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I was a closet thumb sucker until I was 11
I want my daughters to suck without fear.
By Pamela Gordon
[12/23/99]

The Great First-Baby-of-the-Millennium Race
To win I've got to squat directly over the international dateline.
By Leah Eskin
[12/24/99]

Rolling baby killers
Walkers cause more infant deaths and accidents than any other baby furniture. Now, thanks to the boom in e-commerce, they are readily available online.
By Damien Cave
[12/30/99]

Shooting babies
I was a Wal-Mart photo peddler.
By Chris Neal
[01/03/00]

I can't hate the Kelsos
At least they took their disabled child to the hospital instead of the nearest bridge.
By Anne Mitchell
[01/04/00]

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A generation ago, Rogers and Hammerstein penned parental sentiments like "You can have fun with a son but you gotta be a father to a girl." Commentator Camille Peri says the current "crisis of boys" gripping the nation shows that, somewhere along the way, we stopped having fun with our sons and started policing them.

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When my sister-in-law discovered she was expecting a baby boy, her coworkers at a national, liberal magazine offered their condolences. "That's too bad,"one male editor sighed. "You must be really disappointed."

In fact, she wasn't. But in the current American landscape, boyhood is considered a blight, a plague on all our houses. On the parenting bookshelves, titles like "Cherishing Our Daughters" and "Raising Strong Daughters" beam out brightly next to "Lost Boys: Why Our Sons Are Violent and How We Can Save Them," or "Boys Will Be Boys: Breaking the Link Between Masculinity and Violence."

Play weapons, shadow boxing, finger guns have mysteriously become predictors of future violence. Once these were the stock and trade of boys' fantasy play. Now they're frowned upon or banned at most schools, along with the ideals of heroism, adventure and manliness that went with them.

In the rush of cultural analysis that follows tragedies like those in Littleton and Columbine, all boys become guilty by association. The common mantra is that media violence and computer games are "conditioning" boys for violence. But millions of dollars in research has failed to produce more than marginal link to immediate aggressive behavior. And, clearly, the overwhelming majority of boys who watch TV and play video games do not become violent criminals.

"Boys are in silent crisis," William Pollack, the author of "Real Boys," warned last year. "The only time we notice is when they pull the trigger." Never mind that boys are pulling the trigger in diminishing numbers. Despite the widely publicized wave of campus shootings, school violence of all kinds has been on a six-year decline, according to the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention.

The boy-crisis industry conveniently ignores realities like these. It also ignores the many cultural signs that boys are changing for the better. "Animorphs," the book and television series widely embraced by boys, features cool boy heroes who are strong but also vulnerable. Pokemon, the most recent mega-phenomenon in the Power Ranger-Ninja Turtle genre, is also the least violent: Its "warriors" are pudgy, pocket-sized creatures like Jigglypuff, whose "sing attacks" send "even the toughest Pokemon to dreamland."

As a mother of sons, I don't see a generation of lost boys. What I see is the forming of a new Boy Code that could be called sensitive macho. My nine-year-old likes to pretend that he's the machine-gun toting Keanu Reeves character in "Matrix" AND that he's one of Brittany Spears' male backup dancers. He's fiercely competitive at soccer but not afraid to cry. He'll proudly burp the entire "Star Spangled Banner," then smother his little brother with hugs and kisses. The boys I see are not docile or disturbed -- they are exuberantly integrating a smudgy softness into their masculinity.

Isn't that what we really want for our sons?

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