Raising Boyz 2 Men

This site was birthed out of my sincere hope of being able to change the lives of little boys every where. I have worked in education in various aspects for the last ten years, and my niche has always seemed to be working with little boys that teachers, parents, principals, and others have labeled as incorrigible. I often find that it’s not the child that needs changing but the methods in which we try to reach and teach them. Some traditional teaching methods go against the natural processes of male development (which we will explore in great detail later) and make young boys feel inferior to their female counter parts. Other "best practices" of teaching have proven not to be the best practices for engaging young males.

Toy Guns and Violence

I had an interesting conversation on Christmas morning with my mother-in-law and two other moms of young boys. The three of them could not believe as an educator I allowed my sons to play with Nerf guns (which they got for Christmas and absolutely love. When I asked what was wrong with getting them guns I was told it teaches them to be violent, but I beg to differ. My position is that it takes more than a toy gun to teach a child to be violent. If a child never see's a gun used in a violent manner, but only as an item of recreation and in our case learning (my sons and daughter use Nerf guns to shoot alphabet targets that I made for several language arts and literacy games) how does it teach them to be violent. It's the impressions that they get from music/music videos, video games, movies and other forms of mass media that demonstrates the use of guns as a weapon. As we were speaking about this issue one of the other children came by playing a game on a hand held game system that involved shooting, I just smiled.

The PBS documentary Raising Cain addresses the issues of gun play,violence, gender based education and the nature of boys in great detail. This is a great source of information on parenting and educating boys. As always your feedback is wanted and needed!

Below you will find a brief synopsis and video clip from the documentary:

Gender Based Education Report From Learning Matters

This post originally aired May 19, 2003 and re-aired March 4th, 2008.