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Essay

Educating Boys: Nature, Risk, and the Making of Men

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The following essay is part of an ongoing series in which Dr. Joseph Lanzilotti surveys and summarizes the ever-growing body of research on boys’ education.

“Oh for boyhood’s painless play,
Sleep that wakes in laughing day,
Health that mocks the doctor’s rules,
Knowledge never learned of schools,
Of the wild bee’s morning chase,
Of the wild-flower’s time and place,
Flight of fowl and habitude
Of the tenants of the wood;”1

—from “The Barefoot Boy” by John Greenleaf Whittier

Seeing the Difference: When Boys Thrive

“Far from being an accidental or secondary aspect of personality, [sexual difference] is constitutive of personal identity. […] The roles attributed to one or the other sex may vary across time and space, but the sexual identity of the person is not a cultural or social construction. It belongs to the specific manner in which the imago Dei [image of God] exists.”2 In these words, the International Theological Commission, headed by then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, affirmed the significance and foundation of the sexual difference of the human person as central and “constitutive” of personal identity. Over the last five decades, there has been a growing appreciation within various academic fields for the depth and breadth of the differences between men and women. Numerous studies have confirmed and illuminated the physiological, neurological, genetic, epigenetic, and behavioral differences between the sexes.3 These studies have confirmed what the Church, “expert in humanity,”4 has taught and continues to teach us about the nature of the human person created in the image of the Triune God.

A survey of historical anthropology shows us that human beings have at all times prior to the twentieth century, and in all places, recognized that there is this difference. In the twentieth century, it came into vogue to at least feign a myopic denial of these differences, a fad which has continued into the twenty-first century in some circles. In a 1913 essay, G. K. Chesterton wittily remarked, “It is nowadays quite a mark of culture to say that one can see no difference between a man and a woman, or a man and an angel, or a man and an animal. If a man cannot see the difference between a horse and a cow across a large field, we do not call him cultured; we call him short-sighted.”5 In an age of short-sightedness, it may be helpful to hear from those who have studied human behavior across centuries and who may offer their expertise to those who may be unable to see what is right before their noses. Judith Rich Harris, a psychologist who rose to international fame through her book The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do, writes, “In every society we know of, the behavior of males and females differs. It differs far more in most societies than in our own. And the pattern of differences is the same all over the world.”6 In her research on “group socialization,” Harris found that, across cultures, boys and girls segregate themselves into separate groups and learn from one another within these groups. Harris writes, “The most important years for group socialization are the years of middle childhood, from six to twelve. During all that time, children in our society—a society that provides them with a plethora of potential companions—spend much of their free time with peers of their own sex. They are socialized—that is, they socialize each other, they socialize themselves—not just as children but as girls or as boys.”7 This is done not according to an external mandate but as an expression of their way of being human, male and female.

When we observe young boys at play, the marked physicality of their interactions is unmistakable. It is a universal phenomenon across cultures and times. In her book on the male brain, Louann Brizendine notes that, “worldwide, boys on playgrounds wrestle, roughhouse, and mock-fight frequently; girls do not.”8 If we listen to the testimony of two authors in a 1983 study on boys and girls at play, a familiar image is articulated. Pitcher and Schultz write, “Among four-year-olds, boys have a boisterous heyday in their numerous same-sex contacts in rough-and-tumble play, positive teasing, and foolish word play. They wrestle, bump into, and fall on one another.”9 And Eileen Kennedy-Moore describes a familiar scene: “If you watch a group of boys playing outside, chances are, at some point, one boy is going to leap on top of another. There will be a lot of yelling and ferocious roars, but also lots of grins. Other boys will try to pull the first boy off or grab on, too, and they’ll all end up in a pile on the ground.”10 Her description echoes the description given by social scientists Evelyn Pitcher and Lynn Schultz while watching a typical group of four-year-old boys at play. They write, “One child pushes another back and forth in playful tussles, shouting ‘You’re my brother.’ They make machine-gun sounds and chase one another around with space guns and spray bottles. Boys put clay in one another’s hair, play puppet fighting, tickle and pretend to shoot one another, fall dead and roll on the floor. They slide from piles of books, fall over chairs, pretend to drink and eat fire.”11 One recognizes these observations as more than anecdotal—rather, typical—of any playspace with young boys.

For boys to thrive, we as educators and teachers must work with the nature of a boy. We must educate boys in ways that respect their natural needs as boys. Anthony Esolen, a prolific writer and Distinguished Professor of Literature at Thales College, sees the “difference between the behaviors of boys and girls […] as the natural expression of the forms of their bodies.”12 He continues, “The boys have more muscle mass and a higher metabolism; therefore they crave action, and they grow restive and irritable without it, just as a Border Collie in an apartment would.”13 I will quote Esolen here at length because his assessment of the situation is articulate and forceful:

