The Truth About Boys and Reading

September 2007 Special Sections

It would not be a stretch to say that wrestling made librarian Patrick Jones what he is today—not the helmet-and-singlet-clad wrestlers featured in the Olympics, but professional wrestlers of the folding-metal-chair-to-the-head variety. As you might have guessed, Jones isn’t your average librarian. The outreach manager for the Hennepin County Library is also an author, library consultant, and recipient of the Scholastic Library Publishing Award for lifetime achievement. It was an award Jones earned in no small part for his ability to get teenagers into libraries and into reading.

Jones, now forty-six years old, grew up in Flint, Michigan, an avid non-reader until middle school when he stumbled on wrestling magazines. Back then, World Wrestling Entertainment didn’t exist but a regional circuit of professional wrestlers with names like The Sheik and Johnny Valentine did. By 1985, Jones was working as a librarian in Savannah, Georgia; a year later he became a young adult librarian in Springfield, Massachusetts. In those early years, he made a discovery: “I noticed dudes weren’t nearly as interested in reading as girls were.” It was now the era of Hulk Hogan, so Jones tried an experiment. “I started thinking about how to get boys involved and started bringing in wrestling magazines,” he says. “And it worked.”

That’s the good news. The bad news is that it’s still not easy to get boys to read. As a whole, they still read less well and less often than girls. For more than thirty years, boys in the United States—and around the world—have consistently lagged behind girls on literacy test scores beginning in the fourth grade and lasting into high school. It’s an alarming, long-term trend that some worry could lead to a generation of barely literate men with fewer career choices and lower earning power.

But Jones’ discovery—that boys will read when the subject interests them—is an important one. As we’ve  learned more about the different ways in which boys and girls learn, it’s an idea that’s gained traction. Schools and libraries still favor a “one size fits all” approach that plays to the reading strengths and interests of girls, but Jones and others insist there are more ways than ever for boys to get involved in reading—we just need to let them.

What Science Tells Us
Girls are simply hardwired to be better readers, says author and researcher Michael Gurian, who studies the biological and neurological differences between the genders at his Colorado-based Gurian Institute. Brain scans and other tests reveal that girls have more access to areas of the brain that support reading and associated skills, including detailed memory and listening.

In his book The Minds of Boys, Gurian notes that the “female brain utilizes more neural pathways and brain centers for word production and expression of experience, emotion, and cognition through words.” Consequently, girls know more words sooner, remember their meanings longer—and use them more, too.

Powerful hormonal differences also draw girls and boys to different content in what they read and watch. “Girls are drawn to books and TV  where people are relating to each other through talk and bonding,” Gurian says. “Some of that is socialization, but some of it is greater amounts of the bonding chemical oxytocin. Testosterone causes boys to be more aggressive and to be drawn to action.”

It’s said that on average boys lag about twelve to eighteen months behind girls in reading and writing. Gurian notes that boys are also more physically active because the male brain falls into a “rest state” when the body stops moving for too long. “That’s why you often see boys tapping their pencils or feet during class,” he says. “It’s so they can keep their brains awake.”

Biased Toward Girls?
There are other challenges to getting boys interested in reading. Some wonder, for instance, if part of the problem is an educational and library culture dominated by women and their reading interests. Author John Coy, a Minneapolis native who holds a master’s degree in human development and writes young adult books with boys in mind, has wondered as much.

When Coy’s book Night Driving about the road trip conversations between a boy and his father was published in 1996, Coy visited schools and talked with teachers. “When they identified students who didn’t like to read, it invariably skewed toward boys,” he says. Not only were boys the classrooms’ most reluctant readers, they frequently couldn’t stand the literary classics they were assigned to read.

“All the people telling boys what to read or what was good to read were women,” Coy observed. At home the students’ mothers read books; if Dad read at all, he read magazines, newspapers, and instruction manuals.

Schools and libraries have long been the domain of women, and the content assigned to boys by women is often literature that puts the emphasis on the emotional journeys of characters. Books, magazines, and comics driven by fast-paced plots featuring heroes, action, adventure, and sometimes body noises—the reading shown to most attract boys—don’t often make required reading lists.

