Erik wrote: "Now, my two sources for this are Jonathan Kellerman, PhD (director of children psychiatric services in LA) and William Pollack PhD. (renowned writer of Real Boys).
A synopsis of Dr. Pollacks book is in regard to the "Boy Code" a silent code of "manly" conduct. Is it ok for a boy to openly cry in a classroom, on a playing field, or even when they get hurt. Commonly, no. They are expected to tough it out and be a "man" In the World of psycology you will find very different views than the ones of opinionated educators..." Don't know anything about Kellerman, but I hope he is way less problemmatic than Pollack. Mark _____________________ Behind the Attacks on Boyhood: Sketchy Science and Extreme Politics http://www.papillonsartpalace.com/behind.htm Tuesday, June 26, 2001 By Wendy McElroy We now know a 1997 study that was instrumental in embedding PC feminist politics into the education of young children for what it truly was and is � a farce. The study, entitled Listening to Boys' Voices, by clinical psychologist Dr. William Pollack of Harvard, along with his subsequent best-seller, Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood (1998), sparked massive media coverage of what was termed "a national crisis of boys." Leading newspapers covered the "crisis." It was announced on the cover of Newsweek. It was explored in a segment of ABC's 20/20 and discussed on the Today Show. What is the crisis? An epidemic of "violent" behavior by boys � for example, of teasing and bullying at school � that is said to pose a danger to society and to boys themselves. Boyhood has to be modified, activists said in response, largely through the public schools. We must start training more gentle and caring young men, they said. Now, the study upon which the crisis was founded is in question. In an interview, John Haskins of the Parents' Rights Coalition of Waltham, Mass., confirmed that the father of one of the boys might be on the verge of coming forward to attack the data, methodology and ethics of the research project. Haskins explained that the father needed to know that "qualified professionals" will support his concerns. The parent is an academic at a university and speaking out in isolation could be disastrous to his career. Several "irregularities" are making him weigh the risk, nonetheless. For example, the issue of parental consent to the study is unclear as the only permission came as the result of silence. A long letter to parents from the school discussed diverse topics, including the study. Parents were asked to contact the office if they objected to their son's participation. Also, the boys were required to sign their names to the surveys, a demand that may violate the Ethical Standards of the American Psychological Association. The standards state that a researcher must shield subjects "such as students" from any negative consequences of declining to participate. Anonymity is the standard protection offered to those who might otherwise experience "a lowering of a grade or evaluation, loss of privileges, or any other negative consequence over which the researcher has some degree of control." It is no coincidence that criticism of the study is arising only now. Most of the boys involved have gone onto higher education and, so, are not as vulnerable to harmful backlash. A strange secrecy surrounds the results of this study. Although national policy was being formed on the basis of his data, Pollack did not publish the results and he refused to disclose many details, such as where it had been conducted. The location is important because it indicates whether the sampling was representative. Information came to light through research Professor Christina Hoff Sommers did for her most recent book, The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men (2000). She was curious about a press release issued in 1998 from the prestigious McLean Hospital, the psychiatric teaching hospital at Harvard Medical school. Under the heading "Adolescence Is Time of Crisis for Even 'Healthy' Boys, Finds McLean Study," the release stated that "despite appearing outwardly content, many boys feel deep feelings of loneliness and alienation." The concluding sentence called for changing the way boys are raised "in our homes, in our schools and in society." Sommers requested and received the elusive 30-page research paper. In a 1998 speech delivered to the American Enterprise Institute, she reported on her findings. For example, the study had avoided peer review by not being published in a professional journal: Portions of it had been released to the popular press instead. Sommers concluded that "the child-doomsayers" were "irresponsibly portraying healthy American ... boys as pathological victims of an inimical culture." The "stereotypical boy behavior" of adolescence was under attack by politically correct academics who considered such behavior to be offensive and socially destructive. After pointing out that the majority of research indicates that American boys are generally well adjusted, Sommers concluded, "It never occurs to the would-be-reformers of boys that their efforts" to "feminize" them is "grossly unfair" to boys themselves. The underlying assumption of such reformers is that there is no significant psychological difference between boys and girls. The clear differences in behavior between the genders are supposedly due to socialization that can be reversed. Much of the "de-socialization" can be done at taxpayer expense through public schools that exercise parental-style prerogative toward shaping the attitudes of children. Child-crisis writers like Pollack have profited richly from attacking the so-called "bully culture" of boys. Since the 1997 study, Pollack has created a virtual cottage industry of crisis through his subsequent lecturing and books � Real Boys' Voices and Real Boys' Workbook (both 2001). He had been quick to pick up on public concern on violence in schools by boys from Columbine and uncovering what he widely publicizes as the "Columbine Syndrome." The structure of the alleged boy crisis in America has been built largely on the foundation of one study. Professor Howard Schwartz, author of Revolt of the Primitive, has written two expos�s of Pollack's Listening to Boys' Voices. Schwartz describes how the subjects themselves viewed the one-sided questions on the survey as jokes, shouting out answers to each other. One subject reportedly told Schwartz, "Our immature attempt at humor four years ago should not be the benchmark for the 21st century." McElroy is the editor of www.ifeminists.com. She also edited Freedom, Feminism, and the State (Independent Institute, 1999) and Sexual Correctness: The Gender Feminist Attack on Women (McFarland, 1996). She lives with her husband in Canada. _______________________________ Research of Famous Harvard Psychologist Seriously Flawed, Perhaps Fraudulent Students at Belmont Hill School Thought It Was a 'Farce' Questions Used by Dr. Pollack to Disparage American Boys By Atty. J. Edward Pawlick http://www.massnews.com/past_issues/2001/june%202001/6141pol.htm July 2001 Dr. William Pollack threatened to sue Mass News when we reported the charges by Prof. Summers. The research that made Harvard psychologist William Pollack a famous expert on American boys and frightened American parents and educators is seriously flawed, if not fraudulent, according to people familiar with the study. It became the basis of Pollack's bestseller, Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood. Pollack's overtly anti-male conclusions were used by Harvard Medical School in 1998 to declare a "national emergency" that called for "major social reform" of boys. The boys at Belmont Hill School who were used by Dr. William Pollack to conduct the research for his best-selling book about American boys thought that the survey, which reportedly employed coercion, was a farce. "No one around me took the exam seriously with such one-sided and leading questions being asked," one former pupil says. "The test turned into a complete farce when kids began shouting out their answers to their classmates in an effort to make a joke." One student still vividly remembers one question that they were required to answer. "I was asked to answer how often I thought about killing myself - not if I did - how much I did. I was given the choice between once a year, once a month, once a week, or once a day." One parent says the school refused to provide parents with copies of the "test" which was administered to their sons. "We were absolutely shocked when the teachers threateningly demanded that we sign our names. I feel I can honestly say that the common sentiment, as a direct result of those one-sided questions, throughout the entire class was to not take the test seriously," a student has told Massachusetts News. It is a violation of the Ethical Standards of the American Psychological Association, to force subjects to complete surveys and to sign their names. Against universally accepted scientific practice, Pollack has always refused to reveal where the research was conducted or to allow other academics to examine the data behind the sweeping and alarming conclusions he published in Real Boys. But concerned parents and former pupils have revealed that Pollack's research was done on May 19, 1997, at the prestigious Belmont Hill School just outside Boston. The boys continued to talk about it for days. "Over the course of the next few days," a boy says, "it became a badge of honor to admit that one had filled it out incorrectly simply to spite this test which, no matter how accurately answered, in no way reflected the student. As a result, the student body did not answer accurately and honestly. I am still outraged and frightened that the answers I wrote on that test are actually connected to me by name, or by any means." Because of fear of retaliation, until the students left Belmont Hill and had been accepted at colleges, the revelations have until now been kept from the public. In addition, the boys do not wish to damage the school in any way. In the meantime, Pollack a clinical psychologist at Harvard Medical School, became famous and rich because of his best-selling book, published in 1998. Is it Fiction? Prof. Howard Schwartz of Oakland University says the new revelations about Pollack's research confirm what he suspected already. "The only question is how much of his interviews Pollack made up. I suspect it was a lot. This information does nothing to reduce my uneasiness about the standards he applies to his work. His data were collected in a very questionable fashion from an extremely non-representative sample of boys. It makes the head spin to think that he has generalized his findings into a full blown diagnosis of cultural crisis. It is becoming increasingly difficult to take Dr. Pollack seriously." A professor of organizational behavior, Professor Schwartz studies the psychodynamics of political correctness and is publishing a new book on the subject. He sees Pollack's underlying goal as "to provide a theoretical basis for social engineering, for a certain kind of parenting - from a feminist perspective." "Pollack sees no particular [positive] meaning in the role of the father," says Schwartz. "His images of fathers are just about uniformly negative. The whole idea behind the revolution