320. Why boys and girls need different things: The neuroscience of the sexes with Michael Gurian

Michael (00:00):

The kids that your listeners are raising. If we could scan them, the parents would see that around 70 to 80% of the brain activity for those girls is in the frontal lobe, which is executive decision making, impulse control, self-regulation, also words for feelings, et cetera. But around 40% for the males. So males use less of the frontal at the baseline, so have less impulse control, less self-regulation. Again, at baselines, they’re going to rely on gray matter areas for their back and somewhat in the cerebellum and the right side of the brain, which is objects moving through space, and then they’re going to rely on more aggression.

Dr. Sarah (00:50):

Today we’re talking about something that impacts so many families. It is often misunderstood the biological and psychological differences between boys and girls, and how those differences play out in our parenting, our schools, and our culture. Joining me is one of the world’s foremost gender experts, Michael Gurian. Michael is a marriage and family counselor, bestselling author of 32 books, and a social philosopher who has pioneered efforts to bring neurobiology and brain research into homes, schools, corporations, and public policy. His new book, Boys, A Rescue Plan: Moving Beyond the Politics of Masculinity to Healthy Male Development addresses the troubling politics of masculinity and provides a template for raising our sons into loving, wise and successful adult male. In this episode, we’re talking about everything from what science tells us about sex and gender in the brain to why boys and girls bond and express emotion so differently and what parents can actually do to support their children, especially boys in a world that often wasn’t built to support their growth and development. This conversation is packed with insights, practical strategies, and some surprising truths that might just shift the way you see your child’s behavior and how you respond to it.

(02:10):

Hi, Dr. Sarah Bren, a clinical psychologist and mom of two. In this podcast, I’ve taken all of my clinical experience, current research on brain science and child psychology, and the insights I’ve gained on my own parenting journey and distilled everything down into easy to understand and actionable parenting insights. So you can tune out the noise and tune into your own authentic parenting voice with confidence and calm. This is securely attached.

(02:40):

Hello everyone. Welcome back to the securely attached podcast. We have Michael Gurian here. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Michael (02:53):

My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Dr. Sarah (02:55):

I’m really excited to pick your brain. If people aren’t familiar with your work, can you share a little bit about, you have decades of decades of work behind you, but how did you get into this field and what was the beginnings of this trajectory that you are on?

Michael (03:16):

Yep. Yeah, I come at it from two worlds, the psych world and the education world, and early on in my career, so I’m 67, so we’d be going back a ways early on in my career, and you do still hear it somewhat. Now, the concept back then was everything socialized, so there’s really no nothing. So nature versus nurture, nurture wins all that. Well, we all know that it’s nature, nurture, and culture, that there’s not one element that all works together. But I suspected from living overseas, my parents were academics and foreign services, so lived in other cultures and it was clear to me that there was something genetic going on. That male female brain difference had to exist because everywhere I lived, the boys immediately knew how to relate to the other boys. The girls immediately knew how to relate to the other girls. I mean, it was just clear something was going on.

(04:11):

So back then we just were getting brain scans, so we’re talking late eighties. So I got very into looking at those brain scans and it was obvious on the brain scans how differently the male and the female brain operated. So I kind of made a career choice to go deeply into this and then to create applications, create practical applications for those of us in the psych field, the education field, and then parents. So that’s kind of a lot of what that career has been. So I’ve written as a number of books and all of that to try to help people to understand their boys, understand their girls, women and men, and empower everyone via understanding.

Dr. Sarah (04:56):

I think that’s so amazing and it’s kind of cool that there’s this established, accepted status quo. It nurture is at that time nurtures everything and then in actually observing in real time because you had this unique opportunity to look at different quote, nurture environments, and there were some things that were just too consistent across that you got this qualitative data just from your life experience and you picked up on that and that’s what turned into your career. I love that.

Michael (05:26):

Yeah. Yeah, it’s been sweet.

Dr. Sarah (05:28):

It’s like field study.

Michael (05:29):

Yeah. Yeah. It started definitely with that as a kid and young adult. And then we lived in Turkey. My wife and I lived in Turkey for a couple of years, taught there, and she was a therapist there. And so that’s when I was now in my late twenties and I tested it out and it was very clear that these patterns that I know you’ll ask me about, we’ll talk about that, about these patterns were very obvious. So I would go to a village in Turkey where you had polygamy. It was a Kurdish village let’s say, and you had a whole different culture, obviously that’s the point. There’s no similarity between the streets of New York and a Kurdish village, but the boy girl patterns were obvious and clear. So had to be something going on in the brain.

