Sean Kullman, co-author with Michael Gurian of Boys, A Rescue Plan (2025) will be one of our keynoters at the Gurian Summer Training Institute. Registrants for our Summer Institute can join Sean, Michael, and our other presenters on June 21 – 22 on zoom and/or access the recordings for three weeks beyond the weekend.

To learn more and to register for June’s program, please visit https://gurianinstitute.com/events/gurian-summer-institute-2025. To register groups of 5 or more, contact Dakota Hoyt at dakota.gurianinstitute@gmail.com. To look at becoming a Gurian Certified Trainer at our Summer Institute, click the Trainer page on www.gurianinstitute.com. Now here’s more from Sean.

When a friend of mine talked to me about taking his high-school son, Tony, off of his prescribed attention-deficit-disorder medication, I was thrilled to hear it. Having spent many years in education and youth sports, Tony struck me as a typical boy with lots of energy that he liked to work-off on the playing fields. Tony needed to move.

Like many boys, Tony was bored in school and found paying attention for long-periods of time difficult unless the content engaged him in some way. When it did engage him, he could pay attention for longer-periods of time. And, depending on the time of day and the prior class, Tony felt more alert—for instance— if a core course (like Math, English, or Science) took place after physical education class or after an early morning workout. But practically speaking, how can schools arrange for a large number of students to engage in physical activity before core courses like math, reading, and science if boys are too fidgety or tend to lose focus? Is there enough space and time?

I’m not a psychologist and do not want to pretend that my observations working in schools and youth sports as well as the observations of Tony should count as the basis of a complete prescription. But I have seen far too many teachers—who are not licensed to prescribe medication—suggest in round about ways and often directly to parents that their boys need to be medicated. In faculty lounges and in department meetings, I often heard teachers say, “that boy needs some Ritalin.” These were not passing statements in jest. They were serious comments meant to address boys with too much energy who were unsettled in class and needed a different pedagogical approach.

It is also true that some teachers were struggling to manage a classroom where twenty-odd students wanted to learn while a few students were doing everything in their power to disrupt instruction. A teacher’s dilemma is understandable: How do I educate the twenty-odd students who want to learn and minimize the impact of those who are getting in the way?

An article earlier this week in the New York Times Magazine explored a topic that has dramatically impacted the landscape of education for several decades. Paul Tough’s “Have We Been Thinking About A.D.H.D. All Wrong?” addresses the conditions commonly known as attention-deficit-disorder and attention-deficit-hyperactivity-disorder (ADD/ADHD) with more openness than we’ve seen in decades. The science in the article, however, is not new. It’s something Michael Gurian discussed in the Minds of Boys decades ago and something I noticed when I first started teaching boys.

As Gurian and I argue in Boys, A Rescue Plan, ignoring brain-sex difference matters in school. Instead of understanding differences, healthy, energetic boys are being recommended for ADD/ADHD medication far more than girls because—as we argue—the pedagogical approaches necessary are not happening. And while there has been an increase in the number of girls receiving ADD/ADHD diagnosis and medication in recent years, there is no denying that boys lead the pack when it comes to medicating our boys into compliance.

Studies suggest that boys account for 65-75% of those medicated for ADD/ADHD and are diagnosed at two to three times the rate of girls. Some have argued that the lower number of girls diagnosed and medicated for ADD/ADHD suggests that “pervasive gaps exist in the treatment of children, especially girls, with parent-reported ADHD.” This “pervasive gap” observation was one of the key findings in the “Treatment of US Children With Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study.” That specific finding seemed more analytically imaginative than robustly objective, not the entire study of course but this specific finding that felt the need to inject an ideological view that scientific studies ignore female needs in research.

When teachers I know argued that the lack of girls diagnosed with ADD/ADHD is just another example of medical bias against females, it did not seem to ring true for a number of reasons. There arguments relied on the urban myth that females are under-represented in studies and treatment in general even as dozens and dozens of agencies at the federal and state levels spend more resources on girls’ and women’s health.

These teachers’ arguments also failed to reconcile the increase of boys on ADD/ADHD medication with the lack of academic success that supposedly should have followed. Tough mentions this lack of correlation in his article.

But like James Swanson, the researcher who helped lead the M.T.A. study [Multimodal Treatment of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder Study], Castellanos has some real concerns about stimulant treatment for A.D.H.D. He says he is frustrated by a persistent finding in the research: While the medications can have a powerful effect on how children behave in the classroom, they do little to improve how they learn. “It’s a puzzle,” Castellanos says. “There’s a real disconnect between the almost awesome effects on behavior and the minimal effects on academic achievement or attainment. What bothers me is that the kids do more seatwork — you can see that they’ve done more problems — but then when you test them a week or two later, their scores barely budge. Or they don’t budge at all. That’s the thing that really frustrates me.”