in parenting that he is trying to bring about is [the notion] that the traditional family is throwing boys into distress by raising them to be like their fathers rather than like women." Research Doubted Last Year Pollack's research came under attack last year in a book by Prof. Christina Hoff Sommers, of the American Enterprise Institute. In The War Against Boys she wrote that we are turning against boys as the result of research that is "riddled with errors." "On June 4, 1998," she wrote, "McLean Hospital, the psychiatric teaching hospital of the Harvard Medical School, issued a two-page press release announcing the results of a new study of boys. The release ... reported that researchers at McLean and Harvard Medical School found that 'psychologically "healthy" middle-class boys' are anxious, alienated, lonely and isolated - 'despite appearing outwardly content.'" Sommers noted that Harvard said that this was a "national emergency" that had been discovered by Dr. Pollack that called for "major social reform." She reported that Harvard said, "The time has come to change the way boys are raised - in our homes, in our schools and in society." It's unusual to find such sensational claims and recommendations issuing from a staid research institution such as McLean, which is routinely ranked among the top three psychiatric hospitals in the United States, Sommers reported. So Professor Sommers asked to see the research. "I requested a copy of the 'Listening to Boys' Voices' study from McLean. A few days later, a thirty-page typed manuscript arrived. It had not been published, nor was it marked as about to be published. It had none of the usual properties of a professional research paper. Unlike most scientific papers, which alert readers to their limits, Pollack's paper was unabashedly extravagant, declaring that 'these findings about boys are unprecedented in the literature of research psychology.'" The "national emergency," Sommers discovered, was based on a "battery of vaguely described tests administered to 150 boys" in grades 7-9. She says Pollack gave no explanation of how the boys had been selected or whether they constituted anything like a representative sample. "In sum," Sommers reported, "Pollack's paper does not present a single persuasive piece of evidence for a national boy crisis. I do not know whether 'Listening to Boys' Voices' has been submitted for publication in a professional journal. Its sparse data and its strident and implausible conclusions render it un-publishable as a scholarly article." When Pollack's former subjects now realize how their answers have been used by Dr. Pollack as a recipe for changing the boys all across America, they are astonished. "Our immature attempt at humor four years ago should not be the benchmark for the 21st century," one told the Massachusetts News. Pollack threatened to sue Massachusetts News (but never did) after it printed a story in the November 2000 issue. A subsequent story was published in January 2001 with the headline, "Harvard Professor Joins Feminist Plan to Alter the Nature of Males." The subhead was, "Dr. William Pollack Became Famous and Wealthy, Saying Single Mothers are Fine and Boys Are In Crisis, Just Like Their Fathers." Violated APA Ethical Standards Dr. Pollack will undoubtedly respond to these revelations by saying that he had permission from the parents to force the boys to complete the surveys and to sign their names. But this newspaper has learned that the only "permission" came as the result of a long, rambling letter about various topics from Headmaster Richard Melvoin the previous October. Melvoin wrote on page two of the letter, "Belmont Hill has been asked to participate in two surveys. One will survey student attitudes toward violence in the media. The second will study developmental issues in boys' attitudes and will be overseen by Dr. William Pollack, a Harvard Medical School faculty member who has written two books on issues of boys and men in society. Dr. Pollack has also spoken in front of the faculty and at the Boys' Schools Coalition Conference. If parents have any concerns about their sons participating in these surveys, please let our office know." Pollack's surveys were administered to all the pupils in grades 7-9 at the same time in two separate locations at the all-boy school. The head of the middle school, Deborah Callahan, was in charge and Pollack was present. Pollack appears to have violated the American Psychological Association's Ethical Standard 6.11, (c) through (e), which states, "When psychologists conduct research with individuals such as students or subordinates, psychologists take special care to protect the prospective participants from adverse consequences of declining or withdrawing from participation." The Ethical Standard also says that, "The psychologist must make an effort to protect such individuals from any adverse consequences of declining or withdrawing, such as a lowering of a grade or evaluation, loss of privileges, or any other negative consequence over which the researcher has some degree of control." It goes on to state, "Investigators must obtain participant's clear assent or agreement to participate." Parents Concerned Concern was expressed by parents about the methods used and the headmaster wrote a two-page letter to all parents about a week later. He said that he has seen Pollack as a "strong, articulate advocate for boys and boys' schools." And in the next sentence, the Headmaster gave as his basis for this opinion the following illogical statement: "Indeed, he is about to testify in California as an expert witness in an already celebrated case where a young girl seeks