The Truth About Boys and Reading

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?