Dr. Sarah (06:13):

And so when you’ve done a lot of neuropsychological research on this, what are the things that have really solidified themselves over the years as these really concrete differences in brain development across these genders, sexes? How do you distinguish it?

Michael (06:33):

Okay, yeah. So I make the distinction between sex and gender, and I’m going to hold this book up just because it’s a plug, but also what I’m about to say is all in there, boy, a rescue plan, that’s the newest book.

Dr. Sarah (06:45):

Yes.

Michael (06:47):

So I go through it there in more than I have probably ever because in the last five years there’s now so much confusion in social media, especially about is there such a thing as sex and all that? Well, obviously it comes in on the chromosome. So what I try to teach people is, okay, so you’ve got four things to look at when you’re looking at all of this. Not one. So gender fluidity is just one. There are three things you got to look at that precede that, and gender fluidity and gender, even though we use the word for everything, gender is a social construct that comes later. So there is no gender reveal party. I mean, it is only sex. There is no gender at birth. So the X and the Y chromosomes hardwire the brains of boys and girls. This will include, by the way, trans intersex includes everyone because of the X and the Y chromosome, depending on if you have all X or if you have a Y, that baby is going to be hardwired and not just the body, but the brain.

(07:53):

So if you have a child who is intersex, who has both, there is a small minority of kids who have both genitalia still there’s going to be a Y. If it’s going to be more boy, that’s going to be more dominant. So it’ll be X, y, y, and that’s the key thing. So the X’s and the Y’s then contribute to and cause the brain to hardwire in utero via hormone flow. So for boys who are focused today, so for boys at around four to six weeks in utero, this little shot from the Y, right? The mom system reads the Y chromosome by that little boy, that little fetus shooting to the mom sending a signal saying, okay, we need to drop the testes here. So little androgenic hormone hits mom. Then mom sends in androgenic hormone, which is testosterone, sends that hormone thing into the fetus, and the fetus starts to drop the testicles.

(08:53):

And as it’s dropping the, it’s flooding the system with testosterone, and that is how the male and the female brain differentiate. So not just the body but the brain. So the three things that precede gender are chromosomes, which are going to hardwire, and then number one, number two is sex on the brain that hardwires in utero. And three is sexual orientation, which hardwires in utero, gay lesbian, so the LGB part of L-G-B-T-Q-I-A, those three things precede. So you already have sex on your brain, your body’s already sexualized because it’s going to have different sex organs. The chromosomes are different. Then the brain differences already start to apply in utero. And when I speak, I show results from MRI scans of fetuses, which are done. There’s a wonderful study in 2019. They now are looking at fetuses. So you can already see that the fetuses are different, the brains are different, male and female. Then later comes gender. So later you have social constructs. Last thing I’ll say on that, on the science of that is that there are 4 billion ways to be male and 4 billion ways to be female. So there is no single male and there is no single female. And I developed the term 35 years ago of bridge brain to try to explain because trans people existed 35 years ago, gender fluid people existed 35 years ago. I mean everyone existed. It just wasn’t in the news as much.

(10:33):

And what they are is they are bridge brains. So they bridge, so they’re among that one in five boys and one in five girls who we would say bridge. So they lean a little more toward the other sex brain, and if they lean way more toward the other sex brain, they’re trans. Like if 30 different brain centers are operating contrary to their genital sex, then those are trans. Those are people who are going to probably look for surgery one day if they have resources. But that’s very, very few people. However, you do have around 20% of boys and girls are bridge brains. So they’d be what we call gender non-conforming, gender non-binary, all of those categories I put in the bridge brain category.

Dr. Sarah (11:19):

Got it. And the way I’m picturing in my mind what you’re describing is that it’s sort of in my head, feels like it’s a spectrum. And then there’s certain kind of critical parts on that spectrum that once you cross that threshold, your brain has very observable differences.

Michael (11:36):

Everything can be observed on brain scans including trans.

Dr. Sarah (11:40):

Okay. Wow, that is so interesting. So then in your research about the brain scans, one of the factors you had looked into was social and emotional learning and the differences in that area for versus boys. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Michael (11:57):

So females have so many defaults for social emotionals. So if there’s anything emotional that a girl or a woman reads in someone else, nine parts of her brain light up for males at the baseline, only two parts of his brain light up.