to join the Boy Scouts. Part of why we have allowed him to work at Belmont Hill is that he has been an outspoken advocate for the rights and needs of boys." Questions Used by Dr. Pollack to Disparage American Boys ________________________________ erikkhan wrote: > TV the cause of violence? Where are you getting your information > from? It definately is not the NIH, or the American Pediatrics > Association, or even the American Council on Social Work Education-- > not even any reputable education association. > > We actually are starting to find that violence can #1 be attributed > to very complicated wiring problems in the brain creating Psycopothy > or #2 lack of communication. Now, my two sources for this are > Jonathan Kellerman, PhD (director of children psychiatric services in > LA) and William Pollack PhD. (renowned writer of Real Boys). > > A synopsis of Dr. Pollacks book is in regard to the "Boy Code" a > silent code of "manly" conduct. Is it ok for a boy to openly cry in > a classroom, on a playing field, or even when they get hurt. > Commonly, no. They are expected to tough it out and be a "man" In > the World of psycology you will find very different views than the > ones of opinionated educators. > > Kellerman speaks of the infamous and endemic school yard shootings. > > Oddly enough, while I was typing this, a Movie regarding Ted Bundy > came on TV, a movie about one of the most violent people to walk to > the planet, yet he did not watch TV in the proportions of today. > > Am I saying that TV watching is good or bad, no! I feel that > anything done excessively is not good, but within reason is ok. > Parents need to communicate with their children about the difference > of fantasy to reality and TV can be used as prime example of those > majore differences. > > My suggestestions are few, read the two authors stated above (notably- > "Savage Spawn- Reflections of Violent Children" and "Real Boys" > and "Real Boys voices") and next, if someone is going to start using > statistics or statistical related information please cite your > examples. Stating that "researchers" did anything says nothing. > None of us would know if the researcher is a raging alcoholic who has > total experience in census data or a reputable member of youth > statistics. Further, the best place to find stats on violence in > youth is through the Department of Justice, Office of Juvenile > Delinquency Prevtion and look up the National Youth Survey. > > ~Erik > > --- In [email protected], Ferrel Christensen > <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Actually, this is not a new result. Years back, researchers looking > for > > effects on children of watching violence on TV unexpectedly found > that > > hours spent watching TV was already a predictor of later violence > by them. > > FC > > > > On Thu, 7 Apr 2005, Mark wrote: > > > > > > > > Has anyone here come across a more detailed analysis of this > study? It > > > makes no mention of any sex differences. > > > > > > Any other person on this list live in a TV-free environment? > > > > > > Mark > > > _______________________________ > > > > > > > > > Too much television breeds bullies - study > > > > > > http://www.nzherald.co.nz/index.cfm?c_id=2&ObjectID=10119083 > > > 07.04.05 > > > > > > > > > The more television 4-year-old children watch the more likely > they are > > > to become bullies later on in school, an American study says. > > > > > > At the same time, children whose parents read to them, take them > on > > > outings and generally pay attention to them are less likely to > become > > > bullies, the report from the University of Washington said. > > > > > > Frederick Zimmerman, who led the research, said bullying could > now be > > > added to the list of possible bad effects from watching too much > > > television - the others are obesity, inattention and other types > of > > > aggression. > > > > > > "Maximising cognitive stimulation and limiting television > watching in > > > the early years of development might reduce children's subsequent > risk > > > of becoming bullies," he said. > > > > > > Previous research had indicated emotional support from parents > helped > > > young children develop empathy, self-regulation and social skills, > > > making them less likely to be bullies, said the report in this > month's > > > Archives of Paediatrics and Adolescent Medicine. > > > > > > Researchers had also found that early gaps in learning and > understanding > > > may make children less competent in dealing with their peers, and > > > violence on television led to aggressive behaviour, it said. > > > > > > The Washington study looked at data from a study of 1266 4-year- > olds > > > whose bullying - based on assessments from their mothers - was > tracked > > > at ages six to 11. Overall, about 13 per cent of the children > turned out > > > to be bullies. > > > > > > The study also took into account stimulation for the children, as > > > measured by outings, reading, playing and their parents' role in > > > teaching them. Also measured was whether the child ate meals with > both > > > parents and whether parents talked to the child while working. > > > > > > - REUTERS > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > Yahoo! Groups Links > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > Yahoo! Groups Links > > > > [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> In low income neighborhoods, 84% do not own computers. At Network for Good, help bridge the Digital Divide! http://us.click.yahoo.com/S.QlOD/3MnJAA/Zx0JAA/pyIolB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> Yahoo! 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