Boys' Emotional Needs

The carnage committed in April by two boys in Littleton, Colo., has forced the nation to reexamine the nature of boyhood in America. Some psychologists contend that societal pressures on boys force them to suppress their most vulnerable emotions in service to a rigid idea of manhood. They say the result is a nation of boys depressed, failing in school and occasionally exploding with murderous rage. The new concern about boys follows a decade in which adolescent girls were thought to be suffering a loss in self-esteem and academic achievement, in part because teachers gave them less attention than boys. But now it is the boys who are falling behind and more likely to be in remedial classes, to be suspended and to drop out of school.