(12:13):

So there’s a profound brain difference already in dealing with social emotionals. And that kind of segues into why is it people don’t understand their sons or their preschool kids or their elementary school males because we and often moms and female teachers are thinking about the defaults and are not realizing, oh, wait a minute, these boys or a lot of these boys are wired differently. So they don’t use their words, they don’t even know what they’re feeling. But we default because we think of, well, you should be able to use words for your feelings defaulting from a female brain, and we don’t realize we’re doing ’em

Dr. Sarah (13:00):

Got it.

Michael (13:00):

So the more male brain, the guy is on the spectrum, and even the female who’s a bridge brain, you’re going to see more objects moving through space. So rough and tumble play is objects moving through space. The kid in the preschool who’s just running around all the time and knocking around, jumping on his friends to wrestle rough and tumble, all of that, he’s actually communicating and bonding. Bonding just as well, by the way, as his sister who is not doing that, who is sitting in circle time, et cetera, it’s just as good, but it’s just different because he is an object moving through space and he’s moving objects through space and he’s doing rough and tumble bonding rather than sitting and listening and then verbalizing, bonding. It’s just a different kind of bonding. So you’re going to see more objects moving through space, et cetera. What I just described, the more male you go, and even a bridge brain, I’m sort of a bridge brain therapist educator, a lot of words pretty good at words to feelings, et cetera. So I’d be a little more toward the bridge brain, but still, there are certain patterns where it’s very clear that I have a male brain.

(14:13):

So it’s a spectrum like you said, and every individual brings their personality genome, which is just as powerful as their sex, right? I mean, the personality genome is huge. Every child brings their personality genome to their sex. And that’s a lot of what we see when we see our children. We are seeing, at least from the genetic point of view, we’re seeing the personality genome and we’re seeing the sex. And that’s the biggest internal interaction really. So the boy brings the boy and he brings whatever his personality is, right?

(14:51):

And the girl brings the girl and she brings whatever her personality is. And that’s really what we nurture as parents and as teachers. And I use the phrase nurture, the nature just, and I wrote a book called Nurture the Nature to specifically say, we could get rid of all this social impositions and social trends and all that, tell us how we should parent. And that then change a year later. We could get rid of all that if we nurtured the nature of our child. So we figure out what’s the nature of this kid and nurture that. And so a lot of what I’m trying to teach with the science is just to help people figure out, okay, who is this child? And we’re focusing on boys, so where is this boy do we think on the spectrum? And then of course, what’s his core personality? We put those two together. Let’s nurture that.

Dr. Sarah (15:44):

I love that. Actually, that really resonates with me because a lot of the work that I do, less about genetics, but well, not necessarily. I do a lot of work with families of kids who have really explosive and just challenged regulating things. And we talk a lot about, okay, this is their temperament, their nervous system sensitivities, their thresholds for processing stimulation. This is some of their nature coming into the mix, add in personality, add insects, which I realize maybe needs to go into my work more when I think about this stuff. But every kid is going to have, yes, nurture matters, but the nurture is also elicited by what the kid brings to the room with their brain and body.

Michael (16:30):

Right.

Dr. Sarah (16:32):

And so there’s a dynamic feedback loop that’s also going to happen. Like you were saying earlier, you cannot distinguish completely nature or nurture or social context. But yeah, that makes a lot of sense. This individualized process, helping parents be like, who is in front of me? What factors go into what’s showing up in my kid? How do I depersonalize some of these things and not say, oh, they’re just trying to piss me off or press my button.

Michael (17:04):

They might be, but yeah. Yeah, I hear you.

Dr. Sarah (17:09):

Yeah, that resonates with me a lot. You were saying that obviously there are just really concrete differences in the brain development, and there’s also, you were talking about that boys are bonding in a very specific kind of way that looks different from girls. So there’s relational and maybe even attachment approaches that are unique to boys versus girls. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Michael (17:40):

Yeah. Yes. I think it’s one of the most crucial concepts in our culture right now, but we don’t realize it because we don’t realize how much trouble boys get in at school or at home or how we judge them thinking they’re inferior, thinking that they’re defective in inherently defective. In one of my books, I wrote that in schools, we think they’re defective girls. So this is actually really, really big, but I think we have to get it raised into our consciousness. So at schools, in schools, preschools all the way back, we do the Ging Institute, we do contracts with Head Start. So we’re helping all the way back and early head start, one year olds, two year olds, three year olds, just kind of training the teachers to understand how differently the boys and the girls act and respond. And we were brought in because of the preschool to prison pipeline because it’s clear to a lot of folks that there’s already a pipeline all the way back. They can see the pipeline, mainly the boys who are going to end up in prison.

