Seeing them, that is, as they really are
You know that bumper sticker that reads “Start Seeing Motorcycles”? I think we need to “Start Seeing Boys.”
Honestly? I think we fear our teenage sons or at least their stereotypical counterpart with their sullen countenance, baggy garments, knit caps pulled low over shaggy hair and their enthusiasm for misogynist song lyrics and violent video games. But if our sons sometimes seem an alien breed, then call us Dr. Frankenstein: we’ve molded them as such through our collective inability to offer them a different cultural script, say experts on American boyhood. Yet we all know real boys are not so easily stereotyped. How can we start seeing boys in all their emotional complexity and potential?
If you have a son or work with boys – or, frankly, even if you have daughters who will share a classroom with, work with, date or marry a boy – I recommend reading Real Boys by William Pollack of the Center for Men at McLean Hospital/Harvard Medical School, and Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys by Dan Kindlon, also a psychologist and professor at Harvard, and Michael Thompson, a consultant and therapist who works extensively with heads of independent schools.
In the same vein as Mary Pipher’s landmark Reviving Ophelia about the inner lives of adolescent girls, these male psychologists’ work is based on research and clinical experience with boys and their families. Real Boys and Raising Cain pick apart the male myths that feed our relationships and expectations of boys.
For example, Pollack notes that boys are often bound by what he calls “gender straitjacketing” because we adults fail to question the “Boy Code,” that unspoken standard that boys must be tough, independent, demand respect. Tease or be teased. Fight back. Keep your mouth shut when something bugs you. Don’t let on that you feel fear or tenderness. And never, ever act like a girl.
Evidence of gender straitjacketing abounds. Here is one example. I was watching television with my 16-year-old son recently, an episode of House, about a quirky, misanthropic doctor played by Hugh Laurie. We also did a little channel surfing, and I was astounded at the messages imparted about male-female relationships. Here’s what one might have absorbed that evening from the snippets of three programs we saw (a bit of Family Guy, a scene from Legally Blonde, and a commercial for a new sitcom): having a coffee date with a girl is “wussy”; posturing like a Hell’s Angel is preferable to being a brainy, mannerly type (okay, I admit Stewie has a few other issues working against him); and all girls really want out of a date is hot sex. And that is just network television – we have minimal cable service at our house.
Okay, we know that media messages are distorted for laughs. Real boys, these authors suggest, might react differently to emotional triggers such as relationship troubles. They might genuinely feel betrayed by a breakup with a girlfriend; deeply troubled to witness other boys’ cruelty to someone in the locker room; scared or confused if they’re questioning their own sexuality; pained at a strained relationship with a family member – perhaps dear old Dad, likely steeped in and stifled by the very same Boy Code, who has learned to operate only in authoritarian mode.
Other real boys suffer the slings and arrows of everyday misfortune: they’re too short, too geeky, too pimply, too nonathletic. They wear the wrong kind of shoes or come from the wrong part of town. But most learn very early to suppress their feelings and act like they don’t care.
Rarely, this deep and protracted experience of shame leads eventually to a spectacular act of violence; we can all recite the eerie litany: Columbine, Red Lake, Jonesboro, Paducah. Yet even athletic and popular boys – not just the predictable scapegoats – can be scared and lonely, and more often than we realize, clinically depressed, perhaps using alcohol or drugs to self-medicate.
To start seeing boys, we need to commit to what Kindlon and Thompson call the “legwork of parenting,” to resist the temptation to accept “I’m fine” for an answer when your gut tells you otherwise; to sleuth the source of the troubling issue and help your boy name it and strategize solutions, possibly including seeking professional help. Don’t shy away from intimacy. Boys need their fathers and their mothers to remain close to them, give them hugs, choose to spend time with them, and really listen to boys in all their emotional complexity and potential, and let them know we’re on their side.
Although Kris Berggren is raising her son, as well as her two daughters, to fully develop their emotional intelligence, fart jokes still get a lot of laughs at her house.
