Little Boys Lost

Worried that little girls were being overlooked as equal participants in modern life, society has spent the last 20 years focused on how to raise them to become happy, productive and successful women. They have learned the new rules for females: They can be lawyers, bankers, boxers, doctors or police officers and still find fulfillment as tender and caring mothers, wives and lovers.

Meanwhile, many experts now say, we’ve been driving our little boys crazy. We send them out in the world each day with outdated, confusing messages about how they should act and what it means to be a man. They must be stoic but empathetic, strong yet vulnerable, tough but never too forceful. They must be masculine while embracing their feminine side.

“Big boys don’t cry” is still heard across the nation as parents and teachers try to instill the seeds of “manliness” in boys, despite the fact that most adults nowadays would be hard pressed to define the current meaning of “manly.” And despite the fact that psychologists tell us that big boys should cry and that parents should encourage them to express all sorts of emotions once identified as being for “sissies.”

“Boys who can’t shed tears shoot guns,” says William Pollack, author of “Real Boys” (Henry Holt & Co.), one of a spate of new books and articles that address the problems of raising boys in our revised culture. Pollack argues that we raise our boys along outmoded gender guidelines, so they cannot find satisfying and meaningful lives as grown men. Studies of teens by Pollack show that even boys who get good grades, and who are considered “normal, healthy and well-adjusted” by peers, parents and teachers, say they are deeply troubled about the roles and goals of their gender.

Pollack believes this is because we begin to distance little boys from their mothers prematurely, we raise them to stifle their feelings and emotions, and treat them as “toxic” little creatures whose rambunctious behavior must be tamed. He says that from babyhood onward, parents still invoke an obsolete “boy code” and adhere to old-fashioned myths about males that focus on strength, athletics and stoicism, which create young men who do not understand themselves or those around them.

Michael Gurian, author of “The Good Son” (Jeremy P. Tarcher / Putnam), agrees there is a crisis in raising boys but says it is partly based in biology. Boys are wired differently than girls, he says, and that behavior difference must be acknowledged and channeled. Since there is no longer a need for food gathering and “dragon slaying,” he prescribes a guide for shaping the moral and ethical development of boys in a way he believes will produce young men who are “joy-filled, compassionate and self-disciplined.” His goal is to help parents develop “10 universally accepted moral competencies: decency, fairness, empathy, self-sacrifice, respect, loyalty, service, responsibility, honesty and honor.”

He says that boys with those values will find reason to rejoice in their lives. But right now, he believes, most boys are pitifully adrift in a society that exposes them to messages that are violent and chaotic.

Statistics about America’s boys are daunting: They account for the majority of discipline problems in schools; they are more likely to get suspended; they are twice as likely as girls to be labeled as “learning disabled”; and they constitute up to 67% of “special education” classes. In some school systems, they are up to 10 times more likely to be diagnosed (often wrongly) with attention deficit disorder, for which they receive potent medications that bring on side effects. Boys generally lag behind girls in grades, many experts assert, and there are increasingly fewer boys than girls who want to attend college and get a graduate education. Boys are much more likely to commit suicide, violent crimes and to go to prison, statistics show.

Men Question Their Purpose

As female stereotypes disappear and women’s lives expand to embrace new levels of emotional and intellectual expression, men’s horizons seem to be shrinking.

Famed feminist author Susan Faludi seems to agree in her new book, “Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man” (William Morrow). She has said that many men she interviewed for the book suffer from an “agonizing sense that they are not useful to society” and that the basic idea of what it means to be a man, which is to make a meaningful contribution to family, community and civic life, has been obliterated.

Contradictions and confusion about masculinity abound in our culture, the experts agree. From one side of our collective mouth, for example, we remove toy guns and tell little boys they must not embrace violence. Then we watch them use twigs, rulers and pencils as weapon replacements. “Boys will be boys,” we say to each other, unsure what to do next.

Little boys must daily grapple with extreme images of men. TV, films and video games, for example, glorify the Terminators, enforcers and protectors--the ones who win by brute force, bullying and intimidation.

So what do we tell boys about their destiny? How do we train them for a world in which the traditional male survival mechanisms of strength and bluster cannot carry them through, a world in which gender no longer guarantees that they will head what was once an all-male hierarchy?

