When Schools Teach Children to Dislike Boys

How healthy male traits get recoded as disruption—and how teachers may help turn classmates against playful boys

There is a painful possibility that few people want to consider.

What if many boys are not failing school?

What if school is failing boys?

Not because boys cannot learn. Not because boys are less capable. Not because boys are defective.

But because many of the traits most natural to boys are now viewed through a lens of suspicion.

Energy becomes hyperactivity.
Rough play becomes aggression.
Humor becomes immaturity.
Nonconformity becomes pathology.
Spontaneity becomes disruption.

In other words, healthy boyhood is increasingly being interpreted as a problem.

And once that happens, boys do not simply get corrected more often. They get socially downgraded. Their standing falls. Their confidence falls. Their sense of belonging falls. And, as some research suggests, adults may even help teach other children to see them negatively.

That is a very serious matter.

The deeper issue is not just schools. It is culture.

Schools do not invent these attitudes out of thin air. They reflect the broader culture. And for many years now, masculinity itself has been treated as suspect.

Male energy is often spoken of as dangerous.
Male aggression is discussed as if it has no healthy form.
Male spaces have steadily disappeared or been delegitimized.
Fatherhood has been culturally minimized.
Normal male assertiveness is frequently recast as toxicity.

When a culture repeatedly sends the message that masculinity is something to fear, schools absorb that message too.

So when boys show up as boys—active, physical, funny, impulsive, competitive, loud, resistant to passivity—they are not always seen as healthy male children in need of guidance.

Too often, they are seen as little problems to be managed.

Boys are often at a disadvantage before the lesson even begins

The research here is striking.

A broad review of teacher-student relationship studies found that teachers report more conflict with boys than with girls, and that female teachers report less closeness with boys than with girls. That means many boys are entering school environments in which they are more likely to experience friction and less likely to experience warmth. (pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)

Another study looking at kindergarten and first grade found that girls experienced more teacher closeness than boys across both school years, while boys with disruptive behavior tended to experience more conflict with teachers than comparable girls. (sciencedirect.com)

That should have set off alarm bells.

Imagine the public reaction if the research had shown that teachers consistently felt closer to boys and more distant from girls. There would have been outrage. But when boys are the ones receiving less closeness and more conflict, the culture mostly shrugs.

The traits many teachers prefer do not sound much like boys

One older but revealing line of research found that teachers tended to prefer students who were described as rigid, conforming, orderly, dependent, passive, and acquiescent. (https://www.jstor.org/stable/20151346)

That list is worth pausing over.

Rigid.
Conforming.
Orderly.
Dependent.
Passive.
Acquiescent.

That is not a portrait of lively development. It is a portrait of easy classroom management.

And it does not sound much like the average healthy boy.

Many boys are more physically restless, more impulsive, more rough-and-tumble, less naturally compliant, and more likely to regulate themselves through movement and action. That does not make them broken. It makes them boys. But if the school environment quietly rewards passivity above vitality, then many boys will end up being treated as if their very nature is inconvenient.

The playful boys study should have changed this conversation

One of the most revealing studies on this issue looked at children identified as especially playful.

These children were not mean, antisocial, or emotionally disturbed. They were marked by five very positive qualities: physical spontaneity, social fluidity, cognitive spontaneity, manifest joy, and a sense of humor. In plain language, they were energetic, socially fluid, imaginative, enthusiastic kids who enjoyed laughing and could take a joke. (frontiersin.org)

And here is what makes the findings so important: other children generally liked these playful kids. They were seen as popular. They were preferred playmates. Their peers did not initially experience them as disruptive or problematic. (frontiersin.org)

There were also equal numbers of playful girls and playful boys.

That matters.

It means the later negative reaction cannot simply be explained by “playfulness” alone. There were playful girls too.

But the teachers did not respond to the boys and girls in the same way.

