Message from the Headmaster
‘A wise son brings joy to his father (and mother)’
Proverbs 10:1
Understanding Boys
Dear Parents and Carers
I am in the business of trying to understand boys, their motivations and how to influence them for good. Sometimes they can be an enigma, a kind of closed book. Over decades of interviewing boys, mostly in the middle years of Senior School, and asking them why they did certain things, the most frequent answer has been “I don’t know”. After much pondering over these decades, I have come to the view that often the truthful answer is that they don’t know.
If boys don’t entirely understand themselves, recent neuroscience casts some light on the mysteries. I am grateful to Christian Education consultant, Dr Richard Edlin, for crystallising much of the research.
What has become clear from research is that teenage boys’ reward systems (limbic systems) within their brains mature well before the inhibitory systems. The limbic system embeds instincts such as fear, lust, hunger and pleasure. Consequently, the brain’s reward system is very active in a teenage boy while the pre-frontal cortex, which is responsible for functions such as self-control, planning and self-awareness, is still developing. This is further elevated in the company of peers. Research indicates that teenagers experience music, drugs and the thrill of speed far more powerfully in the presence of peers. Research within a virtual driving experiment indicated that teenage boys responded as well as adults to risks and their mitigation, except in the company of peers, where risk increased threefold for 13 to 16 year olds. I experienced that 25 years ago in an actual driving situation with a Year 12 boy in the school I led at the time, driving very fast at night time on an unfamiliar rural road, in a borrowed car full of boys, where he had gained his licence only four days previously. Everything was wrong. It was indeed touch and go for a while in hospital after a major accident, but he survived.
A study on rodents involving alcohol consumption found that young mice consumed alcohol at the same rate as adult mice, except that in the company of other juveniles, they increased their consumption by 25 percent. Boys are not rodents, but there may be similarities across the species.
Research also shows that teenagers largely ignore warnings about the long term impact of smoking, but respond to information on the social effects (it gives you bad breath, it puts younger children in danger of passive smoking, you are being exploited by an adult industry).
Is there any good news about the teenage phase of boys? Absolutely! The teenage brain is far more receptive to learning than the brains of older people (sorry parents!). At a deep neural level, new information is written into the grey matter of the brain, expressed in structural changes to synapses, which can form durable webs of memory.
Why then do teenage boys in the middle adolescent years do what they do? It seemed a good idea at the time.
Perhaps boys may benefit from a sign across their foreheads, “Under Construction?!”. Having said that, there is much to praise and much to enjoy through the teenage years, for boys themselves and for those who are bound to observe them, lead them and teach them. I think, on the whole, our boys at Shore do very well. I hope our parents experience the blessing of Proverbs 10:1 “A wise son brings joy to his father (and mother)”.
Dr John Collier
Headmaster