(18:54):

I make the distinction between aggression nurturance and empathy nurturance, and that connects with paternal nurturance and maternal nurturance. So either anthropological terms, what we’re really talking about is that moms and dads at their baseline tend to bond somewhat differently with their kids. This has nothing to do with changing diapers, everyone changes diapers, all that. That’s not what this is about. It’s in the unnoticed daily bonding, momentary bonding. For instance, dads tend to bond in quicker bursts. Moms tend to bond in longer bursts. So a mom might be bonding via an hour of this, this, this, and this activity. The dad is bonding in quicker bursts, like throwing the ball back and forth. That’s an easy one for people to, involves an object moving through space. And if there’s going to be talk, there’s talk while the object’s moving through space going to be doing something because the cerebellum, which is much more active, has more blood flow in the male brain than the female. Cerebellum is the doing center of the brain at the base of the brain much more active. It’s one of the reasons that boys can’t sit still, the way girls can sit still, et cetera. Well, instinctively don’t have the science, but instinctively moms and dads know what they’re doing. They’re bonding differently at the baseline, there can be exceptions, but at the baseline. So this is actually just as valuable. And aggression nurturance, which grew initially from paternal nurturance, but also grows from all that testosterone, males have 10 to 20 times the amount of testosterone in our bloodstream, in our brains as females do.

(20:31):

So a lot of our life is going to be around that. And testosterone is objects moving through space and aggression later, later it’s sex. But it’s not that for the age group of your listeners of kids, it’s more aggression and it’s more objects moving through space. So that throwing the ball is obvious example of that. But even in classrooms, and here’s where we have trouble in schools, the boys are bopping each other, tweaking each other, doing all this tactile and touch attachment. But the way to your point about attachment, the way males do touch attachment is different than the way females do it, right? I mean, you can have a female who bops and slaps the other person’s back of their head for fun. Yeah, it happens, absolutely. But males do it more because their touch attachment is connected to their hormone base, the way their brain works, they’re using the other person as an object slap in the back of their head, and they’re both laughing.

(21:32):

That’s valid touch attachment, but it’s aggression nurturance, it’s nurturing through aggression, not by avoiding it, but through it. The female brain doesn’t tend to nurture that way, and not only because the hormone base is different, et cetera, but also because she uses so much more of her frontal lobe at her baseline. So the kids that your listeners are raising, if we could scan them, the parents would see that around 70 to 80% of the brain activity for those girls is in the frontal lobe, which is executive decision making, impulse control, self-regulation, also words for feelings, et cetera. But around 40% for the males. So males use less of the frontal at the baseline, so have less impulse control, less self-regulation, again at baselines.

(22:33):

But they’re going to rely on gray matter areas for their back and somewhat in the cerebellum and the right side of the brain, which is objects moving through space, and then they’re going to rely on more aggression. So moms are going to attach more girls attachment patterns. Moms are going to be verbal with everyone. Let’s say they have more word centers, so they’re going to tend to be more verbal than dads are. But then at a certain point, interestingly, intuitive moms start to notice, huh, okay, I’m going to keep talking to this boy about what he feels because I’m going to do that. That’s what I’m going to do, which is great. But they do start to notice, oh, I can’t have him sit down at eight years old and across the table from me and say, what do you feel like? Okay, that’s kind of not working anymore if it ever did.

(23:27):

So the mom adapts, so she says, let’s go to the grocery store. So they’re going to do something and then he’s going to be sitting shoulder to shoulder with her in the car, and then she’s going to try to talk to him because she’s going to intuitively or learn from your podcast or my podcast going to learn. Oh, okay. At a certain point, we have to alter the way we deal with boys. And part of what she’ll also do is she won’t intervene as much in the way that he bonds, so she won’t see danger as much. Like he’ll be doing touch attachment the way he does it, aggression nurturance, and she’ll go, oh, actually that’s normal boy behavior. He’s bonding. We want that. So let’s let him do that. Unless someone’s in danger. If someone’s in danger, she’ll stop it. So aggression nurturance is more of that touch attachment and it’s a little less verbal empathy.

(24:27):

Nurturance, which is what females tend to do much more of at their baseline is they immediately see there’s something going on. And the insula, which is the mirror neurons, the part of the brain that creates mirror neurons, sees pain, says, oh my gosh, I have to stop everything I must empathize and does. And usually with words, again, male brain, not as well set up for that. In fact, testosterone cells, this is a funny one. Testosterone cells actually kill off a lot of the mirror neurons that a boy or man’s brain forms and kill off the oxytocin cells, which are bonding chemical cells that the male produces. Testosterone kills some of that off. Whereas for females, her empathy is gone In this insula, she’s going to increase her oxytocin, which is her bonding chemical that’s going to increase her ability to do verbally motives. How do you feel? What do you feel? What can I do for you? How do you need me? Which is all awesome. The guy though, his cells are killing some of that off, so of course he’s going to bond differently.