The playful boys were the ones increasingly seen as disruptive. The playful boys were the ones who acquired the “class clown” label. The playful girls did not receive the same negative response, even though they were equally playful. (frontiersin.org)

That is one of the most important parts of this research because it makes the double standard harder to deny.

The issue was not merely playful behavior.

The issue was playful boys.

The word the researchers used was “antipathy”

The researchers did not use mild language.

They wrote that “one of the most significant discoveries of the study was the antipathy held by teachers for playful boys from the earliest primary grade.” (frontiersin.org)

Antipathy means a deep-seated dislike or aversion.

That is a stunning word to find in research about young boys who were characterized by joy, humor, spontaneity, imagination, and social vitality.

Other children liked them.

The ​teachers often did not.

That should trouble anyone who cares about children.

Because once an adult repeatedly communicates irritation, contempt, or aversion toward a child, the issue is no longer simple discipline. The adult is helping define that child socially. The child begins to feel it. Other children begin to absorb it. A reputation forms. A role gets assigned.

This boy is fun.
This boy is too much.
This boy is a nuisance.
This boy is the problem.

That is how shame begins.

What happened by third grade is chilling

The most disturbing finding came next.

In first and second grade, the playful children were still generally seen positively by their peers. But by third grade, the playful boys experienced a dramatic reversal. The children began drawing a sharp distinction between playful boys and playful girls, and the playful boys came to be seen as the least preferred playmates and as having the lowest social status.

Think about how serious that is.

These boys had not suddenly become cruel.

They had not become dangerous.

They had not changed into bad children.

What changed was the way they were being seen.

And the researchers strongly suspected that teachers had helped cause that shift, directly and indirectly shaping both the boys’ self-perceptions and the perceptions of their classmates.

That means an adult’s bias may have helped take boys who were initially popular and turn them into social liabilities.

That is not a minor classroom issue.

That is the manufacturing of rejection.

This starts to look like relational aggression against boys

I have spent decades as a therapist, and emotionally abusive systems often work in a very particular way: they turn people against one another. They poison perceptions. They shape alliances. They quietly designate one person as the problem and then let the group do the rest.

When I read this research, I see something disturbingly similar.

Teachers do not have to announce their bias openly for children to absorb it. Children are exquisitely sensitive to adult cues. They notice who gets warmth, who gets annoyance, who gets repeated correction, ​who gets eye rolls, who gets labeled, who gets the benefit of the doubt, and who does not.

Over time, children learn how to rank each other accordingly.

So when a teacher repeatedly treats playful boys as irritating or disruptive, the other children are not blind to that. They learn from it. They internalize it. And in this case, they appear to have acted on it.

That is why this is so serious.

The boys were not merely disciplined.

They were socially reclassified.

Boys are too often being judged as defective girls

This is, in many ways, the heart of the problem.

Boys are often measured against a behavioral ideal that fits girls more comfortably, and then penalized when they do not match it.

Need for movement? Problem.
Need for rough play? Problem.
Less verbal style? Problem.
High energy? Problem.
Resistance to passive conformity? Problem.
Humor under pressure? Problem.

At some point we have to ask a basic question:

What if many boys being labeled are not disordered at all?

What if they are simply boys in an environment that has become increasingly unfriendly to boyhood?

That does not mean boys need no discipline. Of course they do. Boys need guidance, structure, accountability, and mentoring. They need adults who can shape their energy, not shame it.

But shaping is not the same as pathologizing.

And guidance is not the same as contempt.

Many men remember exactly when this began

I suspect many men reading this will recognize something here.

They can remember the moment when their energy stopped being seen as vitality and started being seen as trouble.

They can remember the feeling that the girls were “right” and they were “wrong.”

They can remember being funny one year and “disruptive” the next.

They can remember realizing that being a boy felt, somehow, politically incorrect.

A great many boys were not crushed by open cruelty.

They were crushed by chronic misreading.

And that may be one of the most damaging things schools do.

