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The Three Stages of Boyhood
ОглавлениеHave you ever browsed through a family photo collection and seen photos of a boy growing up, from babyhood right through to manhood? If you have, you’ll know that boys don’t grow up in a smooth way. They go in surges – looking the same for a while, then suddenly appearing to change overnight. And that’s only on the outside. On the inside, great changes are happening, too. But developing maturity and character aren’t as automatic as physical development; a boy can get stuck. Everyone knows at least one man who is large in body but small in mind or soul, who hasn’t developed as a mature person. Such men are everywhere – they might be a prime minister, a president or a tycoon, but you look at them and think, Yep, still a boy. And not a very nice one …
Boys don’t grow up well if you don’t help them. You can’t just shovel in cereal, provide clean T-shirts, and have them one day wake up as a man! A certain programme has to be followed. The trick is to understand what is needed – and when.
Luckily, boys have been around for a very long time. Every society in the world has encountered the challenge of raising boys, and has come up with solutions. The three stages of boyhood are timeless and universal. Native Americans, Kalahari bushmen and Inuit hunters all knew about these stages. When I talk about them to parents they say, ‘That’s right!’ because the stages match their experience.
The Three Stages at a Glance
1 © Keisuke N/Shutterstock.com
2 The first stage of boyhood is from birth to six, the span of time when – in most families – the boy primarily belongs to his mother. He is ‘her’ boy, even though his father may play a very big role, too. The aim at this age is to give strong love and security and to ‘switch a boy on’ to life as a warm and welcoming experience.© Lopolo/Shutterstock.com
3 The second stage includes the years from six to fourteen – when the boy, out of his own internal drives, starts wanting to learn to be a man and looks more and more to his father for interest and activity (although his mother remains very involved, and the wider world is beckoning, too). The purpose of this stage is to build competence and skill while also developing kindness and playfulness – you help him to become a balanced person. This is the age when a boy becomes happy and secure about being male.© Monkey Business Images/Shutterstock.com
4 Finally, the years from fourteen to adult – when the boy needs input from male mentors if he is to complete the journey to being fully grown-up. Mum and Dad step back a little, but they must organise some good mentors in their son’s life; if not, he will have to rely on an ill-equipped peer group for his sense of self. The aim is for your son to learn skills, responsibility and self-respect by joining more and more with the adult community.
These stages do not indicate a sudden or sharp shift from one parent to another. It’s not like the mum stage, the dad stage and the mentor stage. For instance, an involved dad can do a huge amount from birth onwards, or even take the role a mother usually has if need be. And a mother doesn’t quit when a boy reaches six – quite the opposite. The stages indicate a shift in emphasis: the father ‘comes to the fore’ more from six to thirteen, and the importance of mentors increases from fourteen onwards. In a sense, it’s about adding new ingredients at each stage.
The three stages help us know what to do. For example, we know that fathers of boys from six to fourteen must not be just busy workaholics, or absent themselves emotionally or physically from the family. If they do, this will certainly damage their sons. (Yet most fathers of the twentieth century did just that – as many of us can remember from our own childhood.)
The stages tell us that we must look for extra help from the community when our sons are in their mid-teens – the role that used to be taken by extended family members (uncles and grandfathers) or by the tradesman–apprentice relationship. Too often, teenagers move outwards into the big world but no one is there to catch them, and they spend their teens and early adulthood in a dangerous halfway stage, with only peers to depend on.
It’s a fair bet that many problems with boys’ behaviour – poor school motivation, depression, young men getting into trouble with the law (drink-driving, fights, crime, etc.) – have escalated because we haven’t known about these stages and provided the right human ingredients at the right times.
The stages are so important that we must look at each of them in more detail and decide how to respond. That’s what we’ll do now.
From Birth to Six: The Gentle Years
Babies are babies. Whether they are a boy or girl is not a concern to them, and needn’t be to us, either. Babies love to be cuddled, to play, to be tickled and to giggle; to explore and to be swooshed around. Their personalities vary a lot. Some are easy to handle, quiet and relaxed, and sleep long hours. Others are noisy and wakeful, always wanting some action. Some are anxious and fretful, needing lots of reassurance that we are there and that we love them.