Dr. Sarah (25:34):

And it’s interesting because obviously in our culture we have cultural expectations, we also have systemic expectations. School historically is built to teach kids how to follow instructions and be very regulated and values certain types of behaviors way more strongly. And so culturally, I think we’ve, I don’t know, maybe it’s rooted in puritanism and our very old roots of very high moral stuff in our culture of we don’t show aggression. It’s not okay, it’s not acceptable. We actually have a really complicated and kind of repressed relationship to aggression. So people are afraid of it, and so they really want to shut it off right away versus saying, oh, wait, hold on. Aggression in and of itself is healthy. It’s appropriate. It actually has to unfold naturally for healthy development. But obviously we need to teach kids where the boundaries are.

(26:45):

But it’s not like we have to kind of let them experience it in order to organize it. But schools don’t really work that way. And so they really, these systems have just naturally developed that inadvertently hyper value the things that girls are naturally more wired to be good at or are more accessible to them and to punish or not disallow. A lot of the things that boys tend to be more accessible are better at. And so that’s probably a massive problem, and I can understand why your work in helping shape education systems to understand that would be really powerful.

Michael (27:35):

Well, thank you. Yeah, I think it is because you’re absolutely right. The social crisis, probably the preeminent social crisis we face now is around our boys. Obviously 30, 40 years ago it was around our girls and women 50 years ago, right? Absolutely. But now it’s this social crisis that, for instance, to your point, we don’t make the distinction between aggression and violence. Violence is the thing we don’t want.

(28:07):

But aggression is healthy. In fact, to build resilience in children, they must be raised with some aggression. That is the only way they will build resilience. They don’t build resilience by parents saying to them, I want you to be resilient. You have to have some aggression to push back on. And if people prefer the word challenge, that’s fine, challenge to push back on. But really what it is biologically is it’s aggression. So the boy who’s wrestling with the other boy, that’s aggression, nurturance, and it’s building resilience in the other boy, the other boy will wrestle back. That’s aggression nurturance. It’ll build resilience in most cases, even with a neurodivergent kid, it’s going to still be healthy to do rough and tumble play. That’s going to build resilience. Everyone will make their, however, if they think for a particular child it’s danger, then they’ll stop that.

(29:01):

But it’s necessary. Aggression is necessary, but violence is what we don’t want. And what I think happened, and it started I think about a hundred years ago, this issue exists throughout the industrialized world. We stopped, and especially about 50 years ago when we had the feminist movement and we were empowering women, we stopped making the distinction between aggression and violence, and we grouped it all together, and the schools absolutely did that. And the people who train the people in the schools are academics, right? Academics are who train. All of us who come up through counseling, psychology, education, we’re all trained by academics. Academics sort of made the decision that aggression and violence is all the same thing. We’re going to get rid of all aggression because it’s really violence and it’s really violence against women, which it isn’t. Aggression is not that, but violence against women exist, yes, but aggression is not that.

(29:58):

It all got conflated and the school systems got set up and parenting systems got set up to overreact, to aggression because we forgot the distinction. And character development didn’t occur. Resilience doesn’t occur. Resilience development doesn’t occur because we’re trying to cut out aggression. And boys especially come to hate school because anything they do, especially the ones who are more male brain, the bridge brains, they do all right, bridge brain males. But the more male brain on the spectrum you get those guys are just getting punished way too much. And they just started hating school and pulling out. And so it’s a huge social crisis. And I think in the last five years, so the Ging Institute started 30 years ago, right? Because we already saw this. So some of us already saw it. We formed the Ging Institute. We have trainers that go to schools. The schools where we go do training in, they do do systemic change. You used the word systemic. They make systemic change. And if folks want to learn about them, you can go on gry and institute.com. You can see what happens in those schools when they do the boys and girls learn differently program, everyone goes, oh, this should have been obvious. Okay, they see the brain scans.

Dr. Sarah (31:14):

Can you paint a little picture of some of the changes that get instituted in some of these that are most effective?