Because once a boy starts to believe that his natural way of being is unwelcome, he often begins to pull back from school, from learning, and sometimes even from himself.

We should stop asking what is wrong with boys and start asking what is wrong with the lens through which we view them

The real issue here is not whether boys need to grow up well. Of course they do.

The real issue is whether adults can still recognize healthy masculinity when they see it.

Can they recognize exuberance without calling it pathology?
Can they recognize roughness without calling it danger?
Can they recognize humor without calling it deviance?
Can they recognize a playful boy without turning him into a problem?

Until we can do that, boys will continue to pay the price for adult confusion.

And many already have.

Research

Barnett, L. A. (2018). The Education of Playful Boys: Class Clowns in the Classroom. This is the playful boys study, including the findings on teacher antipathy, the different treatment of playful boys and playful girls, and the reversal in peer attitudes by third grade. (frontiersin.org)

Spilt, J. L., Koomen, H. M. Y., & Jak, S. (2012). Are boys better off with male and girls with female teachers? This review found that teachers report more conflict with boys, and that female teachers report less closeness with boys than girls. (pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)

Horn, E. P., et al. (2021). Trajectories of teacher-child relationships across kindergarten and first grade. This study found girls experienced more closeness with teachers than boys across both school years. (sciencedirect.com)

Schlosser, L. (1980). Sex, Behavior, and Teacher Expectancies. This cites the teacher-preference traits: rigid, conforming, orderly, dependent, passive, and acquiescent. (jstor.org)

A note before the article:
Nick O’Hara has written something deeply painful, deeply human, and deeply important.

His essay is not simply the story of one father’s heartbreak. It is also a window into a much larger injustice that far too few people are willing to see, much less name. We hear constant discussion about “absent fathers,” but almost no discussion of fathers who are absent against their will—fathers who love their children, fight for them, and are still pushed out by systems that seem unable, or unwilling, to protect the father-child bond.

That is what makes this piece so powerful. Nick is writing from the raw center of his own experience, but he is also giving language to a reality that many men live in silence. His story is heartbreaking, but it is not merely personal. It raises urgent questions about parental equality, about the invisibility of fathers in family law and public discourse, and about the cost children pay when a loving parent is treated as expendable.

I am sharing this excerpt because I believe his voice deserves to be heard. The full piece is considerably longer, and I hope you will follow the link at the end to read the rest on Nick’s site and help bring more attention to his work.

If we are serious about justice, compassion, and the well-being of children, we must be willing to look at realities that make people uncomfortable. This is one of them.

Father Exclusion: The Invisible Injustice

The search for my abducted child reveals a wider silence on parental inequality

Nick O’Hara

Mar 02, 2026

 

Your children are not your children

They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself

They come through you but not from you,

And though they are with you yet they belong not to you

– Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

My son and I are strangers. He turns seven soon and I’ve never celebrated his birthday with him. I have never read him a bedtime story. I don’t know if he is safe. I don’t even know if he is alive. I am a father needlessly separated from my child, and society makes me invisible. After years of holding my tongue and getting nowhere, I feel compelled to convey what it is like to be completely excluded from your child’s life in a culture that leaves virtually no space for fathers in my position.

We often hear about absent fathers, but rarely about those who are absent against their will: men erased from their children’s lives without justification. I call this “father exclusion”. It’s a term I have coined because I can’t find any official language or descriptor for fathers in my position. Despite impacting many families, it barely registers in our public discourse. No data seems to be collected on father exclusion. No politicians seem interested in addressing it. No one even names the problem.

Father exclusion is not a fringe issue. It is extremely harmful to families and society; a systemic failure so pervasive it becomes invisible. We talk a great deal about irresponsible fathers, but what about those of us fighting with everything we have to be in our children’s lives, only to be systematically shut out? This silence is institutional, cultural and statistical. It has consequences: for children, for fathers like me, for our understanding of parenthood itself.

One goal in sharing my story is to advance a rationale argument in favour of gender equality in parenting, guided by the humanist case for balanced parental rights.

