WhyBoys2

1. Appreciate that boys are built for activity. This activity must be accounted for when we are creating structure for our boys. Give boys an opportunity to move, make activity a part of a task as much as possible. Provide time to be active at regular intervals to keep the wiggles under control. Give the boys the more active chores to do at home and in the classroom.
2. Recognize that the attention span of a boy is going to be shorter when he is not particularly interested in a subject. When teaching boys, keeping tasks and subjects as short as can be and still achieve the objective of the task will help. Breaking things into parts with intervals of activity between can also be useful. Keeping homework to a limited amount can also be very helpful in terms of compliance and completion.
3. Take advantage of his natural curiosity to help him build his strengths. Build into his exploration topics or lessons in which he may not necessarily be interested. Appreciate that his natural curiosity will serve him well in his life.
4. Help him find appropriate ways to test his strength as well as his desire to compete. Don't try to train this out of him, this will only damage him. Instead, help him to see that there can be fun and beneficial ways of demonstrating his capacity to others and to himself.
5. Encourage the efforts he makes, not his ability or his talent. Some recent research shows that encouragement of effort is far more effective in development of perseverance and a positive self image than praising a child for his intelligence or raw ability.
6. When talking to him recognize that being active during that talk helps him absorb what you are saying (providing the activity is not too engaging). Taking a child on a walk or allowing him to color while you talk can be very helpful. Don't always expect a boy to look you in the eyes when you are disciplining him, he finds this embarrassing. By doing these things you are teaching him to express his feelings through talking rather than always by action.
7. Recognize that boys bond by doing things with other boys, and with you as well. Don't expect a boy to want to simply talk to you for the purpose of enjoyment and growing closer to you. He will come to you to talk to you about a problem. Keep it brief, talk too much and he will tune you out. If you wish to get closer to a boy, do things with him.
8. Don't compare him to other boys, either directly to him or even in your own mind. Remember, there is greater variability among boys than there are girls. Learn to appreciate the boy for who he is created to be.

There is also evidence that when it comes to academic performance that the distribution of girls along a bell shaped curve show a greater tendency to fall towards the average while boys distribution curve has a tendency to fall along a greater distribution along the curve, the average is the same for boys and girls but the distribution is different. In other words, more girls have a tendency to be clumped more around the average point while boys have a tendency to spread out more evenly. This means that more boys are going to be at the head of the class but there will also be more boys with difficulties than girls. Applied to behavior, this would suggest that we can expect more girls to act in a way that is considered average for children that age and that there is going to be a certain level of homogeneity with girls. With boys we can expect to see more variability among boys, some behaving in an average fashion, but more that struggle than girls. What this does is that it has a tendency to really isolate the boys that fall in the "struggle" category because there is a body of boys in the average group and a large number of girls in the average group.
What this difference in brain development is that boys act the way they do because they are built to act that way. A boy's development is a central aspect of a boy's behavior. Boys are built to be more active, to test the limits of their physical strength, to throw things to see how it flies, to explore the woods or the insides of the computer, to seek new things to grab their interests, to take on a challenge, to compete with one another, to learn by doing and by experiment, and to try to fix problems. Take that boy and put him into a setting in which he is expected to sit still for long periods of time and to learn through having someone talk to him, want to have him play quietly in the house and pay attention to his homework, to express himself by talking and you begin to see the dilemma that is being created for that boy and for those who are trying to enforce this structure. This structure is not allowing for how this child is created to operate, it pushes him towards "girl" behavior. Have enough of this constraint and you will begin to get school failure, school resistance, disruptive behavior and possibly rebellious behavior. So what can we do?