The boys have muscles that are destined to grow stronger than their sisters’ muscles, but how do muscles grow strong? By exercise—in other words, by action. Think of football, or wrestling, or playing King of the Hill. Wherever you go in the world, you will find boys doing things that stress the muscles and bruise the bones. A boy who lifts weights is making tiny tears in his muscles—which actually build his muscle mass. Imagine a horde of boys whooping it up as they push one another out of their way up the hill, or pile one upon the other at the top—the sheer animal joy of it is impossible to miss. Why, left to their own devices, do girls not do the same? Because their bodies do not crave it. The needs of the body explain what is otherwise hard to understand, that it feels good not only to tackle your opponent in the open field, but to be tackled, to come down with force against the hard ground, and to get up and do the same all over again, and to feel the great satisfaction of sore muscles and sore bones at night, a good and satisfying tiredness, when sleep is like a big dinner after a hard day of work.14

Boys relish in the kind of play their bodies, including their brains, are made to enjoy. This play is often competitive in nature and involves much more frequent and rougher contact of their bodies with one another. 

Denying the Difference: Boys Falling Behind

Michael Reichert, a researcher, school psychologist, and author of How to Raise a Boy, has been amazed how school administrators often try to downplay the differences between boys and girls—even asking him to be “gender neutral” when he speaks to students. However, he writes, “Boys themselves are fervently insisting that parents recognize their true natures, that schools acknowledge their possibilities, and that communities celebrate their diversity.”15

Choosing not to recognize the differences between boys and girls has been harmful to the development and flourishing of both. A significant body of research shows that, in recent decades, boys, in particular, are falling behind in education in significant ways. According to Jonathan Haidt, a social scientist and author of The Anxious Generation, “at every level of education, from kindergarten through PhD, girls are leaving boys in the dust. Boys get lower grades, they have higher rates of ADHD, they are more likely to be unable to read, and they are less likely to graduate from high school, in part because they are three times as likely as girls to be expelled or suspended along the way.”16 Richard Reeves, President of the American Institute for Boys and Men, provides specific examples of ways in which schools are stifling boys’ development: “Schools are increasingly structured in ways that frustrate boys. We expect young children to sit still and be quiet—which is harder on boys. We cut back on physical activity and push academics to ever earlier grades, meaning that slower maturing boys start failing in school early. We have eliminated much of the hands-on learning opportunities, such as shop, that used to be standard.”17

Because of the sexual difference proper to human beings, girls and boys have different needs which must be met in order for them to thrive as girls and as boys. We educate not simply generic “children” but rather boys and girls. Study after study has demonstrated that boys bear the brunt of discipline in a co-ed school environment. A significant contributing factor to this disparity is that the normal behavior of boys is simply more physically engaging, more disruptive by nature, and perceived as more dangerous by those who are in charge of providing order and offering care for young boys. In mixed-sex classrooms especially, this presents unique challenges to teachers, especially those who have not been trained in the innate differences between boys and girls. In fact, an area that is gaining more attention is the possibility that boys may do better in single-sex learning environments.18 Regardless of whether such learning environments are possible or desirable, teachers can and must realize that the needs of boys and girls differ.  In order to help boys to thrive once again, there is a clear path forward. Based upon reliable evidence-based research and confirmed by our own practice and experience at The Heights, there are things that every family and every school can do to help boys to thrive and mature into healthy young men.

An Upside-Down Safety Net

Haidt makes the strong case that without a change of course, boys and girls will continue to suffer from an epidemic of anxiety and other mental health maladies brought about in large part by changes in home and school culture. He argues convincingly that “overprotection in the real world and underprotection in the virtual world—are the major reasons why children born after 1995 became the anxious generation.”19 According to Haidt, parents, teachers, and administrators have embraced a logic of “safetyism” which he defines as the “worship of ‘safety’ above all else.”20 A misguided desire to protect children from physical harm is causing grave psychological and social harm to both boys and girls. According to Haidt, this is primarily “because it makes it harder for children to learn to care for themselves and to deal with risk, conflict, and frustration.”21 Decisions based on “safetyism” have severely restricted activities in the “real world” while failing to realize the dangers of the online “virtual world.” (In fact, some of the draw of the virtual world for children is that it is the place of least supervision.22) “If we really want to keep our children safe,” Haidt writes, “we should delay their entry into the virtual world and send them out to play in the real world instead.”23 Safety is important, but decisions are being made which are akin to misunderstanding the direction of gravity; they hold the safety net above the child rather than below. Certainly there are dangers that can affront all of us in both the real and virtual worlds. It is becoming clear, as evidenced by Haidt’s research and reporting, that an attempt to protect children from physical harm is actually resulting in significant harm, in a deleterious retreat to the virtual world and in an undeveloped fragility within the real world. To fix the problem will require both greater vigilance to protect children from the dangers of the virtual world and greater confidence in the goodness of exposing children to the risks found in the real world.

Haidt defines the “real world” as involving relationships and social interactions that have four specific features. These features are that:

  1. they are embodied;
  2. they are synchronous, meaning that they are happening at the same time;
  3. they involve either one-to-one or one-to-several communication with only one interaction occurring at any one time; and
  4. they take place within communities in which people are naturally motivated to invest themselves in relationships and to work towards reconciliation when things go awry.24

Haidt identifies four foundational and absolutely necessary reforms indicated by his research in order for children to thrive in the age of social media and ubiquitous so-called smartphones.

