{photo credit: Wikipedia}
As parents, we probably have no deeper wish than the desire to keep our children in our safe, sheltered care forever, and never have to send them out to “where the wild things are.”
We tune into the news and see daily evidence of a violent, insensitive, and hyper-sexualized culture. We worry about bullying and harassment and assault… and much much worse.
A lot of our attention is focused on how we raise our girls in this environment. Sometimes, I hear parents say things like, “I’m SO GLAD I have boys and I don’t need to worry about this!”
The thing is, us parents of boys do need to be concerned. Just as our daughters pick up on the cultural messages about femininity, our boys learn all about the “boy code” and our culture of what some have labeled as “toxic masculinity.”
Our little Maxes will eventually sail off, in days or weeks or years, to where the wild things are. They will hear all sorts of messages on TV, in locker rooms, in video games, from their friends, on social media, and “the world all around.” And they don’t yet know all the “magic tricks” for navigating this world as it grows and grows around them.
Our great task as parents is raising children — boys and girls — who are kind, compassionate, comfortable with their emotions, capable of handling their anger, respectful to women, and respectful to men.
And that can be hard for parents of boys in a culture dominated by the “Boy Code,” described by Harvard psychologist William Pollack in his book Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood. This code, Pollack argues, essentially puts boys in a gender straitjacket: they are told they should be stoic, dominant, and powerful. And yet they’re also told they eventually need to become “sensitive New Age men.” Just as young girls are told to be sexy and pure, our young boys are given their own set of contradictory messages.
Psychologists Dan Kindlon and Michael Thompson, in their book Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys, claim that we simultaneously expect too much and too little of boys. We expect them to take on more responsibility and courage than they are prepared for developmentally, but at the same time we don’t expect enough from them in terms of self-control when we resort to such popular phrases as “Boys will be boys.”
What can parents do?
One of the most important things we can do is to help boys nurture their emotional lives.
Boys, and girls, need to be encouraged to feel the full spectrum of human emotions, yet we often treat boys in ways that turn them away from their inner lives. It’s no wonder, then, that we’ve become a culture “awash in anger.”
1. Encourage boys to have an emotional life
“All boys are born with the potential for a full range of emotional experience,” write Kindlon and Thompson. In fact, numerous studies have shown that newborn boys are actually more emotionally reactive than newborn girls. But our culture still does not encourage this emotional life in boys or men.
A study conducted at Rutgers University found that even with infants, we try to suppress boys’ emotions: mothers are more likely to reinforce smiling in boys and more likely to discourage their unhappy emotions. Boys are steered toward powerful superheroes, advertisements generally only portray men as tough and strong, and children learn early on that it’s not acceptable for a boy to cry.
We can encourage our sons to talk about their emotions, but we might need to do this differently than we do with our daughters. Asking a girl, “How do you feel?” might get you a direct response, but boys may have a harder time identifying their emotions. Pollack says we may need to ask more specific questions, like “Are you feeling sad about something?” or “Tell me what’s making you unhappy.”
photo credit: Violently Japy via photopin cc
2. Give boys an emotional vocabulary
Studies have shown that parents engage in more talk about emotions with their daughters than with their sons. Kindlon and Thompson report that “mothers speak about sadness and distress more with their daughters and about anger more with sons.”
In a study of preschoolers and the language they use, girls were six times more likely than boys to use the word “love” and twice as likely to use the word “sad.” Learning to talk about their feelings can help boys to tap into their inner life and find the words for their emotions.
Pollack suggests doing this by reading stories. It might be easier for a boy to consider how a fictional character feels about losing a game, being sent to his room, or a friend moving away, as a springboard to talking about their own emotions. Use a broad range of words for emotions to help children start to understand their feelings and find the words to express them.
{The movie Inside Out is a great springboard for this as well — check out my post for parents about it here}.