Western culture’s current obsession with “toxic masculinity” prefers to cast men as villains, leaving no room to acknowledge that fathers can be victims of discrimination, or that many are unjustifiably pushed out of their children’s lives. Many people take offence at the suggestion that father absence is detrimental to our children, despite the evidence that it is. So, any attempt to raise fathers’ rights is met with discomfort, defensiveness or even aggression: if it is acknowledged at all. For the main part, it is met with silence.

I know this silence intimately. It helps prevent my son from knowing my love.

When he drew his first breath in Brooklyn seven years ago, I was thousands of miles away in the United Kingdom, unaware of his arrival because his mother had cut off contact with me. What began as a conventional path to fatherhood – ultrasounds, excited plans of being present at the birth – unravelled into a nightmare. Every attempt since then to be part of my son’s life has been blocked, defied or ignored by his mother, enabled by systems that treat paternal bonds as optional, granted or withheld at the mother’s discretion.

I later discovered that my estranged wife had given our son different names to those we’d agreed upon. She omitted my name from his birth certificate and provided a false address to give the impression that she lived in New York; presumably in order to align with her falsified Medicaid forms. In fact, she is a citizen of Trinidad and Tobago and lives there with her two older children, whose father she also denies access.

Or at least, they did live in Trinidad. Almost three years ago, my son was abducted by his mother. To evade the increasing scrutiny of Trinidad and Tobago’s Family Court and Children’s Authority, she disappeared with all three children and is hiding somewhere in America. I do not know if they are safe, in good health or whether they attend school.

When I met my ex, in our initial interactions, she told me her first husband had abused her and their children, claiming serious offences. I felt sympathy and wanted to help. She said she reported each incident to the police, to create a record. Though to what end, I couldn’t figure out: she never wanted to take legal action, only to have a record of complaints.

Her story became increasingly inconsistent and I started noticing contradictions that grew more absurd. When I questioned her, she sometimes responded by suggesting that I was paranoid, other times she insisted I was losing my memory. It was only later that I recognised this as gaslighting.

While married and briefly living in Trinidad, it began to feel that she had only wanted me there so that I could support her and the kids while she continued not to work at all. However, tightening immigration restrictions meant that I couldn’t get a work permit and the strain on our relationship grew. Pregnant with our son, she cut off communication when I returned to the UK to work.

Since then, I’ve been trapped in a nightmare. Parenthood has been an illusory half-reality: I am legally a father but have never been allowed to be one. Despite my indefatigable efforts, I have met my son just twice; his mother has blocked all other access in defiance of multiple court orders. I could detail here a long list of her heartbreaking breaches, but nobody would want to read it.

Life as an excluded father is utterly lonely. I feel cast adrift, like an inconvenience nobody cares about.

With court proceedings stalled by my ex’s disappearance, I have spent two years pursuing an application under the Hague Convention on International Child Abduction. I receive email updates mentioning INTERPOL and U.S. authorities’ efforts to locate my son. The situation is surreal. There are days when it feels less like my life and more like a documentary film that I never agreed to star in. I have needed to write about it to help me survive it, to produce a memoir I might someday share to help others enduring similar ordeals.

My story is highly personal; the international dimension somewhat unusual. However, my general experience is not unique. It reflects a deeper truth: we simply do not value fatherhood highly enough. We are far more comfortable accusing men of abandonment than confronting how and why institutions push them out.

It needn’t be this way. We can acknowledge this systemic exclusion while rejecting the false binary that caring about fathers must come at the expense of mothers. Justice does not require us to diminish one parent in order to elevate the other. Instead, recognising and supporting the vital roles of both mothers and fathers, on equal terms, is how we can best serve the interests of our children. Persistently favouring one parent over the other – as we currently do – undermines not only parental equality, but the well-being of children and the moral coherence of society.