  1. No smartphones before high school.
  2. No social media before 16.
  3. Phone-free schools.
  4. Far more unsupervised play and childhood independence.25

I am going to focus on the fourth of these foundations in relation to the nature of boys.

Giving Boys the Time, Place, and Space

“Nature answers all he asks;
Hand in hand with her he walks,
Face to face with her he talks,
Part and parcel of her joy,—
Blessings on the barefoot boy!”26

—from “The Barefoot Boy” by John Greenleaf Whittier

Boys can benefit tremendously by allowing them to play according to their nature and to play in nature. This kind of play is sometimes called “unstructured play,” play that is not organized by adults, play that comes naturally to young boys, whether invented or inherited. The kind of play boys engage in by nature is witnessed across cultures and times, a kind of play that contributes no less to their development than teaching boys to read and to write. Play “in nature” has been fittingly described as play in an “outdoor classroom.” By recognizing this kind of play as both natural and beneficial, parents and teachers can learn to see and affirm the good that is inherent in the nature of boys while coaching them in the exercise of their freedom.

Michael Gurian has spent decades studying the differences between how boys and girls learn based upon neurobiology and educational research.27 In his book Boys and Girls Learn Differently: A Guide for Teachers and Parents, he lays out a masterplan for helping both boys and girls to thrive. This includes the time, place, space, and freedom to play in an unstructured way. Over the last several decades, in direct contradiction to the needs of both boys and girls, many schools have eliminated or severely restricted the time, the space, and the freedom for outdoor and unstructured play, purportedly as they “strive to increase academic excellence.”28 According to Gurian, administrators and educators who curtail children’s access and time for outdoor play wrongly assume “that play and outdoor life do not markedly enhance academic skills.”29

Gurian is among a rising swell of voices calling for more outdoor play for children. In 2013, The American Academy for Pediatrics published a strong defense of outdoor and unstructured play: “Recess is unique from, and a complement to, physical education—not a substitute for it. The American Academy of Pediatrics believes that recess is a crucial and necessary component of a child’s development and, as such, it should not be withheld for punitive or academic reasons.”30 This statement emphasized the very need for such free time for children to adequately assimilate what they learn during indoor class time. The pediatricians stated, “Cognitive processing and academic performance depend on regular breaks from concentrated classroom work. This applies equally to adolescents and to younger children. To be effective, the frequency and duration of breaks should be sufficient to allow the student to mentally decompress.”31 Their complete policy statement from 2013 was reaffirmed once again ten years later in 2023. Boys and girls both use this unstructured time as an opportunity for social connection and integration, though as we have seen, boys’ connections and integrations are markedly physical. So, the elimination or safety-ist curtailing of unstructured play is detrimental to boys’ development in particular. 

The American Psychological Association has pointed out the urgency of the problems facing boys and has created a task force to identify evidence-based ways to help them to thrive.32 According to clinical psychologist Christopher Reigeluth, PhD, an assistant professor in the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Oregon Health and Science University and chair of APA’s Boys in School task force, one of the significant ways schools can help boys is by “building more breaks into the school day (…) including recess and movement-based learning in the classroom.”33 Boys, according to Gurian’s research, need movement to a much greater degree than girls. Boys need adequate time and space in which to move in order to learn. Gurian writes, “Boys tend to use up more space when they learn, especially at younger ages. (…) Boys tend to learn by using more physical space than girls do.”34 

Michael Gurian has written often about a boy’s need for space and movement. Boys have a need to spread out and learn in wide open spaces, both indoors and outdoors. Compared to girls, they occupy more space at a desk and command more space in an outdoor playground.35 Boys need movement in order to process feeling and thought. A boy’s own understanding of what is happening around him, his capacity to verbalize his experiences, and the processing of what he feels is facilitated in and through movement. According to Gurian, “engaging the whole body in the task of emotional processing seems to enhance neurotransmission to limbic (emotive) and left-brain (verbal) areas.”36 Gurian says that when we see “boys punching a bag or doing karate or riding their bikes fast through the bike trails when they are angry, sad, or frustrated, we are seeing this theory in practice.”37

The outdoor classroom includes “grounds, garden, play area, and other nature areas.”38 According to Gurian, the outdoor classroom is necessary for a boy’s optimal neurological development, especially in regard to the needs of the right hemisphere of the brain. The brain is divided into two hemispheres, and boys in particular have a greater need for the time and recreation which allows for communication between the hemispheres as well as for the time and space to develop the right hemisphere outside of the structured indoor classroom. As Gurian relates, while the left hemisphere is primarily involved with verbal processing, the right hemisphere is where spatial skills and knowledge is assimilated and processed. A boy’s education must give ample time to the development of his whole brain, left and right hemispheres together. Brain development occurs first and most rapidly in the right hemisphere then gradually shifts to the left. For boys, the shift takes longer than for girls.39 This is a natural shift which cannot be short-circuited or engineered. Gurian writes, “Because the outdoor natural environment is open (not boxed in like a classroom), it also affords more space for physical movement, which in turn develops the brain. Again, for boys this becomes especially important because of their emphasis on the right hemisphere, and thus their natural need for space area in work and play.”40 Giving the right hemisphere of the brain time and space to grow can help boys at every stage of their development. It is important to continue to give older boys adequate outside time even as they grow into young adults. “As the brain develops,” Gurian writes, “especially until just before puberty, it develops sensory functions constantly. For instance, a seven-year-old might be observed smelling a rose in a way that an adolescent or adult might not; the seven-year-old is building the cell patterns, tissue, and neurotransmission throughout the brain that the adolescent and adult will rely on throughout life for patterning smells. The garden is very much the brain’s classroom.”41

