'Experts' should focus on saving boys.

• Author: Cepeda, Esther J.
• Position: Editorials

Byline: ESTHER J. CEPEDA

I just finished reading ''Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men,'' written by Dr. Leonard Sax after years of seeing sullen boys in his medical practice fail to thrive.

''From kindergarten to college, [boys are] less resilient and less ambitious than they were a mere 20 years ago. In fact, a third of men ages 22-34 are still living at home with their parents -- about a 100 percent increase in the past 20 years,'' Sax wrote. His book came out in 2007, when my own two sons were far from adolescence and hadn't yet developed a visceral hatred of school. The numbers are even higher today.

In ''Boys Adrift,'' Sax identified several factors creating a toxic environment for boys that is driving their decline: a misguided overemphasis on reading and math as early as kindergarten, too much time playing hyper-real video games, an overreliance on medication for attention deficit disorders and a popular-culture devaluation of masculinity.

Sax also shared his suggestions for solving these problems such as considering starting boys in kindergarten a year later than usual, limiting screen time, drinking from glass rather than plastic and looking for all-boys educational environments. After being invited to many speaking engagements to share his research, Sax took a sabbatical from practicing medicine to find more solutions.

What happened next will astound no one who has stuck up for boys and been shouted down by an unruly crowd assuming that to be ''pro-boy'' is synonymous with being ''anti-girl.''

During his talks, Sax attempted to educate school administrators, teachers, school board members and college faculty on methods for taking gender into account in the classroom. He was roundly dismissed.

''As a physician seeing patients 60 hours a week, I didn't have an appreciation for the degree to which this topic is political,'' Sax told me. ''The assumption is that if you advocate for boys, you are right-of-center, and if you advocate for girls you are left-of center. And you must work very hard to make people understand that not only are the politics not the most important issue, but that if you're seeing boys as the 'losers' of good education and work opportunities, girls are not the 'winners,' either. But when you start talking about offering boy-friendly instructional strategies, then you must be against girls.''

In 2010, Sax wrote a follow-up book, ''Girls on...