My son was abducted and taken to the U.S. in breach of a court order prohibiting his removal from Trinidad and Tobago. Like the others, the order proved meaningless. Indeed, every directive issued by the court has been breached or ignored by my ex without consequence.

My ex is legally aided, so there is no financial deterrent to obstruction. Three different legal aid-appointed attorneys withdrew their representation of her after realising she was misleading the court. None of this resulted in sanctions; just stronger orders that my ex ignores. She has, effectively, been able to act with impunity.

She has also prevented my son’s siblings – my stepchildren – from seeing their own father since they were infants. Unwittingly, the children’s experience contributes to the often-racist stereotype of Caribbean father absenteeism. But their respective fathers are not absent: we are excluded.

 

Despite being represented by one of Trinidad and Tobago’s leading family lawyers (who sadly passed away suddenly last summer), I have felt utterly powerless. Court interventions have been too slow, enforcement mechanisms too weak or non-existent. In the initial years of my matter, the institutional indifference was astonishing. Even evidence of my ex preventing her older children from seeing their father – a relevant pattern of behaviour, one would think – could not be considered, due to family court evidentiary rules. Eventually the authorities did seem to realise what they were dealing with. But by then it was too late, my ex had disappeared with my son.

In fairness, the judge’s hands are tied by inadequate enforcement powers. The court knows that my son is being deliberately repelled from access to his father, without justification. It just isn’t able to actually do much about it. The system appears designed to make fathers give up.

With the disappearance, my attorney advised me to pursue the Hague Convention process. At first, it seemed promising: we received confirmation that my son had been taken to America. He was even, seemingly, located by U.S. authorities, only to vanish again. With the Hague application drawing blanks and family court proceedings stalled, I find myself back where I began. I am sharing my story in the hope that someone, somehow, might help locate my child.

 

Please share this essay with anyone who might be able to help me locate my child

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The wider narrative of absentee fathers is well-known, but how accurate is it? In the United States, more than one in four children live without a father in the home. This is also the generally accepted proportion for the UK, though my own crude maths suggests that it could be higher, with nearly 40 percent of households with dependent children being single-parent families (3.2 million out of the 8.2 million total). Data from the Office for National Statistics show 85 percent of those are headed by mothers (child custody data reporting has it higher, at 89 percent). Statistics for Trinidad and Tobago are harder to obtain, but anyone will tell you the situation is likely similar to the U.S. and UK.

How many of these fathers are missing by choice versus how many, like me, are deliberately excluded? We don’t know the answer, because – and this is a point worth emphasising – nobody publishes that data. There is no government task force. No politicians introducing parental equality legislation. No newspaper headlines.

It’s easier to frame us as absent, easier to perpetuate the ‘irresponsible father’ trope than confront the reality of father exclusion. Doing so would entail acknowledging that men face systemic discrimination in family courts and are relegated to second-class parental status. It’s easier for society not to care.

 

For the sake of our children, we should care. Active father engagement results in improved child outcomes. In 2016 the UK Department for Work and Pensions hosted a Father Engagement Seminar, which concluded that children with highly involved fathers have greater self-esteem, perform better at school and have fewer behavioural problems.

Conversely, growing up fatherless is highly detrimental to children and society. Children from fatherless homes are exponentially more likely to run away, die from suicide, suffer with substance abuse, become teenage mothers, have behavioural disorders, be sent to prison ... the list goes on. The fact that we have to go back a decade to find such a level of attention (in the UK) to the issue tells its own story.

When I share this information, people often react defensively. One American acquaintance, raised by a single parent, accused me of “blaming single mothers” before I could explain that I, too, grew up in single-parent households (with both my mother and father at different points), and that I was not making a political argument. But I had offended his sensibilities; he wasn’t prepared to even momentarily consider an alternative perspective.