Jonathan Haidt advocates for three ways that we can improve children’s wellbeing through outdoor play. The first is to simply give children more time to play outdoors, before, during, and after school hours. The second is by improving the spaces where children play. An aspect of this improvement is to work towards providing environments that are more natural and less structured. The character of the outdoor place itself which is used for recreation and play has been greatly impoverished in many schools. In many cases, it has been restricted to playgrounds with manmade equipment and shredded rubber tires used as “mulch,” the whole area designed to minimize the risk of physical injury. Such cramped, cushioned, and sterile environments, however, are not adequate for the flourishing of the imagination and an encounter with the natural world. 

As an alternative, Haidt writes about the “adventure playgrounds” pioneered by Europeans and designed for imaginative play.42 Adventure playgrounds feature “loose parts,” an idea advocated for and explained in detail by Rusty Keeler in his book Adventures in Risky Play.43 These are everything from classic playthings to repurposed materials that are unattached and uninstalled. They can be picked up, moved, and reconfigured endlessly. Another aspect is that adventure playgrounds have access to natural spaces which use “wood, stone, and water to create environments that cultivate the natural love all children have for life and living things.”44 Haidt writes, “When you put children into natural settings, they instinctively explore and spontaneously invent games. Abundant research shows that time in natural settings benefits children’s social, cognitive, and emotional development.”45 Haidt provides a number of ideas for schools in the section “Better Recess and Playgrounds.”46 According to Haidt, the third way to improve children’s wellbeing through free play is “to reduce rules and increase trust.”47 This is where a broader conception of the freedom of the child comes into play.

Cultivating Freedom: Observe More; Intervene Less

Haidt recounts a remarkable study which demonstrates the counterintuitive changes that can occur when children are given the freedom to become responsible for themselves. A school in New Zealand, Swanson Primary School, took part in a study to see what would happen if children were given opportunities for “risk and challenge” during recess. Under the leadership of the school principal, Bruce McLachlan, the school made the bold decision to strip away all the rules. Whereas before students had been explicitly forbidden to do anything associated with risk, these students became free to work out their own boundaries in self-directed and responsible ways. Haidt relates what happened on their playground: “More chaos, more activity, more pushing, more shoving on the playground, and also more happiness and more physical safety. Rates of injury, vandalism, and bullying all declined.”48 This finding is counterintuitive to an ideology of safetyism. Stripping away externally imposed rules does not lead to anarchy but rather to the discovery of freedom and to the laws written on the human heart, what moral theologians call the natural law, the first precept of which is to do and pursue good and avoid evil. Although there will be mishaps and times when intervention by a responsible adult will be necessary, allowing children to figure out the “laws” of play on their own can contribute substantially to their development as persons in a world of other persons and in a world of real things. Matthew Crawford, in his book The World Beyond Your Head, writes about how the attention given to a particular task allows for our freedom to be activated in obedience to the world, such that our action fits within this world. The world that we are talking about in this essay is the world of play. Crawford writes, “Attention is at the core of this constitutive or formative process. When we become competent in some particular field of practice, our perception is disciplined by that practice; we become attuned to pertinent features of a situation that would be invisible to a bystander. Through the exercise of a skill, the self that acts in the world takes on a definite shape. It comes to be in a relation of fit to a world it has grasped.”49 Children learning to play can be clumsy at it, but it is in their interest to figure out how to engage in this world without the constant intervention and direction of well-meaning bystanders. 

When we raise boys, we are striving to raise them to become men who will be “dangerously good.”50 We want them to grow into the kind of men who will find it within themselves to know what is the right thing to do and to have the courage and the grit to get it done. We want them to grow into men who relish the challenge of work and the joy of a day’s work well done for one’s family and the larger society. We want to raise men who will give themselves generously in the daily tasks of a life well-lived. Researchers are showing us that policies which strive to help boys thrive by pushing play to the peripheries and emphasizing academic rigor at earlier and earlier ages actually risk harming generations of boys. It is in large part through child-led play that a boy’s character is formed. Harris relates the following story in her book The Nurture Assumption which illustrates just how powerful this kind of play is for the raising of boys into men: “The Duke of Wellington, in explaining his victory over Napoleon at Waterloo, said that the battle was won ‘on the playing fields of Eton.’ That was where the character of the British officer was formed: on the playing fields of Eton. Not in the classrooms but on the playing fields—the places where boys play together with a minimum of supervision from their teachers.”51 If we want to raise boys who have the mettle to take on the world and to be fully alive, we must prioritize the time, space, and freedom for boys to play in ways that respect their nature.

