About The Santa Fe Boys Foundation
Joseph’s Story
As the founder and President of the Santa Fe Boys Educational Foundation, I present these few paragraphs to describe the background and purpose of the foundation. My personal concern about boys at risk started when I volunteered as a Big Brother in the Big Brother Big Sister program and was matched with 8-year-old Joseph.
Over these 20 years since our first meeting, getting to know him, I was also introduced to many of his other struggles, which are fairly typical of many boys. At that time when our relationship first began (around the turn of the century), the country was waking up to the “boy crisis,” suddenly discovering the educational, mental health, and conduct problems of many boys. These boys of the boy crisis are not the guardians of the glass ceiling, nor are they the me-too perpetrators. They are what the foundation has come to call boys at risk for long-term negative outcomes like educational failure, unstable employment, and long periods of incarceration.
The graphs presented on this website home page about the prevalence of mental, behavioral, and developmental disorders among children show that the greater early vulnerabilities of boys are quite real.
The Santa Fe Boys Educational Foundation is focused on this higher rate of boys and men being susceptable early in life and on the fact that so many disturbing behaviors that later come to the public’s attention have their roots in these early, boy-predominant issues. The bottom line is that boys today in schools and in community find a more unaccommodating atmosphere than ever before and the statistics show it.
For the past decade or so, with Joseph and these boys at risk in mind, the foundation has searched for ways to bring these issues more to the forefront. The Foundation got underway in 2013. It’s not about educating boys, which the name may lead some to conclude, but about educating adults about boy vulnerabilities early in life to negative outcomes later. There are two parts to that mission. The first has to do with the early in life part. Many now appreciate the importance of the first months and years as the base for much of what happens later. The second part has to do with boys. In what ways are very young males uniquely or almost uniquely vulnerable to some of these outcomes?
Joseph was the inspiration for The Santa Fe Boys Foundation
The foundation situates its concern about boys within a larger bio-psycho-social framework. The one part of this tripartite causal base usually accorded less attention is biology, perhaps because there is a fear that it will be used as an excuse to explain away undesirable boy behavior as innate. In contrast, the foundation hopes that we can see boys at risk as a part of the basic repertoire of causes that contributes to developmental pathologies and to acting out antisocially and in other undesirable ways. These need to be addressed with early in life interventions to give more boys a chance to become educated and to contribute. Another, more basic, concern the foundation has is that when we leave out boys’ neurology, endocrinology, and physiology for example, we rob them of their complexity as humans.
Not everyone agrees with this point of view. It has been common to assert that the preponderance of male difficulties is a result of social construction or learning theory or from watching violence on TV or from “rigid adherence to restrictive masculinity ideologies” as the American Psychological Association tells us in its guidelines for working with men and boys. Granted, socialization has something to do with it, maybe even a lot.
But there is also a counter trend to these socialization-only points of view, and this is based on all that is being learned from neuropsychology and genetics and is typified by the 800-page special issue of the Journal of Neurobiological Research published a few years ago. This is titled: An Issue Whose Time Has Come—Sex/Gender Influences on Nervous System Function.
Boys today experience a more unaccommodating atmosphere
It’s all about how crucial it is to appreciate sex differences for medical treatments, especially for women, since so much research in the past has been carried out only on men. That is, the issue whose time has come is appreciating differences between sexes and acknowledging their significant biological basis so that better medical treatments can be developed for women and ultimately for all. So, understanding biology is vital, and the Santa Fe Boys Educational Foundation suggests the same argument for understanding the broader causes of boys being at risk, as this journal makes for appreciating sex differences in medical research: it is an issue whose time has come.
We hope that a main outcome of our effort will be to appreciate the problems of boys at risk as a complex, almost exclusively male vulnerability with origins in the mixture of biology and psychology, in the context of a larger society where racism, economic inequality, availability of guns, father absence, and many other elements also contribute to the mix.
The question we in the foundation ask is not only what is going on in society, but also what is happening internally and individually—neurobiologically and psychologically, and how these interact epigenetically and in other ways to explain this preponderance of male outcomes which are troubling and often antisocial.
Signed, Paul Golding, PhD