Coy thinks part of the problem lies with book publishers. He discovered that first-hand with his second book, Strong to the Hoop, the story of a ten-year-old boy determined to play basketball with the older guys. “It came out during the basketball craze a few years ago,” Coy says. “But editors weren’t interested in it.” Editor after editor, all women, rejected the book. “They kept saying they had no interest in sports,” he says. “I realized there was a huge gap between what  gets published and the interests of kids, both girls and boys.”

Slower to develop and forced to read books they don’t understand about subjects uninteresting to them, boys lose interest in reading early on in school. By the time they reach middle school, they label themselves as poor readers, an identity that’s tough to shake especially when puberty and its self-questioning nature kicks in and reading is seen as an activity for dorks or sissies. Who wants to read when he could turn on Xbox or play outside?

What Boys Like To Read
Author Jon Scieszka writes books that appeal to boys—The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales is his most well-known. He’s also founder of Guys Read, a nutty website devoted to bolstering reading among boys. He edited the companion book Guys Write for Guys Read, a collection of essays from notable guys, including Stephen King, Gary Paulsen, and Simpsons creator Matthew Groening. Many of the pieces in the book are poignant and not all contain stories about bodily functions (although Paulsen’s and King’s entries are hilarious additions to the genre).

Scieszka, who is himself from a family of six boys, insists he doesn’t write with boys in mind so much as he does what interests his own instincts as a guy, and that includes parody. He began writing after ten years of teaching, years filled with faculty meetings with the same reading bias Coy noticed. “Women would suggest quieter titles,” Scieszka says. “I’d always suggest rowdy books.”

Scieszka launched Guys Read in 2000. Shortly thereafter, professors Jeffrey Wilhelm and Michael Smith published their book Reading Don’t Fix No Chevys, a study of what boys think about reading. What Wilhelm and Smith learned is that boys want to see themselves and their concerns in what they read. They want to be able to export what they learn from reading so they can share it with others and be immersed in what they’re doing—a pleasant condition experienced by many called “flow.”

Flow reading is so engrossing one forgets about time and revels in the experience. To achieve it, boys need a clear purpose, ongoing feedback about how they’re doing, help if they get stuck, and a chance to share what they’re learning. They need text that is neither too easy nor too hard and about topics they find relevant. And they prefer nonfiction with supporting visuals and short text since completing a short section provides a sense of accomplishment.

More than anything, we need to let boys choose what they read. Kathleen Baxter, an Anoka, Minnesota, retired librarian, makes upwards of 100 presentations a year on the topic of connecting boys and books. She advises grabbing a stack of books covering the kinds of topics boys love and asking them if they’re interested in a  book—if not, move on to the next. Bodily noises can’t miss. The book What You Never Knew About Tubs, Toilets and Showers, Baxter reports, is always a favorite with boys.

Tom Newkirk, a University of New Hampshire English professor and director of the New Hampshire Literacy Institutes, says we shouldn’t discount video games, comic books, and TV shows—as boys tend to experience things spatially.

Most video games and comic books are based on some type of quest in which an imperiled hero tries to find clues or treasure and earn advantages so he can go to the next level. Action, danger, a purpose, and a chance to share your score with your buddies—Newkirk sees it as boy catnip and suggests asking boys to create their own games and comic books as a support for reading adventure books.

We should also examine the sedentary conditions at school that work against boys’ natural energy. “We need to find ways for literacy to tap into that energy,” Newkirk says. “When boys draw Ninja battles, they’re expending energy in a good way.”

Coy has helped third graders make a “sound book” based upon his book Vroomaloom Zoom. “I find that lots of kids who struggle with reading and writing are good at making sounds,” he says. “This helps give them a connection to the project and everybody gets excited about creating sounds for their story.”

When the author first introduced schoolkids to the stage version of his book Strong to the Hoop, even the most reluctant readers volunteered to be in the play because “they weren’t volunteering to read,” Coy says. “They were volunteering to be on a basketball team.”

Scieszka subscribes to the idea that we should encourage boys to read anything they wish as long as they keep reading. “We’ve got to expand what our definition of reading is,” he says. That means being open to comics, magazines, and the like.

He suggests parents find a few books for their boys and then read the beginning aloud to see if it’s interesting to them. “If it isn’t, don’t make a big deal about it,” Scieszka  says. “Guys are solution-oriented. Most of us are thinking, ‘Stop talking about it—let’s try something and see what happens.’”