Both boys and girls need not only the time and the space but also the freedom to play according to their nature. According to Jonathan Haidt, “Physical play, outdoors and with other children of mixed ages, is the healthiest, most natural, most beneficial sort of play. Play with some degree of physical risk is essential because it teaches children how to look after themselves and each other.”52 Gurian highlights how this kind of play prepares children for situations which they can neither anticipate nor control. “Play that goes on outside and in nature usually involves a complex near-chaos of social relations. That each child must manage the constant possibility of random experience is also good for the developing brain; it further involves neural challenges regarding how hierarchies work, and how the limbic system should accept or reject certain emotional impulses, ranging from anger to joy. It provides all this in a few minutes of concentrated experience.”53 According to Haidt, this is what our boys need, especially in the face of the current epidemic of anxiety: “By building physical, psychological, and social competence, it gives kids confidence that they can face new situations, which is an inoculation against anxiety.”54 He goes on, “It is in unsupervised, child-led play where children best learn to tolerate bruises, handle their emotions, read other children’s emotions, take turns, resolve conflicts, and play fair.”55 Even when children’s play must be supervised, there are ways of ensuring that this supervision gives boys the opportunity to work things out on their own. A good rule of thumb would be to observe more and intervene less. For example, there are times when boys will ask a teacher to referee a game during recess. It may seem like a generous and responsible thing to do, but in many cases it would be in the boys’ interest to allow them to referee their own games during free play. Likewise, when conflicts arise, it is often in their interest to coach the boys on how to seek resolution rather than doing the work for them.

The kind of play that comes naturally to boys doesn’t need to be taught, although the specific contours of its rules may be socialized from older boys to younger ones. Boys who have been constrained and institutionalized may have difficulty acting according to this nature, like a plant confined to too small a container. The brain of a boy so constrained will need time to grow into the new space and freedom just as the roots of a tree, once constrained to the nursery pot, need time and freedom to grow into the rich soil of good earth. Thus, it will be necessary to be patient with boys who have never experienced this kind of play and this kind of freedom. There may be mishaps along the way and some boundaries and rules may have to be given within which boys can exercise the freedom proper to their age and maturity. For those who educate and care for boys, it is necessary to consider and appreciate the nature of boys’ play as something not merely tolerable but good. 

The behavior of boys among one another, which often involves bumping into one another, wrestling, competing, and playing “fort wars” may, in fact, be understood as a form of nurturance in its own right. Such is the claim of the researcher Michael Gurian.56 He encourages teachers and parents to look upon the competitive forms of play towards which boys naturally gravitate as not only tolerable but actually desirable forms of peer-to-peer instruction. This kind of play is often interpreted by well-meaning adults as violent or aggressive (with a negative connotation) but its aim is not to cause harm or to destroy. Only if it crosses the line towards harm or destruction can it rightfully be called violence and not nurturance. Gurian wants us to see this behavior as a healthy and natural means whereby boys build one another up for life in a world in which they will need strength to stand on their own two feet physically, emotionally, and morally. Boys who engage in rough and tumble play are actually preparing each other for the challenges that lie ahead. When left to work things out on their own, most play among boys—even most roughhousing—is well regulated. In her 1998 book, Two Sexes: Growing Up Apart, Coming Together, Eleanor E. Maccoby wrote, “Enjoyable play of these kinds occurs far more frequently than aggression among boys. They seem to be trying out each other’s strength and toughness, without letting the situation escalate into serious confrontation.”57 Researchers have found that among elementary school boys, rough play developed into a true fight only about one percent of the time.58 They have found that roughly 60 percent of boys engage in “play fighting” spontaneously. Surprisingly, researchers also found that this only comprises about a tenth of their free time.59 Studies have also shown that about 40 percent of boys who don’t prefer “play fighting,” though they may engage in it for the sake of camaraderie with their peers. Boys will naturally engage in the kind of unstructured play that they enjoy. 

For those unfamiliar with or uncomfortable with the physical nature of how many boys naturally play, intervention by parental and educational authorities often comes too soon and too often. Boys hear the words “no” and “stop doing that” far more often than girls. Kennedy-Moore provides a helpful means of distinguishing between pretend and real fighting among boys. She writes, “In rough play, kids are smiling and having a good time; in real fights they’re angry or crying. In rough play, kids take turns ‘attacking’ and being ‘attacked’ and they’re careful not to push or hit too hard. In real fights, the kids are trying to hurt each other. Rough play often involves a whole group of kids, and they continue playing together happily afterwards. Real fights usually involve only two kids, and they don’t want to be together afterwards.”60 Gurian has also proposed a helpful paradigm for educators and parents to understand and accept what boys are doing when they engage in the kinds of physical play that can be easily misinterpreted. He makes the distinction between what he calls “aggression nurturance” and “violence.”61 Gurian writes, “Aggression nurturance is the term I use for nurturance that involves aggression activities, such as aggressive physical touch, competitive games, and aggressive nonverbal gestures.”62

