Читать книгу The Complete Parenting Collection - Steve Biddulph, Steve Biddulph - Страница 83

A mother teaches a boy a great deal about life and love. She is invaluable for helping him gain confidence with the opposite sex. She is his ‘first love’, and needs to be tender, respectful and playful, without wanting to own or dominate his world. As he gets to school age, she encourages him, helps him make friends, and gives him clues about how to get on well with girls.

Many boys and girls have trouble getting along with the opposite sex, as do many men and women. A mother can make sure her son is not like this, she can help him to relax around girls and women. She can teach him what girls like – they love a boy who can converse, who has a sense of humour, who is considerate, who has his own ideas and opinions, but is interested in theirs, and so on. She can even alert him to the fact that girls can sometimes be mean or thoughtless – that girls are no saints, either.

As mentioned, the opposite-sex parent often holds the key to self-esteem for a growing child. Teenage daughters need to have their image of themselves as intelligent and interesting people boosted by their father. He can also teach them to change a wheel, fix a computer or catch fish. A son whose mother enjoys him as a companion learns that he can be friends with girls comfortably in the years from five to fifteen. The pressure to pair up and prove oneself sexually is taken away, and he can move more naturally through friendship to a deeper connection with a girl when he is ready.