Experts agree the problem of how to raise boys is urgent--it deepens as we ignore it. But they don’t agree as to whether the problem is one of nature or nurture.

Pollack believes that 90% of the problem is nurture.

“Baby doctors will tell you that at birth, boy babies are more emotive and more expressive, and one might argue they are even more attuned with their mothers than girl babies,” he says. “But by the time they enter first grade, teachers have difficulty reading the emotions on boys’ faces and are frequently unable to talk with them about their emotions. This is what we’re doing to our male children.”

In most families, he says, little boys “lose their voices” by the time they are 4 or 5. Parents coo over and caress little girls, talk with them incessantly, stroke away their tears. Boys are raised, often unwittingly, with less talk, less touch and with shame as an overwhelming weapon, he says.

Parents and teachers shame boys into conforming to the old and now useless mold of masculinity, he says. Boys are taught not to cry, to mask their emotions, to hide their hurts, to stop fidgeting, to cut the apron strings and to stand on their own two feet--to be strong and silent and impervious.

Thousands of tiny incidents occur every day, he says, without parents ever realizing what they are doing. When little boys scrape their knees and come to their parents crying, for example, moms and dads tend to brush off the dirt and send them back into the fray without discussing what happened or how the boy feels about it. “Big boys don’t cry,” or the ever-popular, “You’re crying just like a girl” are common shame phrases used by parents to get boys to be “manly,” he says. Little girls with scraped knees are usually encouraged to linger awhile, to “tell Mommy (or Daddy) what happened.” Early in life, he says, many boys stop trying to express their feelings and emotions.

This approach is all wrong, Pollack says.

“Biologically and socially, boys cannot function this way. Everything we’ve learned about girls and the need for bonding and connection is true for boys as well--although boys express those needs differently.” The biology of boys causes them to be “more wild, more action oriented and more rough at play,” he says. But society twists that to mean that boys are more violent and aggressive. “They are not. They are as loving and caring as girls are, but they show it in different ways. We are all the same species. Men are not from Mars and women from Venus.”

He prescribes more connection with mothers: “I say love your sons as you do your daughters. It won’t make them into sissies or namby-pambies.” In fact, his research shows that such closeness with mother (as well as father) leads to a more successful and satisfying adulthood.

Biology Believed to Be a Factor

Author Gurian believes biology rules “at least 50%” of the life of a boy. “Anyone who’s raised a boy knows they are by nature more impulsive, more physical, more rough and tumble. Sure, our culture encourages them to be that way, but also the male brain secretes 20% less serotonin than the female brain, and serotonin is what calms us down.”

He lists other differences between boys and girls: The male aggression center of the brain is larger than that of the female; males have up to 20 times more testosterone than females; males under stress tend to pull away from others, whereas stressed females tend to seek closeness. Boys’ brain development “pushes them outward into the surrounding world, rather than inward into their emotions.” He considers boys more morally fragile because their biology leads them more easily into trouble, he says. And society seems to have no idea how to direct the energy of these children.

“We have the most violent population of male children in the entire world,” he says. And that is partly because so many of our boys are adrift without guides or goals.

For each stage of boyhood, Gurian describes what steps parents can take to curb the normal but undesirable behaviors that all boys go through, such as lying and throwing temper tantrums.

“It’s normal for toddler boys to throw tantrums, hit things and people, yell and scream, bounce around and disobey parental commands.” But Gurian advises parents to nip the hitting syndrome immediately. “A toddler should learn never to hit his caregiver, even when angry. If he is throwing a tantrum and hitting you, he can be redirected to hit the floor, a couch or other soft object.”

He disagrees with Pollack that a lack of mothering might cause part of boys’ trouble.

“That’s a pseudo issue. The big issues are: Where are the dads? Where are the grandparents and the extended families? Where are the churches and synagogues in our little boys’ lives? Why aren’t our kids more involved in spiritual and religious life, rather than in five hours of video games every day?

“The U.S. is in moral crisis,” he says. “And I don’t mean Columbine, because most kids will never do something like that.” He says that boys are living “a life without mission, without service, without a quest for truth. That’s very difficult for males of the species, and very dangerous for a culture.”

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Bettijane Levine can be reached by e-mail at [email protected].