Raising Cain
Everyone should check out the PBS special, Raising Cain about the difficulty boys have growing up in today's world. Here is a short blurb of the film:
America's boys are in trouble. They are the most violent in the industrialized world. Many are unable to express their emotions. On average, boys are doing worse in the classroom than they were 10 years ago.
When I first heard about this piece, my liberal knee jerked quite hard about why girls weren't included in this special. But after watching the piece, I came to understand that this was in the same vein as an earlier PBS special called Girl Wrestler about (well) young girls wanting to wrestle.
Raising Cain is quite good about moving from addressing infant boys all the way up to teenagers, in a wide-spectrum of class, and wealth. Two things surprised me about this show: the first was a study showing that girl toddlers are quite calm when their mothers leave them for short periods of time, while baby boys instantly get upset. It shouldn't have been a surprise: boys emotion parts of their brain don't fully form until later in adolescence.
The second surprising moment was during a segment about a youth who attends an all-boys school in the LES: the boys were playing patty-cake during lunch. I immediately started laughing about that, but then had to stop myself; what a great moment! Kids were being kids without some BS cultural baggage about who should do what. Sending youngsters to single-gender schooling sounds more and more appealing.
I am looking forward now to PBS running a similar program about young girls, and their difficulty growing up in this world. It would be interesting to see how divergent it is, and what the experts think are the big issues for young girls (and women) in America.
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This is the permanent home of Raising Cain. I wrote this post at 23:21 on January 12, 2006. This post is part of grubbykid.com, a weblog. If you liked this entry, why don't you read some other posts such as The year in cities or Best Blond Joke Ever? Or you could go to the site archives or return home. All are good choices.
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Some descriptive tags for this entry are: culture PBS television tv interesting.
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Some descriptive tags for this entry are: culture, interesting, PBS, television, tv.
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