Over the last 40 years, the United States has seen a remarkable change in the academic success of boys and girls. In 1970, 58% of college graduates were young men; now close to 60% of college graduates are women, and this gender gap continues to grow. There will always be boys who will thrive in school, but more and more, it's girls who do well academically and boys who are losing ground.

Two-thirds of the and F's given out in school go to boys. Boys are one-third more likely to drop out before finishing high school. Eighth grade girls score higher in both reading and especially in writing than boys do, and by 12th grade that gap has widened. Indeed, the average 11th grade boy in the U.S. writes at the level of the average 8th grade girl.

A few years ago, medical schools in the U.S. began accepting more young women than young men; soon medicine will be a female-dominated profession. I could go on and on with these statistics, but you get the point: on average girls outperform boys in elementary school, middle school, high school, college and graduate school.

Why is that? Experts disagree on the reasons. If you read Christina Hoff Sommers' The War Against Boys, you'll blame feminism for feminizing schools; if you read Leonard Sax's Why Gender Matters or Michael Gurian's The Minds you'll think it's the brain differences between boys and girls that educators don't take into account: if you read Peg Tyre's The Ttvuble with Boys, youMl conclude that classrooms are unfriendly places for boys, and that teachers' techniques don't work for them. If you read other experts, they'll tell you that the “boy crisis” is overblown.

What we do know is that this is happening not just in the U.S. but in Western Europe, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand. Once parents and educators removed the psychological barriers to higher education that used to exist for girls, that is, once we leveled the playing field, girls outstripped boys in school. How can you motivate your son to do better in school? In my opinion, there are five different types of boys who aren't doing well in school.

The Struggling Boy. The vast majority of boys who get poor grades in school are not “underachieving.” They are making their best effort and are struggling academically because they are of below average intelligence and the work is extremely hard for them, or they are of average intelligence in a very hard-driving school district. It is humiliating to know that you struggle with academics that other boys find easy: it's frustrating， and makes you want to run away. These struggling students need teachers who can make learning fun, and they, require the ongoing respect of teaches and their parents in order to slay motivated. These boys need to hear the old saying， “As long as you're trying your hardest.”

The Learning Disabled Boy. We know that boys have more variable brains than girls do, and that this affects their school performance. Two-thirds of children in special education are boys. Many of these boys have real learning disabilities. We used to call boys with learning disabilities “stupid” or “lazy.” Now，we're able to focus on the areas of their brains that do not work as well as others.

The Cruising Boy/good-enough Student. These boys often feel that school is hard, and pretty boring, that they do enough homework, and that there are other things to be interested in girls, sports, a part-time job, cars, etc. It's not that a boy like this has a particular passion，it's just that he doesn't like school all that much, and doesn't see how it is related to his future.

The only ways to motivate a “cruising/good-enough” boy: 1) Continue to hold high expectations for him， and express your ideals and some sense of disappointment, or 2) Use incentives to induce him to change his priorities. Some parents react negatively to the idea of “bribes,” but I call them incentives; they work in business， they work for kids.

The “Otherwise Engaged” Boy. There are boys who develop interests outside of school that are so compelling that school can no longer hold their interest. The satisfaction一not to mention the applause—that talented, athletic boys receive playing football, for example, or the sense of usefulness that other boys get from paying jobs, editing the school newspaper, being part of a band, or computer games, arc far greater than anything mere grades can offer them. Though ifs exciting when a boy discovers a passion he wants to pursue, it can present many challenges to their parents.

The “Otherwise Engaged” Boy. In my book，The Pressured Child， I talk about children who seem to be allergic to the school environment. There are some boys for whom the physical experience of being in a class all day, the psychological experience of having a teacher controlling everything, the frustrations of having to sit still, the humiliation of grades are simply intolerable. If your boy is allergic to school in this way, it is going to be a struggle to keep him going until he finishes. He'll need teachers who understand and can work with boys who hate school without taking it personally. They have to be willing to modify homework demands and try to see the school environment through a boy's eyes.