When Lord of the Flies was first written it sold only 3,000 copies before going out of print. No one could believe in Jack, Piggy and Ralph and the thought that boys could turn into murderers, lacerating each other's flesh and revelling in torture and death.

It was the 1950s, when boys were loyal and true to each other and were brought up on sound scouting principles. They knew Kipling's If by heart, worshipped Ernest Shackleton and expected to stand by each other in the front line if it came to another war. As Jack says in the book: “After all, we are not savages, we're English.”

But that was the Fifties, when bonny baby boys grew up into wholesome lads, married and carried their family surname into the next generation. Now, 50 years later, Channel 4 has decided to create its own Lord of the Flies in a farmhouse in Cornwall and no one thinks that the boys will rally together. Everyone expects the worst, including the producers, who presumably are hoping for more than a pile of dirty socks. At the very least they will be looking for fistfights, the brandishing of bread knives and the pulling apart of insects.

Boys stink. In the past 50 years their reputation has plummeted. In the 21st century they are seen as bad, mad or sad. T-shirts for little girls say “Perfect Princess”, their brothers' say, “Bad Boy”.

Mothers of daughters are now the superior ones. They sit smugly chatting in the kitchen while their daughters colour and read Harriet the Hamster Fairy, meanwhile mothers of boys watch as their sons career around the house brandishing the hair dryer at each other and laying booby traps. Barack Obama can chat about his two impeccably bought-up girls who help to clear the dishes, but that's because he doesn't have sons.

Boys are hopeless, they can't participate in the national hobby of shopping for more than five minutes without asking when they can go home. But that's the least of it when you look at the statistics. More than 95 per cent of exclusions in schools are male. Boys are four times more likely to be autistic and nine times more likely to have Asperger's.

Everyone does them down. The only advertisements about boys are for washing powder. When a primary school in Cornwall discovered that its reception year contained only boys, the teacher was treated as a heroine for taking them on.

I blame J.M. Barrie rather than William Golding for starting the downward spiral. Peter Pan and his lost boys made it clear that mothers are happy to lose their sons, that every boy needs some hideous Wendy figure in a white nightgown and that all fathers deserve to be in the doghouse.

When I admit I have three sons, I can hear the intake of breath. The midwife was the first. “Another boy,” she said anxiously. “At least you have one daughter, she'll look after you when you get old.” If China doesn't want its daughters, Britain doesn't want its sons. Boys grow up into men who still expect their mums to wash their clothes and feed them in their twenties while they go around drinking and stabbing each other in the streets or in the office. As Margaret Atwood wrote, girls are “somehow gooder”.

But in the 1950s being all sugar and spice wasn't seen as a benefit, in fact the goodie-goodie Anne in Famous Five is considered more boring than Timmy the dog. Mothers need to celebrate boys again. Last weekend our children's four male cousins came to stay so we had seven boys under 12 in the house. They soon discovered the sinking mud by the stream and the paintball guns. Their fathers went fishing. But without any male role models, it didn't descend into chaos.

They went round in a gang and knew their pecking order. The oldest painstakingly taught the second youngest to swim, the baby was lugged around under the ten-year-old's arm, and when they played cops and robbers they chivalrously refused to tie up my daughter. Occasionally, they would return to scavenge for more food rather than to sneak about who had Kung Fooed who. The four-year-old didn't whimper when he got singed by the bonfire. My son picked up a Willard Price Adventure book and read it to the younger ones when they were exhausted. Everyone was blissfully happy.

What boys really want is fun and facts. Schools don't do either any more. My eldest doesn't want to understand how a Victorian chimney sweep felt, he wants to know the size of Britain's empire; he has no interest in repeating, “How much is that bunch of bananas?” in French, but he knows the Greek alphabet by heart. From this September, the Government expects all five-year-olds to know simple punctuation. Most little boys couldn't care less about full stops, but can probably tell you the name of ten dinosaurs or diggers. They don't necessarily need a male teacher, but they do need one who understands the importance of exercise as much as empathy.

The 1950s got it right. Boys like hanging around in groups analysing motors rather than emotions and then coming back for a hug with their mother. They need hobbies such as sailing, fishing, football, cycling and surfing to focus them, or they will end up feeling redundant. They prefer missions that don't just include tidying up their room.

We've already put far too many boys in Britain in a Lord of the Flies situation, dumping them on desolate estates, giving them nothing to do except fight each other. It would be more interesting if Channel 4 gave ten boys a real challenge rather than expecting them to sit around the house cooking and cleaning.

Drop them off in the wilderness with some bows and arrows, penknives and a few tents and then they could show what little boys are really made of.

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