Kennedy-Moore’s description of pretend play aligns with Gurian’s description of the positive behavior of nurturance among boys. Likewise, her description of real fighting aligns with Gurian’s idea of violent activity which, by definition, intends to harm or destroy. What boys are doing when they play-fight, tackle one another, and bump into one another, is not usually violent in nature although it can, according to Gurian, appear aggressive, especially to the outside observer. What are boys doing through this kind of activity? According to Gurian, “They are building strength, focus, attentiveness, and hierarchy through these actions.”63

Some parents and educators can find the rough and seemingly aggressive nature of boys’ play uncomfortable and unsettling. What follows is in no way an apology for violent behavior. Rather, we begin with an observation and an affirmation of a boy’s thirst for play which at times becomes rough and physical. It is behavior which is most likely to be observed outdoors, when boys play together on playgrounds or while traipsing through the woods (or the neighborhood) together. It is a kind of play that makes many parents and teachers jump immediately to intervene, impose rules, and set limits in an attempt to not only mitigate but utterly eliminate the possibility of even the slightest danger. This is true to such a degree that many school districts have dramatically restricted or eliminated outdoor recess. According to Haidt, beginning in the 1980s, specifically in the United States, the UK, and Canada, “Many parents and schools banned activities that they perceived as having any risk, not just of physical injury, but of emotional pain as well. Safetyism requires banning most independent activity during childhood, especially outdoor activities (such as playing touch football without an adult referee) because such activities could lead to bruised bodies and bruised feelings.”64

Free play is key to providing both boys and girls with the conditions necessary to develop and thrive. According to Haidt, “A key feature of free play is that mistakes are generally not very costly. Everyone is clumsy at first, and everyone makes mistakes every day. Gradually, from trial and error, and with direct feedback from playmates, elementary school students become ready to take on the greater social complexity of middle school. It’s not homework that gets them ready, nor is it classes on handling their emotions. Such adult-led lessons may provide useful information, but information doesn’t do much to shape a developing brain. Play does.”65 Haidt refers to the work of Peter Gray, a developmental psychologist, who defines free play as “activity that is freely chosen and directed by the participants and undertaken for its own sake, not consciously pursued to achieve ends that are distinct from the activity itself.”66

In the Valley

“Cheerily, then, my little man,
Live and laugh, as boyhood can!
Though the flinty slopes be hard,
Stubble-speared the new-mown sward,
Every morn shall lead thee through
Fresh baptisms of the dew;
Every evening from thy feet
Shall the cool wind kiss the heat[.]”67

—from “The Barefoot Boy” by John Greenleaf Whittier

Every year in the Valley, that beloved area of our campus where the Heights lower school is located, a new cohort of third grade boys enter into an environment intentionally free of typical playground programming and manmade play equipment. It is a literal, though miniature, valley, surveyable from the rim on which our log cabin-style classrooms sit, and descending by slopes, some steep and some gradual, into a dirt-and-grass open space surrounded by trees. There is no blacktop or concrete in our beloved Valley, with the exception of a walkway which leads to the cabins. There is grass, mud, water, and mulch. There are sticks, logs, and trees. There is sun, and there is shade. Sometimes there is snow, and, yes, the boys throw snowballs at one another. The boys are free to climb on any limb thicker than their thigh. At some point not far into the academic year, the boys build forts and work with all their might to defend them from marauding classmates. When not building and defending forts, the boys enter into a variety of boy-initiated games and imaginative play. Many of their games involve a great deal of physical exertion and physical contact. One favorite is tackle football. And one of the first lessons that boys receive when they enter the Valley, whether as a third, fourth, or fifth grader, is how to tackle another boy in a safe and effective manner. These lessons are teacher-led. By showing boys how to tackle each other in ways that minimize the risk of injury, and by giving every one of them ample time to practice these techniques, the boys are able to play more freely and injuries become far less common. Even boys who have never played American football smile with delight as they practice tackling and being tackled by their new friends. There is something quintessentially boyish and wholesome about the whole experience of learning how to tackle one another, especially for those boys coming from schools in which such physical play was banned or greatly restricted. The lesson and the opportunity to practice tackling and being tackled unleashes a joy and new confidence in the boys, some of whom have never been given the freedom to engage in such boyish joviality. “Yes, go ahead and tackle your friend,” is not something commonly heard on most modern playgrounds. Young boys at The Heights are free to roam and stake out claims on their own portion of the Valley, venture through the trees, or play a team game of their choosing and their own spontaneous organization on the mulch. It’s truly a boys’ haven. 

