When I was about 12 and growing up in my Hull suburb in the 1970s, my friends and I liked to while away the evenings filling balloons with water and hurling them at unsuspecting passers-by. We’d almost always miss, then run away. Once, we attacked the same bus driver at the same bus stop three nights in a row. He’d stop, we’d appear out of the shadows lugging these huge distended wobbly missiles which we’d then heave through the open door of the bus. On the third night, as the balloons exploded around him, saturating the step of the bus but not much else because, as usual, we’d made the schoolboy error of overfilling our water balloons, the bus driver said this. “Oh no lads, come on, no, not again, no.” I can hear his lugubrious tone even now, over a quarter of a century later.
His tone said he was fed up, that the joke was over, but there was also an acceptance that while we were being a bloody nuisance, we weren’t being bad, we were being boys. And we certainly weren’t suffering from any syndrome anybody might care to invent. Eventually one of our number was caught with a suspicious number of balloons in his pocket by the local policeman. He promptly shopped the rest of us and I arrived home to find a panda car outside the house. The police told us to stop and we did. Nowadays, what do you reckon? The bus driver attacks us? Jack Straw and David Blunkett burst out of the darkness? A curfew? An ASBO? Compulsory Ritalin?
A fortnight ago I was in Lydd, on Romney Marsh in Kent. It’s a remote place, Lydd, straggling around a huge expanse of treeless grass, which is like a village green, but ten times as big as the norm. My wife and I took our children to the swings in the middle of the green. There was a boy playing there; it turned out, when we got talking, that he was called Stefan and he was six. I don’t doubt that in a few years’ time he will be trying to drench bus drivers with water balloons.
He was fascinating, Stefan, and it took me a while to work out why. He was stripped to the waist, athletically built, suntanned, grubby, cheerful, confident, chatty and yet incurious at the same time. He radiated health, mischief, happiness and energy. He looked as though he lived all his life outdoors, mixing with other children, having fun, learning about life. He looked like a boy from an old photograph or newsreel, a throwback. I realised that Stefan seemed special because he presented the very image of carefree boyhood, and yet you hardly see boys like him any more. His parents were nowhere to be seen. Maybe they were keeping an eye on him from a distance, but I don’t think so. I think they were somewhere else, but still doing an excellent job of letting their boy get on with being a boy.
The snatch of Stefan’s life that I witnessed seemed close to what many of us carry in our heads as an ideal of proper boyhood, an ideal that urbanisation and the Industrial Revolution and, more recently, the spread of a risk-averse, sanitised, controlled, timetabled culture of child-rearing have all eroded in practice but failed to eradicate in the imagination. Many aspects of modern life conspire against our boys achieving this ideal. Lack of time, that’s one problem; lack of time for fathers appropriately to supervise such a life; lack of time for sons to follow their instincts, with their homework and swimming classes and art clubs and football matches — all worthwhile, none a substitute for the real thing. Lack of time and lack of space, and an intolerance of mess in our just-so interiors. And fear also: fear of cars, which is justified; fear of abduction, which isn’t.
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But in some quarters a different fear has emerged in recent years — a fear of boyishness itself. This is best shown in the creeping medicalisation of what seems in many cases to amount to no more than an extreme case of being a boy. I agree with Frank Furedi, the professor of sociology at Kent University who has written much on parenting, when he says that, a few cases aside, the whole edifice of ADHD and Ritalin is “a complete cop-out”, usually on the part of schools.
I interviewed John McEnroe a few years ago. We talked about his boyhood. He was excessively energetic, easily bored, restless, competitive and temperamental. “Nowadays, they’d have a whole bunch of names for it,” he said. I thought about what he said when I read recently that some states in America have prosecuted parents for refusing to follow a school’s insistence that their son be put on Ritalin, just as some schools in Britain have requested that certain pupils, almost always boys, start taking the drug too. I decided McEnroe hadn’t been joking. A boy like him probably would be on Ritalin now in America, just as some other future sports genius, or actor, or musician, is probably having their spark dulled by chemicals as I write. Or maybe a late-developing future scholar or writer is being told he is dyslexic when the reality is that no one has taught him to read properly because he’s noisy and boisterous. (There is a very strong case, incidentally, for boys going to school a year later than girls, and going through school with girls who are a year younger and, therefore, at roughly the same developmental stage.)
I grew up in the suburbs. Opposite our house was a golf course, behind it a field. From an early age, maybe around the age my own son is now, seven or so, my brother and I would go on to the golf course and into the field, neither of which we were really supposed to do. We’d jump around in the barn, climb trees, get a bit daring and run across the fairways when we reckoned all the golfers had packed it in for the evening. My childhood wasn’t idyllic, but it was closer to the ideal than my son’s life. I can’t remember Sam or his friends going unsupervised, not once.
I suppose, in an ideal world, it’d be easier for parents, easier certainly for teachers, possibly better for society as a whole, if boys weren’t so silly and naughty and impulsive and loud. But they are, most of them, to varying degrees. It’s normal. It’s biology. The solution isn’t stateendorsed drugging. The solution is to accept what it is to be a boy and then find contemporary methods of giving boyhood desires as free a rein as possible. Scout troops, for instance, are oversubscribed, with long-waiting lists. The Scouts, along with the Guides and the Boys Brigade, are all oversubscribed because, they say, they can’t find enough nice, safe grown-ups prepared to help to run them. They are all either too tired after work or busy pursuing their lifestyles. How about some government money, or lottery money, to pay stipends to fund part-time posts? How about schools binning their endless testing and turning their disruptive boys out into the local park or field for an hour or two each day?
The birth rate is dropping. “Adults have become scared of having children,” says Furedi. I’d be more specific. I think adults, some adults anyway, have become scared of boys. Scared of having their own boys, scared of other people’s too. Boys, on the whole, are more impulsive, emotionally needy and naughtier than girls. They also create more laundry. How times change. I don’t know anybody now who prays for their first-born to be male, and that ‘s great. I know a few who, if pushed, are quite keen for their second or third-born to be female, however. What a shame.
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