© The Light Photography/Shutterstock.com
What all babies and toddlers need most is to form a special bond with at least one person. Usually this person is their mother. Partly because she is the one who is most willing and motivated, partly because she provides the milk, and partly because she tends to be cuddly, restful and soothing in her approach, a mother is usually the best equipped to provide what a baby needs. Her own hormones (especially prolactin, which is released into her bloodstream as she breastfeeds) prime her to want to be with her child and to give it her full attention.1
Except for breastfeeding, dads can provide all a baby needs. But dads tend to do it differently: studies show them to be more vigorous in their playing2 – they like to stir children up, while mothers like to calm them down (although if fathers get as deprived of sleep as mothers sometimes do, they too will want to calm baby down!).
Learning to Love
If a mother is the main caregiver, a boy will see her as his first model for intimacy and love. If she builds this close bond, then from toddlerhood on – if she sets limits with her son firmly but without hitting or shaming him – he will take this in his stride. He will want to please her, and will be easier to manage because the attachment is so strong. He knows he has a special place in her heart. Being made to wait or to change his behaviour might baffle him, but he will get over it. He knows he’s loved, and he will not want to displease the person at the centre of his existence.
Mum’s interest and fun in teaching and talking to him helps his brain to develop more verbal skills and makes him more sociable. Boys need more help than girls to catch on to social skills (more on this later).
If a mother is terribly depressed, and therefore unresponsive in the first year or two of her son’s life, his brain may undergo physical changes and become a ‘sad brain’.3 If she is constantly angry, hitting or hurting him, he will be confused over whether she loves him. (Please note, this is constant anger we are talking about, not occasional rattiness that all parents feel and show. We aren’t supposed to be angels as parents – if we are, how would our children learn about the real world?)
Those of us who are around young mothers have to be careful to support and help them, to ensure they are not left isolated or overwhelmed with physical tasks. A mother needs others to augment her life so she can relax and do this important work. If we care for young mothers, they can care for their babies. Husbands and partners are the first rank of help, but family and neighbours are also needed.
What Goes On Between Mother and Baby Boy?
Science has trouble measuring something like love, but it’s getting better. Scientists studying mothers and babies have observed what they call ‘joint attention sequences’. This is love in action, love you can see. You will have certainly experienced this with your own child. The baby seeks out your attention with a gurgle or cry. You look towards him and see that he is looking at you. He is thrilled to make eye contact, and wiggles with delight. You talk back to him. Or maybe you are holding him or changing him, and you feel that closeness as you sing to or tickle him. He impacts on you, and you on him. The exchange goes on, a ‘pre-words’ conversation – it’s delightful and warm. Researchers filmed mothers and babies going about their day, and discovered that joint attention sequences happen between 50 and 100 times a day.4 This is where the ability to relate to others skilfully and sensitively is first learnt.
Another kind of joint attention sequence is when a child is distressed and you croon, stroke or hold him gently, and distract him – you care for him based on your growing experience of what works to help him calm down. Or you engage with him just to enjoy seeing him become happy or excited. Soon your ‘joint attention’ might be directed at a toy, a flower, an animal or a noise-making object that you enthuse about together. You are teaching him to be interested in his world.
This is one of the most significant things a parent ever does for their baby. Inside baby’s little head, his brain is sprouting like broccoli in the springtime. When a baby is happy, growth hormone flows through his body and right into his brain, and development blossoms. When he is stressed, the stress hormone – cortisol – slows down growth, especially brain growth. So interaction, laughter and love are like food for a baby’s brain. All this interaction is being remembered in these new brain areas: the baby is learning how to read faces and moods, be sensitive, and learn calmness, fun, stern admonition or warm love. Soon he will be adding language, music, movement, rhythm and, above all, the capacity for feeling good and being empathic with other people. Boy babies are just a little slower, a little less wired for sociability than girls, and so they especially need this help. And they need it from someone who knows them very well, who has the time and who is themselves reasonably happy and content.
The process keeps going right into little-boyhood. A mother shows delight when her child makes mud pies, and admires his achievements. His father tickles him and play-wrestles with him, and is also gentle and nurturing, reading stories and comforting him when he is sick. The little boy learns that men are kind as well as exciting, that dads read books and are capable in the home; and that mothers are kind but also practical, and part of the bigger world.
In Short
To sum up, the first lessons boys need to learn are in closeness – shown through trust, warmth, fun and kindness. Under six years of age, gender isn’t a big deal, and it shouldn’t be made so. Mothers are usually the primary parent, but a father can also take this place. What matters is that one or two key people love the child and make him central for these few years. That way, he develops inner security for life, and his brain acquires the skills of intimate communication and a love of life and the world. These years are soon over. Enjoy your little boy while you can!