Kindlon and Thompson also note that “studies of parent interactions with both boys and girls suggest that, when a girl asks a question about emotions, her mother will give her longer explanations.” Moms are more likely to engage their daughters in conversations about other’s feelings. For example, if a girl asks why a child is sad, the mom might say, “Maybe his friend just left. What do you think?” while a boy is often told, “It’s not polite to stare.” We can help our boys understand their emotions by talking about the emotions of others.
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3. Share your inner life with your children
Share with your children how you felt when a colleague said something critical of you, or when you lost an important game. Showing our vulnerability, and expressing our emotions and how we deal with them provides a positive model for our children, and lets them know that emotions like sadness, fear, or disappointment are not weaknesses.
4. Openly express love for your boy
Pollack argues that we encourage boys to separate from their mothers in our culture before they are emotionally ready. In one study, when children were being dropped off at Kindergarten, the girls who cried were hugged and consoled, while the boys were told to “be tough” or “don’t cry.” Eventually our sons need to separate from their mothers, but not at the tender age of five.
Our children, boys and girls, need emotional connection with us and attention from us. Studies of infant attachment have demonstrated that a core component of secure attachment to caregivers is physical contact ~ hugs, kisses, cuddles.
Mothers may have a tendency to want to back off from physical contact with their boys as they grow up, but we shouldn’t back away from the hugs. Pollack reassures us that we will not “make him ‘girl-like’ or ‘feminine’ by maintaining a close relationship. There’s simply no such thing as too much love!” A boy ultimately wants to be “where someone love[s] him best of all.”
5. Teach boys that there are many models of masculinity
Help boys break out of the gender straightjacket by encouraging boys to see different examples of successful men in their lives. Pollack suggests that we talk about the men in our lives and why we love them: “Isn’t your grandpa wonderful? I love how he enjoys playing with you and putting you to bed at night when he babysits.”
6. Look beyond the anger
The one emotion our culture deems acceptable for boys is when they roar “their terrible roars” and gnash “their terrible teeth”: ANGER. But often the anger is a mask for something else. It may be another emotion that they cannot display, so they show “their terrible claws” instead.
A helpful way to do this can be to ask your angry son, “If your anger were an animal, what would it be?”
I once asked my then-six-year-old son this, and he told me his anger was a “gorilla.”
“What is the gorilla doing?” I asked.
“He’s throwing things everywhere!” my son replied. I encouraged him to be the gorilla. He threw some pillows around the living room, and then, when he had calmed down, he was ready to talk about why he really was upset: his friend had been mean to him at school, and he was sad.
It’s never too early to help our boys (and girls) discover what drives their anger, and to help them find healthy ways to process it.
7. Avoid teasing or shaming
Even light-hearted teasing or comments about a boy’s emotional reaction can send a clear message that the “Boy Code” of emotional stoicism needs to be followed. Be careful with your words when your boy opens up to you.
Where The Wild Things Are
In Raising Cain, Kindlon and Thompson also compare today’s boys to Max from Where the Wild Things Are. After getting into mischief “of one kind and another,” his mother sends him to his room. He then journeys to where the wild things are, joining the monsters who “celebrate his wildness.” Max enjoys his stay, but soon decides to return home to his hot dinner in his room. They write:
“Frightful little ‘Max’ reminds us of boys at every age who venture into new emotional territory, face a struggle of one kind and another, and often cover up their emotional confusion with an elaborate masquerade of anger or aggression. As a boy moves farther and farther from his mother’s physical protective presence, and especially as he enters adolescence and the culture of cruelty that awaits him there, he needs to be able to carry her in his heart, in the security that her love provides him and the emotional education she has given him. He needs to know that, between his mother and himself, however they maintain their connection, he can always find the place where he is loved ‘best of all.’” {emphasis added}
So give your little (or big) Max a hug, and explore how you can help him grow up connected to his inner emotional world, and connected to the other important people in his life. Hold space for his feelings and his words, and let him know you’ll always have a hot supper waiting for him.
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