Michael (31:22):

For instance, their discipline referrals go down 50 to 80%. Okay, so this is when the teacher calls the principal and sends a boy to the principal. Could be a girl, but 80% of the time it’s a boy. So well that goes down 50 to 80% because the teachers learn, the counselors learn the principals, everyone learns that, oh, wait a minute, that was actually not defective behavior. That thing that boy did that I used to call the principal about, I don’t do it anymore. I look at that and go, oh, that’s aggression nurturance. That’s fine. So what happens is that the brain trust of teachers and of admin and also of parents changes so that they don’t overreact.

Dr. Sarah (32:11):

Got it.

Michael (32:12):

And then in terms of classroom strategies, for instance, now, because that system has learned that girls, that both sides of the female brain has word centers, have word centers, but only one side of the male brain do. So now they understand, oh, the use your words thing, or why am I giving my boys? And well, they weren’t producing the words the females produced. I got to teach them how to use words differently. So now what the teachers do is let them draw. So now the boys draw and girls can do it if they want and some will, but most girls will start writing right away. So I’ll give an example, and parents can go into schools, like elementary schools and see this on the walls. You can go, the teacher puts up the papers that the kids wrote. So let’s say the teacher asked, we’ll do this for the new year. Let’s say the teacher asked, alright, write about what you did over summer vacation at the baseline. If that’s all the teacher does, the teacher’s going to have five to seven boys who are not going to be able to write more than a paragraph.

(33:24):

And people can see that on the walls. But once they kind of altered their system, now what they say is to all their students, you don’t have to write anything for 20 minutes. Take this piece of paper out, draw it into a square, you’ll have four quadrants. Draw what you did over the summer vacation or make it six if you want. So then everyone who wants to can draw. That’s graphic and that’s tapping into the visual graphic. So female brain has word centers on both sides, including on the side that does the visual graphics. Male brain doesn’t tend to have word centers there. So more enhanced visual graphics. So we want to use that. We want to let ’em draw so that then when they write, they can produce more words because they’re going to now be able to write what they drew. And an example is senses. So for instance, color, female brain sees color way better than male brain. But if we say to this fourth grader, okay, go ahead and draw and use crayons or colored pencils, he draws it. And then now he can put color into what he wrote. We took our red car to such and such. The Grand Canyon used to be she has those details already. She doesn’t need to draw.

(34:41):

She’s using way more of her brain to write that paper than he is. But now that we use this strategy, we see the boys are starting to get A’s and B’s, the ones who are getting C’s and D’s, because they’re doing what we want them to do. We want them to have detail, we want them to have emotion. We want them to have an organized paper. Well, she was way better at that than he was until we use this kind of strategy.

Dr. Sarah (35:07):

So what you did was you basically took something that the female brain just intrinsically could combine and deliver in one package, and that was the bar that was being set for both brains, and you broke it down into smaller parts and then taught those individual smaller parts to everyone so that the boy brains could do it more stepwise instead of having the girl standards. That’s more consolidated, just kind of organically as the standard for everyone. Is that?

Michael (35:41):

Yeah, I think, yeah, I might be saying the same thing you’re saying in a different way. The standard is set is I’m a teacher, I want them to write. The standard is sort of set, I don’t know if it’s a female brain standard, it’s just that here’s what a good paper is. A good paper has organization. And to your point, those are easier for the female brain at the baseline.

Dr. Sarah (36:06):

But a lot of these educators probably didn’t know, obviously didn’t know that what they were expecting. A female brain can just do not, because they can just do all the way to the very end. What they’re able to take three different steps, and it looks like they’re combining them, integrating them, and presenting one final product. Whereas in reality, if you take those steps, draw, add, color, add words, the boys need that broken down in a different way. And so we are basically just deconstructing something that we took for granted that boys could do, but because girls could do it.

Michael (36:47):

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Perfect. Yes, absolutely. And that I think the primary reason that happens, at least in school and psychology systems is because we are training between 18 and 25 or 26. We’re training young people in college and grad school without showing them. These are our future teachers, psychologists, counselors, even doctors. I have a lot of MD friends who have come to my talks, seen the brain scans and said, that is the first time I saw male female brain scans and I have an md. So in our academic world, we are training our professionals without alerting them to the fact that the male and the female brain operate differently. And so a lot of ’em, as I think you’re saying, are defaulting toward female brain and not realizing that in a classroom of 30, okay, we got to remember that some boys are going to learn no matter how they’re taught, they’re going to be fine. But when we break it down, we did our two year pilot, university of Missouri, Kansas City, and that two year pilot, we broke down the populations. And what we find in the classroom is that a third of the kids, third of the boys, fine, going to do fine no matter what. A third, not as good, not as good. They really need those strategies. But yeah, they could probably get a B, but a third are going to get and F’s, unless these strategies are practiced by the system.