The genius of the Valley is the integration of the outdoors and the indoors as places where boys can be taught in an environment in tune with their nature where they are seen by teachers who view their activities with delight and affirmation. Rather than merely putting up or “managing” the natural behavior of boys, our work in the Valley is to facilitate the unfolding of their nature in light of the truth of the human person created in freedom, by freedom, and for freedom.68 With our boys in the Valley, during their play, there is no adult hovering over them to direct or police their every move. While the boys are watched and seen by seasoned teachers, we rarely have to intervene to redirect their play. When necessary, teachers coach the boys towards what is appropriate and away from harmful behavior. The boys also learn from the older boys in the Valley who are their seniors and their guides. The teachers in the Valley are men who remember what it was like to be a boy. Teachers are not looking for opportunities to intervene unnecessarily; on the contrary, our teachers will occasionally join the boys in their games. In this environment, boys experience themselves as free and learn to grow into their freedom. The same love for freedom characterizes our approach to teaching in the middle school and the upper school. 

An aspect of our outdoor environment in the Valley is the freedom that it affords for boys to play physically with one another, to test their strength, and to push their limits. The environment itself allows for the boys to experience themselves as free, and, in this freedom, they do what young boys will do. These boys are learning about themselves and about the world in which they live. If you spend time watching boys at play in such an environment, it will not take long to observe them piling on one another in some way. Boys organize themselves into teams, naturally. And they organize their own games, arbitrating their own rules. What is seen among boys left free to be boys is a tremendous amount of physical contact which places the strength of one boy or one group of boys against another group of boys. This involves a great deal of rolling, tumbling, tackling, wrestling, building, disassembling, running, chasing, defending, and conquering.

Beyond the Valley

Of course, not every school will be able to create the exact conditions of the Valley. But no matter the circumstances or the place, there are things that can be done to ensure that boys and girls have the time, the space, the place, and the freedom for child-led play. Sometimes this may require excursions to local parks. It may require purchasing nearby plots of land or putting the resources into cleaning up an abandoned lot so that it can be transformed into a play area suitable for child-led play. For boys this will most definitely include a suitable space and the natural resources necessary for the building of forts and the observation of the bits of the natural world that show themselves season by season. We hope that our experience with boys in such an environment will encourage other schools, school boards, and administrators to prioritize the outdoor play that comes naturally to boys as a routine part of their curriculum, especially at the younger ages but also continuing into high school.

In order to thrive, boys need teachers and parents to give them the freedom to act out their natural need for physical contact with one another. It may take time, but with a greater understanding of both the nature of these forms of play and the benefits that they afford, it is our hope that more educators will delight in the manifold unique and delightful expression that boys give to the ideal of the “man fully alive,”69 prioritizing both the outdoor classroom and the freedom to let boys be boys. 

