to be totally bored hearing this same old trite trotted out

[curryfreak]

Get this all the time from parents of boys.
How difficult they are, how much more of a handful they can be in relation to girls, how much they eat in comparision to girls ffs,- who cares.
The one though, that has been in vogue for a while,(courtesy of daily mail headlines and the like) is how terrible boys are faring in the education system, and how these dreadful female teachers are feminising the poor little mites,- how they have no male role models, because there are so few male teachers (particularly in primary schools)
Yawn yawn yawn...
Simple facts are girls have been on the backfoot for years. Nobody gave a toss, when they were lagging behind educationally, and in some cases activly discourgaed from taking subjects which were considered male dominated.
Boys are having to wake up to the fact that their sense of entitlement is no longer acceptable.
So, thoughts.

yes apart from where I teach - 'cos there aren't any! We have had fine female soloists over the last few years singing this classic!

I thought that the latest thinking was boys are physically/mentally INCAPABLE of sitting still till they are around age 7. (Hormones or some such). After this, they are OK, but by this time they have lots of catching up to do in comparison with girls.

In the long run though, men still end up getting paid more for the same jobs, so I don't really think there's much to complain about (this said as the parent of of course, intellecually brilliant boys, whom I never complain about ).

I think the problem with the men getting paid more argument is that the boys who are failing at school often end up with no job at all, and their childhood behavioural label escalates into an anti-social or criminal label in adulthood. Men get paid more, but they are also more likely to be homeless, or in prison, or substance misusers.

Even if people think that small boys as a group should be penalised due to their future group success, we all have to pay for the social consequences of the ones who really fail.

Agree MillyR. Off to bed now - can't keep eyes open!

Namechange - have you seen a boy aged under 7 playing on a DS or doing something else that interests them? They can sit still perfectly well if they want to! (Not necessarily for long periods, but 'incapable' is very OTT.)

I don't think anyone has argued for boys being penalised, merely pointed out all the hysteria about schools being somehow feminised places which are actively hostile to boys is not actually true. And that in the end boys in general do much better than girls in general anyway so there's no need for parents of boys to panic.

I doubt very much that homelessness/substance abuse/criminality have much to do with whether your primary school teacher is a woman or a man.

There is not a shred of research which shows that boys' attainment is affected by their teacher being male or female.

Feminised curriculum? Not true. Most of the marks for GCSE and A level come from exams.

The reality is that now there are fewer of the traditional unskilled/semi-skilled jobs, so there's a pool of unoccupied labour, looming as "dangerous ' in the fevered imagination of the DM. Also, as more service-oriented jobs have taken over from manufacturing, women are at an advantage.

just don't particularly feel the need to somehow gain his success in life at the expense of his female peers" but no-one is arguing that either Edam.

I work in a profession where there are plenty of women at the bottom and exceptionally few at the top. IME its partly because men are very often far more driven and will sacrifice more to succeed, because women are very often better that the management side of th ejob and that isn't a skill thats valued much in Finance regardless of whether its a man or a women; becasue almost nobody wants a part-time finance director (I am incredibly lucky to work 4 days a week) because there is only ever one finance director in a company and the MD is terrified of being asked a finance question on the day/s when the FD is off!

Those women at the top generally had their children later so were able to put the kind of hours in at an early stage and negotiate better terms when you have a skill and experience people want.

I still don't feel the need for my DS to struggle in school as a child to make up for the fact that any daughter I might have might have a fight on her hands later.

My desire to see male teachers in schools isn't an educational one, its pragmatic - as a single mother I like to see as many positive male role model for DS - particularly those in professions which are traditionally female. I accept I don't have any right to expect an education system to provide that but I'd still like it!

Thank you Edam. Some sense at last!

there is a maleness crisis though, with one of the leading causes of death in young men still suicide

Is there really a maleness crisis?

Many would disagree.

A maleness crisis? FFS!

3 times more likely to kill themselves than their female counterparts must be a crisis by anyone's standards?

China, I think, is the only country where female suicides outnumber male

Women have always dominated the primary education system, yet Victorians didn't seem to worry too much about the 'feminisation' of the education system.

Also there are more factors in play than just the education - society has been through a massive change, gender roles are completely different now to what they were in days gone by and most cultures do have a distinct masculine / femenine set of jobs, roles and agendas. We don't seem to anymore.

Also parenting is really different now and the expectations we as parents have of what it is like to be a parent (ME time - my gps NEVER had ME time ffs - parenting was a FT occupation, if you weren't at work to feed the little darlings then you were doing something at home to make sure they were fed) is really different.

We are in an insular society where people are easily cut off from one another, just look at how isolated old people are now.

They're doing badly at secondary school because typically boys are good at cramming and passing tests, then forgetting it (O-level style exams) and girls are typically better at planning and doing projects (GCSE style tests ie course work)

Boys and girls are both lovely and have their own challenges because they are CHILDREN and, more importantly HUMAN children.

Lots and lots of reasons why things happen...and why gender stereotypes are used in the media.

SAD that OP thinks that 2 wrongs make a right and that because women managed to change their lot, then men or boys should have a crappy hard time now.

Never ever said boys/men should have a hard time mow because girls did traditionally.
You are replying to the question (as did most other posters) that one you want to answer,not to what i posted originally,- but that seems to be par for the course on here.
Interesting to see all the hysterical responses posted.
Has only confirmed my suspicion, that some mothers of boys are super sensitive about their little darlings.
Not doing them any favours in the long run!

YABU

And I have two of each so do not consider myself biased.

Maybe your OP was not clear on what you meant then as it definitely give the impression that it is "get your own back time" for girls. Todays boys/girls are not responsable for the mistakes previous generations have done raising their children so it would be really silly to make boys pay for it, so to speak, or enjoy the fact that they are falling behind

Have made not done [foreign head on emoticon]

My op was very clear. You've just chosen not to address it!

What a completely antagonistic and frankly ignorant OP.

Just fark the fark off would you? Hysterical women that we are, you can't want to hang around surely and grace us with your superior presence.

I always remember when Micheal Burke the BBC reporter was moaning that only women got top jobs at the BBC and men were being squeezed out and I thought "welcome to the last 3000 years of women's history".

But one sex maltreating the other is wrong whichever way round it is.

I also agree with the OP that when girls were discriminated against nobody said anything much for about 2000 years.

Also, Harvard Business review did a study that showed that when men and women were judged on doing the same tasks, men got more praise and attention than the women, even though the women had performed as well as the men.

And, doesn't matter about the exam results becuase when they leave uni boys are likely to get paid more for doing the same job, have bigger pensions and find it easier becoming a company director or a seat on the board than their female contemporaries.

So boys are not suffering that much.

Oh right...

'My boys are grown up and at uni now, but they were delightful,sweet, loving, caring, compassionate, clever and absolutely gorgeous when they were younger. As they still are'

I agree with kamikatze. I have never complained about mine. I grew up with brothers and never felt at a disadvantage and it was never assumed that their career/academic prospects were any more important than mine. I think that a lot of nonsense is talked about it. They are all individuals. Some boys would benefit by being more active and having more sport at school, but some would hate it. You can't generalise on anything.

yes, my poor ds deserves to be struggling at school because of SLD. Serves him right for being a nasty difficult boy.

Must try harder at encouraging the other ds to fare a little more terribly in the educational system. He doesn't deserve it.

Men, they're all bastards right? And Mothers of boys, are all shrewish.