I couldn’t agree more about exercise. How we got to the terrible lack of physical exercise in public schools I don’t know. But exercise is good for any child, and its benifits are hardly limited to boys alone.

My issue is when you gender what boys need by say limiting it to exercise, you bypass all the crucial relational development that the man box suppresses in boys. Our children need to learn emotional self regulation, empathy, collaboration, connecting across difference and most of all how to form authentic lasting relationships. Something which studies by the AARP and others tells us we are failing to do on a massive scale, living instead with epidemic levels of social isolation.