Researchers are finding that boys and girls really are from two different planets. Experts say boys and girls have different “crisis points”, stages in their emotional and social development where things can go very wrong. Until recently, girls got all the attention. But boys are much more likely than girls to have discipline problems at school and to be diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD). Boys far outnumber girls in special-education classes. They’re also more likely to commit violent crimes and end up in jail.

Even normal boy behavior has come to be considered pathological（病态的） in the wake of the feminist movement. An abundance of physical energy and the urge to conquer—these are normal male characteristics, and in an earlier age they were good things, even essential to survival. “If Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer were alive today,” says Michael Gurian, author of The Wonder of Boys, “we’d say they had ADD.” He says one of the new insights we’re gaining about boys is a very old one: boys will be boys. “They are who they are,” says Gurian, “and we need to love them for who they are. Let’s not try to rewire them.”

But what exactly is the essential nature of boys? Even as infants, boys and girls behave differently. A recent study at Children’s Hospital in Boston found that boy babies are more emotionally expressive; girls are more reflective. (That means boy babies tend to cry when they’re unhappy; girl babies suck their thumbs.) This could indicate that girls are innately more able to control their emotions. Boys have higher levels of testosterone（睾丸激素） and lower levels of neurotransmitter serotonin（神经传递素） , which inhabits aggression and impulsivity. That may help explain why more males than females carry through with suicide or become alcoholics.

There’s a struggle between a desire and need for warmth on the one hand and a pull toward independence on the other. Boys are going through what psychologists long ago declared an integral part of growing up: individualization and disconnection from parents, especially mothers. But now some researchers think that process is too abrupt. When boys repress normal feelings like love because of social pressure, says William Pollack, head of the Center for Men at Boston’s McLean Hospital, “they’ve lost contact with the genuine nature of whom they are and what they feel. Boys are in a silent crisis. The only time we notice it is when they pull the trigger.”