home and then going part time to playgroup/nursery at around 3 is my ideal FWIW.

He's Australian. I read the Raising Girls one, which I had mixed views on. Some of it is sensible, some of it hippy claptrap and some of it surprisingly conservative (funny how quite often very traditional attitudes to parenting and male/female roles use the hippy ethos as a figleaf, but don't get me started on this.)

I think, based on his views on nursery, that its basically a new take on attachment parenting, which dates back to the 50s and has been largely discredited since. Haven't read Raising Boys and I gather some of it is quite sensible but I would take anything he says about nursery with a hefty pinch of salt.

I loved that book and have heard him lecture. I agreed with the vast majority of what he said.

A friend recommended it. I got to about page five where he says boys should be at home, not at nursery, and had to put the book down.

My DS is so different to my DD. Gender, yes, but their personalities are chalk-and-cheese. DD will sit down and look at a book or draw a picture. However toddler DS is a ball of energy who needs constant physical activity, is always climbing on me and all over the house, and I have limits to what I can do physically for medical reasons. DH works long hours and can't be home to help me. So sending DS to nursery to get that fix of physical exercise on days when it's just me at home are absolutely essential to me!

Really interesting to read this thread as I have been having the major guilts about increasing his nursery time from September, and what a friend said about this book hasn't helped.

Has anyone read the one about girls? I haven't yet but am obv more familiar with girls (used to be one myself!).

We had 2 girls for 20 years before our little boy came along and my experience is that boys and girls are most definitely different. Our 2 girls are as different as chalk and cheese but these are still both girls. As a recent example, we have held birthday parties at home for all our children through the years. We held a birthday party this year for our ds 6ths birthday and it bore no resemblance whatsoever to the parties we had for our dds. They didn't sit still for a minute and every party game turned into some rough and tumble - it took 2 of us watching them full time every minute to keep control and we only invited 6! For the first time we are seriously thinking about having his party at the leisure centre next year. I like the Raising Boys book although I don't agree with what he says about nursery. I definitely agree that boys needs a good male role model and I think not having one is more damaging than whether or not they go to nursery.

I have been doing quite a bit of research recently about infants and daycare, and just reading some studies from America in the 90s is really heartbreaking - it bears no relevance for UK nurseries today though, totally different in terms of regulation, staffing, qualifications, attitudes. So if Biddulph is basing his ideas about how damaging nursery is on outdated Australian research then I wouldn't find it useful if you are deciding whether or not to send your child to a UK nursery in 2013.

I wouldn't pay any attention to what Steve Biddulph says, personally, as I think he's a sexist prat with an agenda.

This.

I thought it was good, but probably becuase it agrees with how I want to bring up my children. I started them in Yr 1, they didnt go to nursery. Its popular with the Steiner lot I think.

Some books will tell you how toddlers thrive in nursery and I disregard those ones as rubbish becuase that suits what I do.

Interesting about the play fighting - apparently being rough is a physical need and it they manage not to inflict actual injuries on each other they are showing great self control and we should be proud

I don't really understand why boys need to roll around fighting. My brother used to with me (I'm female) and I hated it, used to play dead or fight back just to get away. My parents never intervened.

I've read the Raising Boys and the recent one about girls. He didn't write the girls book, (just a foreword, which is annoying cos he was publicizing it like he wrote it) and I thought it was light reading, nothing much of substance. I didn't like it.

Raising Boys I liked more, actually thought it was very good. But these kind of books always polarise opinion. But I think these books are always for an ideal home. Most of us dont have that. Life deals us different hands, different children, and we have to go with what we ahve and do our best. Read it, take what suits.

I don't buy into anything fully, but I did draw some comfort from the idea that boys do actually need to roll around on the floor fighting. My three do this ALL the time. I hate hate hate it, but I do see that its a necessary learning excercise (lion cubs learning) - and I now let them do it up to a point.

That's what I got from the book anyhow

What most of you said. I ignored it and sent my two boys to nursery at 1 because that's what we had to do. I also thought it was badly written - too many exclamation marks to be taken seriously.

I can't stand him. His arguments about nurseries are backed up with 'well x y and z happens in nurseries, so no wonder the kids are damaged' when clearly you wouldn't put your kid in a nursery where that happened...

But on the 'Australian book about bringing up boys' front I absolutely love 'He'll Be OK - growing gorgeous boys into good men' by Celia Lashlie - it's more about boys from age 7 and up. I expect that a lot of what she says would be controversial on Mumsnet, but I think it's pretty brilliant and exactly the advice that I need.

I did find some of the later stuff about good role models, community involvement etc quite interesting, but I suspect exactly the same wisdom can be applied to girls. And I read it when DS was tiny, he's only 7 now, so maybe I would have thought of that stuff for myself when he gets older anyway?

Don't remember the nursery stuff but as DS was in nursery from 6months it's entirely possible I wiped that from my mind!

I think it's like all parenting books - some will really chime with you, most will have a couple of bits you can cherry-pick, but lots of them are a bit 'meh' I think.

Yet another -are they very different? I know a lot of them use 'day care' which in my sisters case was more like a big childminder than a nursery.

I think didn't he write about a testosterone surge at 4 or 7 or something that's become accepted myth, but not grounded in reality?

Didn't if bring out one about girls too? Someone mentioned it to me but I've not read it.

It may be Australians (as a whole big generalisation) have a different attitude to parenting. My Aussie sister in law was amazed how young we started school here. Her children had just turned 6 and in her aisle most mums only used part time childminders if at all.

I wanted to love his book, and the later chapters are good, particularly around wider community support for bringing up teenage boys, but I was in floods about the childcare bit.

I have to work full time, as I earn most and we couldn't pay the mortgage if I didn't. Thanks Steve for suggesting that my son will be disadvantaged for life because of this..... not all parents (any?) have a choice whether to keep their child at home or send them to nursery.

IME Australian nurseries are hideous compared to British nurseries so I wouldn't worry too much.

I've actually seen Steve Biddulph's Raising Boys lecture and some of the stuff he says makes a lot of sense. I read the book about a year after and it wasn't quite as good. However, I think if you read it without taking the claims too seriously, its not that bad a book. It does explain a lots about the way boys behave and think.