(38:23):

And that’s how it breaks down. Well, you take a third of every classroom and every parent knows this third because these parents of boys are talking to each other, or I hope will talk to each other and go, man, is your, I mean, my boy’s smart. Why is he getting a D? Why is he getting a C? Right? And my argument has been for decades that it’s a mismatch between that system and those kids’ brains. And unfortunately to your point, most of the mismatch is boy’s brains because the default female brain is working for that system.

Dr. Sarah (38:54):

And it sounds like in the way that you are training schools, I could hear someone, a parent making the argument, well, don’t bring it down to the lowest common denominator. That’s not fair. But what it sounds like you’re describing is that first of all, everybody benefits from this model because girls aren’t like they’re able to synthesize it, so it doesn’t really matter if it’s broken down for them or not. They’re not getting less of an education or less of an environment where they’re going to do great. They can synthesize whether you break it down or not. But if you don’t break it down, the boys who can’t synthesize it will get left behind. They’re not going to be able to play this game. But I like that it’s offered in a way that it doesn’t diminish anybody’s approach because basically it sounds like it’s being presented as a way of take what you need instead of everybody come up here to this very integrated place. Are there things that you’ve seen teachers implement in the classroom when you’re doing these types of trainings and helping classrooms shift that you’ve seen parents pull into their home life that’s been helpful?

Michael (40:13):

All of it. Have them draw before they write. That works for that brain. So it’s going to apply at school and at home, have them move around. This is another thing that’s big in our guian trained schools. They’re using standing desks for the kids. They’re having a move around having brain breaks every 10 to 20 minutes. And that has to happen at home too. When should that, and another one is, when should the homework be done? Probably not. When the brain is really tired, and especially for male brains, we want to give ’em a recharge because the male brain goes to a full rest state and the female brain. So that means what happens is everything in the frontal temporal, everything in the top shuts down, and that brain needs to recharge. Female brain still has activity in frontal temporal. Its temporal. She still has activity everywhere, even though her brain is tired.

(41:08):

And that’s another male female difference that comes in on the X and the Y chromosome. So we need to do like, okay, he needs to run around the block for 15, 20 minutes to get his brain recharged before he does his homework or he ought to eat, refuel the brain, something like that. And then the communicating, social, emotional, that’s the other one. We train schools in how to alter that for males. And the standard, to your point, by the way, the standard is already preset and it’s already high, right? We’re not saying lower the standard, right? ,

Dr. Sarah (41:40):

Yeah.

Michael (41:40):

It’s already high.

Dr. Sarah (41:41):

I wanted to make that crystal clear because I don’t think that’s what you guys are doing.

Michael (41:45):

What we have to do is we have to use strategies with boys in those systems that can help them reach the standard. And so it goes for social emotional too. Parents will alter and intuitively alter the way they do social emotionals with their boys and girls, especially as the boys start to hit puberty because it becomes very clear that puberty testosterone is affecting their brains. And it does. By the time boys go through puberty, they won’t use as many words for feelings as girls. They won’t cry as much as girls, et cetera. These things are hormonal, prolactin, testosterone, all of that. That’s just the way it is. Okay? But we can still, as parents, we can help them to figure out what they’re feeling.

(42:34):

So we’re just going to do it differently. We’re going to do more shoulder to shoulder. We’re going to use less words. We’re not going to lecture at ’em, and we’re not going to say things anymore to them. At a certain point, parents smartly stop saying, how do you feel? Come sit down at the table and tell me how you feel. Okay, this is a boy. He’s going through puberty and then post puberty, we’re going to do something else. Like I said, we’re going to walk down the street with him. Peripatetic and counselors too will have to alter how they deal with males. If they want to retain males, they’re not going to sit for 50 minutes asking a guy what he feels that’s going to work for one out of 10, sorry, one out of five guys. They’re going to have to walk with him. They’re going to have to toss a ball back and forth with him. They’re going to have to have him draw or use sand trays, different strategies to get the same high result. We still want him to tell us what he’s feeling, but we got to do it differently and we won’t expect him to tell us with as many words as females, that standard will change because he doesn’t have the brain centers producing that many words.

Dr. Sarah (43:37):

That’s so interesting.

Michael (43:38):

There’s a one in five exception. I’m a one in five exception. I’m a very verbal guy.