References

  1. John Greenleaf Whittier, “The Barefoot Boy,” 1855.
  2. Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, Communion and Stewardship: Human Persons Created in the Image of God, July 23, 2004, n. 33.
  3. For a review of such studies, see Ivan Szadvári, Daniela Ostatníková, Jaroslava Babková Durdiaková, “Sex differences matter: Males and females are equal but not the same,” Physiology & Behavior, Volume 259, 2023. For a review of Louann Brizendine’s work on the male brain, see Joseph Lanzilotti, “What Parents and Teachers Need to Know about the Male Brain,” Heights Forum, May 3, 2025.
  4. Pope St. Paul VI, Pope St. John Paul II, and Pope Benedict XVI all used this term to describe the Church’s contribution to society. Paul VI spoke of it most notably in an address to the United Nations in 1965. John Paul II did so in his encyclical Solicitudo Rei Socialis in 1987. John Paul II continued to frequently employ this language. The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church adopts this language as well.
  5. G. K. Chesterton, “Concerning Those Who ‘Cannot See the Difference,’” The Chesterton Review, Volume 23, Issue 4 (November 1997), 407-411. Chesterton goes on: “Now, there are really interesting differences between angels and women; nay, even between men and beasts, and all such things. They are differences which most people know instinctively, as most people know a cow is not a horse without looking for its mane; or most people know a horse is not a cow without looking for horns. Whether the difference ought to count in this or that important question is a completely different matter, but it ought not really to be so difficult simply to see the difference.”
  6. Judith Harris, The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do (New York: Free Press, 1998), 209-210.
  7. Harris, 211-212.
  8. Louann Brizendine, The Male Brain: A Breakthrough Understanding of How Men and Boys Think, (New York: Harmony Books, 2010), 33.
  9. Evelyn Pitcher and Lynn Hickey Schultz, Boys and Girls at Play: The Development of Sex Roles, (Praeger Press, 1983), 59, quoted in Eleanor E. Maccoby, The Two Sexes, (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1998), 34.
  10. Eileen Kennedy-Moore, “Do Boys Need Rough and Tumble Play?,” Psychology Today, June 30, 2015.
  11. Pitcher and Schultz, Boys and Girls at Play.
  12. Anthony Esolen, No Apologies: Why Civilization Depends on the Strength of Men (Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway, 2022), 10.
  13. Esolen, 10.
  14. Esolen, 10.
  15. Michael C. Reichert, How to Raise a Boy: The Power of Connection to Build Good Men (New York: Tarcher Penguin Randomhouse, 2019), 252.
  16. Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (New York: Penguin Randomhouse, 2025), 177.
  17. Richard Reeves, “The Boys Feminism Left Behind,” The Free Press, October 22, 2022.
  18. Alvaro de Vicente, “A New Case for All-Boys Education,” The Hill, April 14, 2025. Our headmaster at The Heights recently published this piece in an effort to reopen the public discussion about the benefits of the all-boys school option.
  19. Haidt, 9.
  20. Haidt, 94.
  21. Haidt, 94.
  22. Lenore Skenazy, Zach Rausch, and Jonathan Haidt, “What Kids Told Us About How to Get Them Off Their Phones,” The Atlantic, August 4, 2025.
  23. Haidt, 68.
  24. Haidt, 68.
  25. Haidt, 15.
  26. John Greenleaf Whittier, “The Barefoot Boy,” 1855.
  27. Gurian holds an honorary doctorate of letters from his alma mater, Gonzaga University, to acknowledge his contributions in applying the neuroscience of boys and girls toward education. His organization, The Gurian Institute, founded in the 1990s, has helped to educate over 60,000 educators and over 2,000 schools and school districts across the globe. The focus of The Gurian Institute has been to teach teachers about the differences between boys and girls and how these differences ought to inform the ways and the environments in which boys and girls are taught.
  28. Michael Gurian, Boys and Girls Learn Differently! A Guide for Teachers and Parents (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2010), 139.
  29. Gurian, 139.
  30. The American Academy of Pediatrics, “The Crucial Role of Recess in School,” Policy Statement, January 1, 2013.
  31. AAP, “The Crucial Role of Recess.”
  32. Cf. Zara Abrams, “Boys are facing key challenges in school. Inside the effort to support their success,” Monitor on Psychology, 1, April-May 2023.
  33. Abrams, “Boys are facing key challenges.”
  34. Gurian, 47.
  35. Cf. Gurian, 47.
  36. Gurian, 154.
  37. Gurian, 154.
  38. Gurian, 101.
  39. Cf. Gurian, 26.
  40. Gurian, 141.
  41. Gurian, 140-141.
  42. Cf. Haidt, 258-260.
  43. Cf. Rusty Keeler, Adventures in Risky Play (Lincoln, Nebraska: Exchange Press, 2020).
  44. Cf. Haidt, 260.
  45. Haidt, 260. Haidt provides a number of ideas for schools in the section “Better Recess and Playgrounds,” 256-262.
  46. Cf. Haidt, 256-262.
  47. Haidt, 261.
  48. Haidt, 261.
  49. Matthew B. Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2016), 25.
  50. Cf. Alvaro de Vicente, “The Culture of The Heights: On Our Mission,” HeightsCast, October 27, 2022.
  51. Harris, 190.
  52. Harris, 52.
  53. Gurian, 141.
  54. Haidt, 68.
  55. Haidt, 53.
  56. Gurian, 95. Gurian gives it the name “aggression nurturance.”
  57. Eleanor E. Maccoby, The Two Sexes: Growing Up Apart, Coming Together (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1998), 34.
  58. Peter K. Smith, Children and Play (Malden, Massachusetts: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 111.
  59. Kennedy-Moore, “Do Boys Need Rough and Tumble Play?”; Cf. K. Conner, “Aggression: Is in the eye of the beholder?” in Play & Culture vol. 2 (1989), 213–217; Douglas Fry, “Rough and tumble social play in humans,” in The Nature of Play, ed. Anthony D. Pellegrini and Peter K. Smith (2005), 54-85; and Peter K. Smith, “Chapter 6: Physical Activity Play: Exercise Play and Rough-and-Tumble,” in Children and Play (2009).
  60. Kennedy-Moore, “Do Boys Need Rough and Tumble Play?.”
  61. Cf. Gurian, 95-97.
  62. Gurian, 95.
  63. Gurian, 95.
  64. Haidt, 98.
  65. Haidt, 53.
  66. Peter Gray, “The Decline of Play and the Rise of Psychopathology in Children and Adolescents,” American Journal of Play, vol. 3, 4 (2011), 444.
  67. John Greenleaf Whittier, “The Barefoot Boy,” 1855.
  68. For a more in-depth discussion of our understanding of freedom as distinct from mere license here at The Heights, cf. Andrew Reed, “Why Boys Need to Be Given Freedom,” The Heights Forum, April 25, 2018.
  69. Cf. Alvaro de Vicente, “The Man Fully Alive: On our Vision,” HeightsCast, October 20, 2022.

About the Author

Dr. Joseph Lanzilotti

Research Fellow

Dr. Joseph Lanzilotti joined The Heights School faculty in 2022. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Biology with a second major in Philosophy from DeSales University, a Master of Arts degree in Theology from Ave Maria University, and a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) degree in Theology from the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family. Having grown up in rural New Jersey, Dr. Lanzilotti developed a great love for the natural world. He is a beekeeper and gardener. He enjoys trail running, swimming, and skiing. Joseph and his wife, Caeli, have a two-year-old son. They reside in Reston, VA.

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