What puzzles me is why acknowledging evidence of poorer average outcomes for children in father-absent homes is so often treated as a moral judgment rather than an empirical observation. Recognising such patterns need not imply blame, nor does it diminish the efforts or sacrifices of single parents. If child welfare is a genuine priority, we should be able to discuss uncomfortable data openly and with nuance, even when it complicates prevailing narratives.

 

Being an excluded father feels like living in exile. Some people are sympathetic, but not overly concerned. There is no language for your grief, no place for your story. Father exclusion does not fit into any fashionable social movement. Indeed, it’s allowed to slip through the cracks because it contradicts prevailing assumptions about gender, victimhood and power. Refusal to acknowledge this issue reflects a cultural and legal bias that renders fathers morally disposable.

Link to the full article  Scroll down and look for the above image to continue reading.

Seeing Theroux the Manosphere
The Reviews Missed the Most Important Question

Louis Theroux’s Inside the Manosphere is drawing the kind of reviews one might expect. Some say he did not focus enough on the harm done to women and girls. Others say he was out of his depth and ended up giving attention-seeking influencers exactly the publicity they crave. Still others praise the film as a revealing look at “toxic masculinity” online. But as I read the reviews, I was struck by something more important than their differences. They all seemed blind to the same possibility.

Take The Guardian. Its complaint was not that the category “manosphere” might be vague, ideological, or rhetorically manipulative. No, its complaint was that Theroux did not spend enough time showing the impact of these men’s ideas on women. In other words, the basic frame was accepted from the beginning: the manosphere is a danger to women, and the only real question is whether the documentary pressed that point hard enough.

The Independent came at it from another angle. It called the documentary “an infuriating failure” and argued that Theroux’s old-style documentary method is no match for internet-age performers driven by money, clout, and shameless self-promotion. Fair enough. But notice what is still missing. The review does not step back and ask whether the word manosphere itself has become a smear category—an elastic term that can be stretched to include not only grifters and woman-haters, but also men who simply question feminism, challenge anti-male orthodoxies, or speak openly about the struggles of boys and men.

Then there is the more favorable coverage. Decider recommended the film and described it as a revealing look at how toxic masculinity spreads online. That is now the standard language. The issue is assumed, the verdict is built in, and the label does most of the work before the discussion even begins. Once the term manosphere is accepted uncritically, everything inside it is already morally suspect.

What I found most striking is that Theroux himself seemed more aware of the problem than many of his reviewers. In an interview with The Guardian, he acknowledged that the term manosphere is “inexact” and somewhat in the eye of the beholder. That is an important admission. It suggests some awareness that the label can become a catch-all—one that may sweep together genuine extremists, foolish provocateurs, traditionalists, and ordinary male dissenters under a single cloud of suspicion. But that thread was barely followed by the reviewers. They seemed far more interested in whether Theroux had been sufficiently condemnatory.

And that, to me, is the real story.

The reviews were not really debating whether the category itself is being used ideologically. They were debating whether Theroux handled the category effectively. That is a very different question. Almost none of them seemed willing to consider that “the manosphere” may now function as a protective shield for feminism itself—a way to discredit, marginalize, or pathologize male voices that raise inconvenient questions. Once a man can be placed somewhere inside that dark and blurry category, his arguments no longer have to be answered. He can simply be associated with misogyny, extremism, resentment, or grievance.

That is why this matters.

Of course there are ugly voices online. Of course there are men saying foolish, cruel, and sometimes dangerous things. But there is a world of difference between identifying genuine bad actors and using a sprawling moral category to batter males who are questioning feminism or refusing to repeat approved cultural slogans. The reviews I saw did not seem especially interested in that difference. And when smart reviewers all miss the same thing, it is often because that blind spot is doing important cultural work.

In the end, the critics mostly asked two questions: Did Theroux go hard enough? Or did he give these men too much airtime? Very few seemed to ask the deeper one: Has “the manosphere” become one more ideological weapon used to protect feminism from scrutiny? That omission tells us quite a lot—not only about the documentary, but about the cultural climate in which it is being received.

Men Are Good