From Six to Fourteen: Learning to Be Male
At around six years of age, a big change takes place in boys. There seems to be a ‘switching on’ of boys’ masculinity at this age. Even boys who have not watched any television suddenly want to play with swords, wear Superman capes, fight and wrestle and make lots of noise.5 Something else happens that is really important: it’s been observed in all societies around the world. At around six years of age, little boys seem to ‘lock on’ to their dad, or stepdad, or whichever male is around, and want to be with him, learn from him and copy him. They want to study how to be male.
If a dad ignores his son at this time, the boy will often launch an all-out campaign to get his attention. Once I consulted in the case of a little boy who repeatedly became seriously ill for no apparent reason. He was placed in intensive care. His father, a leading medical specialist, flew back from a conference overseas to be with him, and the boy got better. The father went away to another conference, and the illness came back. That’s when they called in the psychologists. We asked the father to reconfigure his lifestyle, which involved being on the road for eight months a year. He did this, and the boy has not been ill since.
Boys may steal, break things, act aggressively at school and develop any number of problem behaviours just to get Dad to take an interest. But if Dad is already in there on a daily basis playing, teaching and caring for his son, then this stage will go smoothly.
Mums Still Matter Just as Much
This sudden shift of interest to the father does not mean that Mum leaves the picture. In the past, in North America and the UK especially, mothers would often distance themselves from their boys at this age, to ‘toughen them up’. (This was also the age that the British upper classes sent their boys to boarding school.) But as Olga Silverstein has argued in her book, The Courage to Raise Good Men,6 this often backfired. If, in the early years, a mother suddenly withdraws her presence or her warmth and affection, then a terrible thing happens: the boy, to control his grief and pain, shuts down the part of him that connects with her – his tender and loving part. He finds it just too painful to feel loving feelings if they are no longer reciprocated by his mother. If a boy shuts down this part of him, he will have trouble as an adult expressing warmth or tenderness to his own partner or children, and will be a rather tense and brittle man.7 We all know men like this (bosses, fathers, even husbands) who are emotionally restricted and awkward with people. We can make sure our sons are not like this by hugging them, talking to them, listening to their feelings, whether they are five, ten or fifteen.
© Darren Baker/Shutterstock.com
Mothers have to stay constant, while being willing to let Dad also play his part. Boys need to know they can count on Mum, in order to keep their tender feelings alive. Things work best if they can stay close to Mum, but add Dad, too. If a dad feels a child is too taken up with his mother’s world (which can happen), he should increase his own involvement – not criticise the mother! Sometimes a dad is too critical or expects too much, and the boy is afraid of him. A father might have to learn to be more thoughtful, gentler, or just more fun, if his son is to successfully cross the bridge into manhood with him.
The six- to fourteen-year-old boy still adores his mother, and has plenty to learn from her. But his interests are changing – he is becoming more focused on what men have to offer. A boy knows that he is turning into a man. He has to ‘download the software’ from an available male to complete his development.
The mother’s job is to relax about this, and stay warm and supportive. The father’s job is to progressively step up his involvement. If there is no father around, then the child depends more on finding other men – at school, for instance.
PRACTICAL HELP
WHAT TO DO IF YOU’RE A SINGLE MOTHER
For thousands of years, single mothers have needed to raise boys without a man in the house. And more often than not, these boys have turned out just great. Please take this on board right away – mums on their own can raise fine men.
Over the years I have interviewed mothers who did this, to find out their secret. Successful single mothers of sons always give the same advice. Firstly, they found good male role models, calling in help from uncles, good friends, schoolteachers, sports coaches, youth leaders and so on (choosing with care to guard against the risk of sexual abuse). A boy needs to know what a good man looks like. If caring men are involved enough, and over a sufficiently long period of time, this provides that one missing thing a mother can’t give – a male example to copy. If there are one or two good men who know and care about your son, it makes a huge difference. (It’s the same if you are in a two-mother family, raising a boy. There will be men in your social circle who are the kind of man you would want your son to emulate. Ask them to get involved.)
Single mums can also comfort themselves that, after all, many boys with dads only see them for basically a few minutes a day. Whatever you do, don’t marry some deadbeat just so your son can have a man in the house!
