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The teachers would give us feedback, saying that the guys were much more receptive and relaxed during the week.

I left at the time when you needed signed forms just to go near water. There is a lot of fear in every public institution now around liability, and it’s kind of systemic.

If you’ve ever sat in a Grade 8 classroom, boys are always pushing at each other. We’re not creating opportunities for boys to work out some of that stuff. What are we doing to these kids, asking them to sit down, not move, not to be in the world?

There are too few male role models:

In the education system, most educators at the primary level are women. Around the age of six or seven boys start to turn to males to mimic as role models. There are some really great teachers who are sensitive to these issues, but, systemically, we need to create an environment where more men are drawn to being educators for that age group.

We also have a lot of single parent homes, where there’s an absence of an engaged male role model in their lives. So boys turn to media, and these other icons of masculinity. The whole gang phenomena is probably most disturbing because you have these confused, afraid, fragmented boys turning to each other to guide one another through this. We often see these boys as angry gangs but I see really scared kids.

Why boys might be acting out:

One of our core basic needs as human beings is to have an emotionally and physically available primary relationship. Attachment determines how our brains get wired. We know that boys are diagnosed five times more than girls with attention deficit disorder. What we’re doing is looking at brain scans of insecurely attached children and we’re finding that their scans are very similar to kids with ADD. We’re basically medicating the attachment symptom.