Children
The Focus Shifts to Raising Boys
About twenty years ago an increasing number of authors and researchers began to focus on ways in which girls were being negatively affected by society's stereotypes about females. It was part of one of the most dramatic shifts in gender roles in history. Today girls and women are able to view life with a sense of options and opportunities that simply did not exit when I was growing up just a few decades ago. Now, more women than men graduate college, a Fortune 100 company has hired a woman CEO, and we are increasingly captivated by women in sports (the latter always a reflection of our society's values, good and bad). It hasn't been achieved without a price. Women feel torn and often overwhelmed by choices between achievement and attachment. Young girls are still exhibiting high rates of eating disorders and rapidly rising rates of smoking. But it is a far, far better situation to be a woman in today's American world. I wish the same could be said for boys and men.
Psychology is suddenly playing catch up in taking a new look at how boys are raised and how society influences their evolution into men. Taking cues from the work done by the women's movement, considerable focus is being given to social stereotypes and the limitations they place on males. Suddenly, the bestseller list is populated with important insights about what boys appear to experience and how limitations are being imposed that may contribute to concerns about male violence, the significantly higher incidence of school problems (academic and behavioral), and higher suicide rates. Current recommended readings include "Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys" (Ballantine, 1999) by Dan Kindlon and Michael Thompson, "Lost Boys: Why Our Sons Turn Violent and How We Can Save Them" (Free Press, 1999) by James Garbarino, and "Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood" (Henry Holt, 1998) by William Pollack.
Among their findings are some issues I see regularly in my work with families. Boys still are expected to be tough, independent, and not to cry. I often chide mothers who are expressing the wish for husbands to be more sensitive and emotionally expressive, yet are molding the next generation of men to have the same problems in expressing any other emotion besides anger. This is one of the most critical issues. If boys exhibit what are still considered to be predominantly feminine behaviors, i.e., being sensitive, crying, then parents are often concerned that their sons are too soft, won't make it in the tough world, even wonder if their sons are gay. An even stronger influence comes from peers. If boys are not perceived as "real boys" they are mercilessly teased by male and female children as "sissies" and "fags and are frequently scapegoated and bullied.
Parents have been somewhat misguided in earlier writings that urged them to create a unisex model for child rearing. That is not the answer. Boys and girls are not biologically or psychologically identical. But the similarities are greater than the differences. More accurately, parents should simply be more attuned to their child's personality and support the child's natural ways of being and responding. With boys, there needs to be a concerted effort to help them to express a wider range of emotions and to feel okay about themselves if they are not athletic or physical. Don't stop hugging your sons or having a good cry together when something sad has happened.
A key problem is that boys learn to bury all feelings other than anger and those emotions become increasingly inaccessible as they get older. Boys experience an increasing sense of disconnection, not having the close bonds that are so common for girls as they get older. I find many men breaking into tears in my office when they are able to admit how lonely they really feel. It is human nature to form intimate bonds. Just as it is our nature to work, achieve, and experience self-sufficiency. These two forces, which often conflict with each other within each of us, have historically been artificially allocated separately to men (autonomy) and women (intimacy). It's time for both genders to experience their full potential by growing up in a world that is less dominated by stereotypes.
Two additional social issues also are significant contributors to the problems faced by boys. One is that media has actually increased the image of the tough male, the emotion-less killing machine. At least in the old days the cowboys kissed their horses! John Wayne would be a wimp by today's standards. Boys spend endless hours at video games being successful "killers" and go to movies where ruthless revenge is the primary solution to problems. If you don't think this has an impact, think of the effects of all those skinny models and movie stars on the significant rise in eating disorders in girls, at younger ages than ever. It is foolish to believe that media does not influence behavior. Please don't buy the sorry excuses from the entertainment industry that they are just giving people what they want. If video games and movies were less violent, and those were the only options, the sales would still be there.
Finally, one of my concerns ever since I was a graduate student in psychology. Early childhood education is biased against boys. Research has demonstrated this for years. But nothing changes. Young boys are typically more active, less verbal, and slower to develop reading skills than are girls. But schooling is designed to place an early emphasis on all those skills, resulting in an inordinate amount of school problems among boys. Add to this the fact that there are few male teachers in early education, robbing boys of role models but also influencing the style of teaching. Roughhousing, running around, lots of gross motor activity and hands-on learning should be a more significant part of early education. The learning of skills needs different approaches and timetables.
I'm writing this column right after two more stories about male violence are in the news, one local, one national. We need to better understand the inner world of boys and take steps to help them find alternative ways to express their emotions as well as more ways to feel good about themselves. Somebody's life probably depends on our ability to do a better job at raising sons.
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