Part of the survival kit of single mothers is the network(s) of good men in their community. If you are a dad, your son will certainly have friends who don’t have a dad present or whose dad is not very involved. Think about inviting that boy when you plan a trip to a concert, the beach, a sports game or a weekend away with your own son. His mum will be so appreciative, though she would never have asked for this, not wanting to impose. (She may be a little cautious, so perhaps don’t start with a nine-day wilderness trek.)
Single parents need to be networked. Being involved in a community group, church, sporting or hobby group, extended family, or just a neighbourhood where kids are loved and valued is a natural way to provide other good adult role models and people to bounce off, especially in adolescence.
There’s one more thing. All the successful single parents I’ve known also recognised they needed to be kind to themselves, and not become long-suffering martyrs. (Martyrdom is like yoghurt: it has a shelf life of maybe two weeks, then it tends to go kind of sour!) Single parents who did well planned into their lives a massage, a game of racquetball, a yoga class, or just time vegging out watching television when the children were asleep – and they kept this commitment to their own wellbeing. (For more help on single parenting, see here.)
PRACTICAL HELP
FIVE FATHERING ESSENTIALS
All fathers have one thing in common: they would like to be good dads. The problem is, if we weren’t given great fathering ourselves, and many of us weren’t, how do you turn good intentions into action? What if you just never got the ‘software’? The best way is to hang around other men and learn from what they do, see what you would copy and what you would never repeat! From talking to hundreds of men, here are five basic clues.
1 Start early. Be involved in the pregnancy – talk with your partner about your hopes for the child and your plans and dreams for how you want your family to be. Plan to be at the birth – and stick to the plan! Go to some birth classes, especially those just for fathers, which are being offered more and more. Once your baby is born, get involved in baby care right from the start. Have a speciality. Bathing is good: they are slippery little suckers, but it’s a fun time and a big help. This is the key time for relationship-building. Caring for a baby ‘primes’ you hormonally and alters your life priorities. So beware! Fathers who care for babies physically start to get fascinated and very in tune with them – it’s called ‘engrossment’. Men can become the expert at getting babies back to sleep in the middle of the night – walking them, bouncing, singing gently, or whatever works for you! Don’t settle for being useless around babies – keep at it, get support and advice from the baby’s mother and other experienced friends. And take pride in your ability. If you have a demanding career, use your weekends or holidays to get immersed in your child. From when your child is two, encourage your partner to go away for the weekend with her girlfriends and leave you and your toddler alone, so that both you and she know you are capable and can ‘do it all’. Try to clean up before she gets home – this really impresses spouses.
2 Make time. This is the bottom line, so listen closely. For fathers, this may be the most important sentence in this whole book: if you routinely work a fifty-five- or sixty-hour week, including commute times, you just won’t cut it as a dad. Your sons will have problems in life, your daughters will have self-esteem issues, and it will be down to you. Fathers need to get home in time to play, laugh, teach and tickle their children. Corporate life, and also small business, can be enemies of the family. Often fathers find the answer is to accept a lower income and be around their family more. Next time you’re offered a promotion involving longer hours and more nights away from home, seriously consider telling your boss, ‘Sorry, my kids come first.’
3 Show your love. Hugging, holding and playing tickling and wrestling games can take place right through to adulthood! Do gentler things, too – kids respond to quiet storytelling, sitting together, singing or playing music. Tell your kids how great, beautiful, creative and intelligent they are (often, and with feeling). If your parents were not demonstrative, you will just have to learn. Some dads fear that cuddling their son will turn him into a ‘sissy’. In fact, the reverse is probably true. Sons whose dads are affectionate and playful with them will be closer to their fathers, want to emulate them more, and be comfortable in the company of men. For both sons and daughters, a dad’s affection is vital. A child can’t understand that you work long hours, worry over tax forms or scrimp and save for his future, because that’s not something he can see or touch. Kids know they are loved through touch and eye contact and laughter and fun. Affection is reassuring – it conveys love in a way that words cannot. Children who are hugged and kissed feel safer in the world, and when Dad does it too, they are doubly secure.