There are other factors to consider that impact a child’s ability to focus and the central part of a Swedish study of 1.6 million six-year-olds to nineteen-year olds. The study by Hjern, Weitoft, and Lindblad showed how socioeconomic and family-dynamic factors contributed to the diagnosis and prescribing of ADD/ADHD medication. Children were being prescribed medication for something psychologists tried to historically argue was genetic even though the study and no prior studies identified a particular gene. The more compelling parts of Hjern’s study were the factors related to socioeconomics and family structures that lead to prescribing ADD/ADHD medication.

Key Findings

• Boys were three times more likely to be on ADHD medication than girls, with medication use highest in boys aged between 10 and 15.
• Women who had only received the most basic education were 130 per cent more likely to have a child on ADHD medication than women with university degrees.
• Children were 54 per cent more likely to be on ADHD medication if they came from a single parent family rather than having both parents at home.
• Coming from a family on welfare benefits increased the risk of ADHD medication by 135 per cent when compared with households not claiming benefits.
• There were no statistically significant differences between the effects that socioeconomic factors had on boys or girls in the study.

The “study showed that almost half of the cases could be explained by the socioeconomic factors included in their analysis, clearly demonstrating that these are potent predictors of ADHD-medication in Swedish schoolchildren.”

The study also mentions that “there is considerable evidence that genetic factors are important in the etiology of ADHD, although the specific genes involved are yet to be identified.” This argument is perhaps the most hollow at this time as there is no specific gene associated with ADD/ADHD and something that needs more research. And even if the day comes when ADD/ADHD is associated with something in one’s genes, the premise that boredom and the inability to focus are associated with some type of genetic flaw fails to address what Dr. Joel Nigg mentions in Tough’s essay, being in the “wrong niche in life.” Or as I like to think of it, being bored.

“For a significant percentage of people diagnosed with A.D.H.D., Nigg says, “there’s nothing neurobiologically notable about them. Instead, their symptoms are situational or conditional. They may have had a hard life, or they have a lack of social support, or they’re in the wrong niche in life.” Or, as I like to argue, the pedagogical approach is misdirected.

Nigg’s observations seem to fit in well with the Swedish study about inabilities to focus that are more likely related to real-life distractions, poor pedagogical approaches, socioeconomics, coming from a single-parent home, and—I would assert—being male. The observations above raise an important question for our schools: Can we create rigorous, learning environments that engage struggling boys and girls whose environments outside of school create challenges in school without drugging them? Our current educational system in the U.S. suggests we are certainly struggling to do so, especially for boys—regardless of race—who are less likely to reach proficiencies in reading and college readiness when compared to their female counterparts. To combat the perceived and real disruptions boys create, we turn to drugs like Ritalin and Adderall.

When we think about modern education in the United States and other Western countries over the last 40 years, these countries have created less hospitable school environments for boys. In the UK for instance, Prime Minister Keir Starmer referred to the fictional Netflix series Adolescence as a documentary with other members calling for it to be shown in schools throughout the United Kingdom, which is currently happening. It was British politician Kemi Badenoch who had the common sense to call out the foolishness of establishing government policies on works of fiction.

On a very troubling level, our current educational systems seem like something right out of dystopian fiction at times and driven by a Dominant Gender Paradigm (DGP) by policymakers, educators, and the media. Michael Gurian discusses the DGP in our book Boys, A Rescue Plan as the “amalgam term for academic approaches to males and females that rely on the politics of masculinity, masculine social norms theory, and social constructivism”—ignoring male and female nature and relying on social constructs of masculinity to explain away the “problems” of male nature instead of nurturing its beauty and necessity. Run amok, it looks exactly like a major world government prescribing a fictional television show as a way to teach children about toxic masculinity, the manosphere, and white, male rage.

Pedagogical approaches that aim to teach essential skills have been replaced by initiatives that do not recognize sex-differences and instead fall into a culture of the exception, spending enormous sums of money on ideologically driven curriculums that take resources away from necessary classroom instruction. Couple that with drugging boys with Ritalin and Adderall and one sees a large infrastructure that aims to suppress male nature while emphasizing notions of female oppression and notions of female empowerment at the expense of male health and equality.

In the early years of Ritalin and Adderall prescriptions for children and youth, “81.5% were boys, most aged 5–14 years, according to one study in the Canadian Medical Association Journal. Another study in the Netherlands showed “most prescriptions were delivered to male patients (84.2%) and the majority were children and adolescents: 20.5% were aged 6–9 years, 48.5% were 10–14 years, 19.6% were 15–18 years, 6.2% were 19–24 years and 5.3% were 25–45 years of age.”

Parents are looking for all sorts of solutions. Some parents have red-shirted their boys (held them back a year) in efforts to help them mature a bit more before starting school. And while that approach may work for a small percentage of children, it is not the ultimate cure in a culture that has spent decades trying to shackle male nature instead of harnessing it like the wind and allowing our boys to sail on to new adventures in life that allow them to thrive as men.

While parents instinctively know we should be thinking more about sex-differences, our schools, media, and government have silenced them and allowed ideologically driven ideals of masculinity and gender to take the place of a pedagogy that recognizes boys and girls learn differently—that our boys need different structures and not more prescriptions.