(43:44):

One in five exception

Dr. Sarah (43:46):

That’s what you would call bridge brain.

Michael (43:46):

Yeah, I’m more of a bridge brain. Yep.

Dr. Sarah (43:48):

Okay. That’s so helpful. I mean, as a therapist, and I know there are a lot of therapists listening to this podcast too, but because as a therapist we are like, I have a group practice of 12 therapists, and we were kids, so we’re like, whenever we get those teenage boys, we’re always in case conference being like, all right, we got to figure out how do we engage different, it’s totally different. And as parents, we know it too. I think this idea of construction, and I don’t mean that just quite literally constructing a block tower, but constructing in play, in conversation, in activity, just taking an idea and letting them build it a little bit more. I think that tactile experience is really important. I think I use construction materials in my play, in my play with young boys, but also just in working with older teens, I feel like we have to be building something, whether it’s symbolic, something physical, like, oh my god, so many kids, boys in my practice, Legos are like a permanent fixture in every therapy room in my practice.

Michael (45:08):

Well, and it’s stimulating the brain. It’s brilliant what you’re doing because by getting them, the more multisensory you are, the more that what happens in the brain is there’s more connectivity, and some of that connectivity will go up to where the word centers are, which is up in the frontal. Without that. If they’re sitting in a chair, like pick a 12-year-old sitting in a chair for 50 minutes or 45 minutes, what happens is within the first five or 10 minutes, somewhere in there, his brain goes to a rest state. So the frontal lobe is completely depleted.

Dr. Sarah (45:44):

He’s just starting to, whatever he had available to him to talk is starting to take a nap. Basically.

Michael (45:51):

It’s taking a nap, and that’s how his brain’s set up. So it’s not a flawed brain, that’s just how it’s set up. And there are reasons we could go into it, maybe another podcast. There are reasons why the male and the female brain, from an evolutionary perspective are different. But anyway, it’s how his brain’s set up, so, so we have to get him moving. We either accommodate in order to help people as a system or we continue our social crisis and just lose millions of males.

Dr. Sarah (46:21):

Yeah, so obviously I think one thing people definitely should do is get, I mean, you have many books, but this new one, this a Boys, a Rescue player, that I feel like would be a really helpful place to start. If parents are like, what do I do? I have a young boy. I want to set them up for success. I want to start doing things with them that allow them to get the brain development that we want to see moving in the right direction without penalizing them for having a V Brain. They have one sort of, if you wanted to start something today at home at when your kid gets home from school, what’s one thing a parent could try today to just help understand their son a little better, connect with them in a little bit of a way that’s more in alignment with the way their brain works. If they’re feeling disconnected or confused by their kid or worried that they’re going to lose them as they get older, what’s one thing they can do to facilitate that?

Michael (47:21):

One thing? Well, let me put a couple plugs in guian institute.com, G-U-R-I-A-N institute.com. If any issues are happening in school, go there. You’re going to see everything available. And also the Wonder a Parenting podcast, my podcast got to plug that just for a sec.

(47:39):

Because it answers a lot of these questions. So one thing, try one thing I would try looking at studying how verbal they are. So stepping back now and doing a one week study on this, boy in my care here, I’m the mom. Let’s say, how verbal is this guy? And kind of keeping a journal. And if he’s really, really verbal like Michael Gry, and then, okay, what I’m about to say may not apply, but let’s say he’s not, and we realize that then now I would go, after that week, I would start instituting. So the one thing I would do is to start instituting these things, be multisensory with him. So throw a ball back and forth when you want to talk to him or have him shoulder to shoulder and or allow rough and tumble play shoot baskets with him before I talk to him about his emotions. So what this is, is all multisensory so that more of his body and brain is involved before the mom tries to ask him what he’s feeling. I would try that.

Dr. Sarah (48:48):

I love that. I think that’s a really, really good place to start. And we’ll put links to your website and your podcast in the show notes. Where can people get your book, and is there anything else that you want to make sure people know if they want to get in touch with you or connect with you or your work?

Michael (49:05):

Oh, well, info@goeninstitute.com connects with me. The book should be everywhere. I mean, it is more online now these days, but Barnes and noble.com, amazon.com, it’s in bookstores. That’s the easiest way to get it. Yeah, I mean, I think that’s probably best. So go institute.com and then just hit Amazon or one of those online sellers.

Dr. Sarah (49:28):

Amazing.

Michael (49:28):

Yeah, so call me anytime. I’m on your team now.

Dr. Sarah (49:32):

Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Michael (49:35):

Pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Dr. Sarah (49:42):

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