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Comment by wongarsu | Hacker News Reader

> With daughters, there’s less effort with physical harm and much more effort into helping their emotional well-being.

Suicide rates for 10-14 year olds are twice as high for boys than for girls, and for 15-24 year olds four times as high. I'm sure you are describing how parenting is done in general, but not spending as much time on the emotional well-being of boys doesn't seem to be a good strategy.

1: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/suicide/rates_1999_2017...

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Suicide attempts, however, are far higher in females: https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/suicide.shtml

This is in part because males choose more effective suicide methods - they are approximately twice as likely to use firearms.

But couldn't that be because some do it as a cry for help?

Yeah I suspect this is the reason. It'd be pretty stupid to insinuate a whole gender is ineffective at suicide.

The insinuation was a gender was more effective.

Suicide attempt as cry for help clearly suggests you are not psychologically ok and that you need help now.

If anything, that makes me think that we need to give more emotional attention and care to boys, since they're less likely to seek help (even if the method for seeking help is destructive).

A female friend of mine who worked at a psychiatric clinic for a while told me years ago that most suicide attempts are really just attempts of getting attention / cries for help. Choosing a less effective method is likely pretty deliberate.

You are aware that this, even if it would be true, does not suggest that they are psychologically ok? Instead, they are in distress and need help.

Yes, but arguably the person that wants to actually really kill themselves as effectively as possible is less ok than someone crying out for help and deliberately choosing "suicide" methods that are much less likely to actually end in death.

Statistically, if you are a parent with a child that is not emotionally OK, a son is more likely to kill himself, which is not reversible / recoverable. So at least while those stats remain true, the idea that girls need more emotional support is not backed up by the evidence I'm looking at.

Statistically, the best thing I can do there is to keep him away from guns and to not have them in household. That really works, then he has only less fatal means available to him.

Then of course there are things like treating him as normal multidimensional human as opposed to as emotionless competing machine as people in these HN theads write about boys. Like, the boys I know in real life are way more multifaceted people, they do have emotions and everything. They have relationship issues with regards to their friends. They do have to deal with bullying from their friends both physical and emotional. When young, they are not walking constantly fighting trouble people in this discussion describe. When teenagers, they are not only-cares-about sport and violent games kind of guys. Nor closes himself to his room and ignores the family which is actually supposed to be cool thing about boys kind of guys.

Reading gender sterotypes on HN about boys, one would believe it is impossible for boy to become artist, writer, scientist or philosopher. Except in real world, boys and men engage in all those. But really, median boy that live in my bubble is not destructive machine. There are few boys that do cause disproportional trouble, but majority of them are nice humans.

Back to girls, I would be careful to trust people who find all these attempts to "not be serious" at the time of trying. Majority of them is serious. People who act like they are not serious or just cry for attention that needs to be ignored are how girls dont get help they need.

I think most people chiming in here (me included) are just sharing anecdotes about their experiencing raising their children.

Destruction is a normal part of adolescent behavior. I think many first time parents are just really surprised to see it manifest so strongly in their children, especially toddlers.

I don't know what you mean as normal adolescent destruction. My brother was not destructive nor were my friends. Adolescent sons of my colleagues are not destructive. I know that troubled teens exists, but I also know that many of them are actually decent people.

Most toddler destruction is cluelessness and the same toddler is sad and compassionate in other situations. Physically active toddler boys are noisy which is tiring, but they are also sweet and trying their best.

And all of that is irrelevant to effect from article, which manifest only in immigrant fathers and first born female child. And the effect is small.

So the divorce effect is likely way more about clash between cultural expectations of foreign born dads then about how horrible either boys or girls are.

The two options are: girls are bad at suicide or girls are not as serious about suicide (compared to boys).

Either way, clearly the boys need more intervention, in whatever form that takes.

I definitely didn’t mean to discount the emotional damage done to boys by social media and media. Also the damage done to them by caging them up in schools while demanding absolute obedience and attention in “lord of the flies” situations.

You did though. You said girls need emotional support and boys you need to worry about them damaging themselves (physically) or others (emotionally).

I honestly can't come up with a reading of your comment that doesn't involve discounting the emotional needs of young boys.

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