4 Lighten up. Enjoy your kids. Being with them out of guilt or obligation is second-rate – they sense you are not really there in spirit. Experiment to find those activities that you both enjoy. Take the pressure to achieve off your kids: when you play a sport or game, don’t get into too much heavy coaching or competition. Remember to laugh and muck about. Only enrol them in one, or at most two organised sports or activities, so they have time to just ‘be’. Reduce racing-around time, and devote it instead to walks, games and conversations. Avoid over-competitiveness in any activity beyond what is good fun. Teach your kids, continuously, everything you know.8
5 Heavy down. Some fathers today are lightweight ‘good-time’ dads who leave all the hard stuff to their partners. After a while of this, these partners start to say, ‘I have three kids, and one of them is my husband.’ There is an unmistakable indicator for this – when your sex life declines badly!Get involved in the decisions and discussions in the kitchen, help to supervise homework and housework. Develop ways of discipline that are calm but definite. Don’t hit – although with young children you may have to gently hold and restrain them from time to time. Don’t shout if you can help it. Aim to be the person who stays calm, keeps things on track, and pushes the discussion on about how to solve behaviour problems. You are your children’s guide. through your clarity, focus and experience, not through being bigger and meaner. Do listen to your kids, and take their feelings into account.Talk with your partner about the big picture: ‘How are we doing overall? What changes are needed?’ Parenting as a team can add a new bond between you and your partner. Check with your partner if you are stuck or don’t know how to react. You don’t have to have all the answers – no one does. Parenthood is about making mistakes, fixing them, and moving right along.
In Short
All through the primary school years and into mid-high school, boys should spend a lot of time with their fathers and mothers, gaining their help, learning how to do things, and enjoying their company. From an emotional viewpoint, the father is now more significant. The boy is ready to learn from his dad, and listens to what he has to say. Often he will take more notice of his father. It’s enough to drive a mother wild!
This window of time – from about age six to the fourteenth birthday – is the major opportunity for a father to have an influence on (and build the foundations of masculinity in) his son. Now is the time to ‘make time’. Little things count: playing in the backyard on summer evenings; going for walks and talking about life and telling him about your own childhood; working on hobbies or sports together, just for the enjoyment of doing it. This is when good memories are laid down, which will nourish your son, and you, for decades to come.
Don’t be deterred if your son acts ‘cool’, as he has learnt to do this from his schoolmates. Persist and you will find a laughing, playful boy just under the surface. Enjoy this time when he really is wanting to be with you. By mid-adolescence his interests will pull him more and more into the wider world beyond. All I can do here is plead with you – don’t leave it too late!
Fourteen and Onwards: Becoming a Man
At around fourteen years of age a new stage begins. Usually by now a boy is growing fast, and a remarkable thing is happening on the inside – his testosterone levels have increased by almost 800 per cent over his pre-puberty amount!9
Although every boy is different, it’s common for boys at this age to get a little argumentative, restless and moody. It’s not that they are turning bad – it’s just that they are being born into a new self, and any type of birth always involves some struggle. They are needing to find answers to big questions, to begin new adventures and challenges, and to learn competencies for living – and their body clock is urging them on.
I believe this is the age when we fail kids the most. In our society, all we offer the mid-teens is ‘more of the same’: more school, more of the routines of home. But the adolescent is hungry for something else, something new. He is hormonally and physically ready to break out into an adult role, but we want him to wait another four or five years! It’s little wonder that problems arise.
© Dejan Dundjerski/Shutterstock.com
What’s needed is something that will engage the spirit of a boy – that will pull him headlong into some creative effort or passion that gives his life wings. All the things that parents have nightmares about (adolescent risk-taking, alcohol, drugs, unsafe sex and criminal activity) happen because we do not find channels for young men’s desire for glory and heroic roles. Boys look at the larger society and see little to believe in or join in with. Even their rebellion is packaged up and sold back to them by advertisers and the music industry. They want to jump somewhere better and higher, but that place is nowhere in sight.
What Old Societies Did
In every society before ours – from the tropics to the poles – in every time and place that has been studied by anthropologists, mid-teen boys received a burst of intensive care and attention from the whole community. This was a universal human activity, so it must have been important. These cultures knew something we are still learning – that parents cannot raise teenage boys without getting the help of other adults.
One reason for this is that fourteen-year-old sons and their fathers drive each other crazy. Often it’s all a father can manage to love his son. Trying to do this and teach him can be just impossible. (Remember your dad teaching you to drive?) Somehow the two males just get their horns tangled and make each other worse. Fathers get too intense: they feel they are running out of time as a dad, and they see their own mistakes being repeated.
Once, when I was an inexperienced family therapist, we saw a family whose fourteen-year-old teenage son had run away and lived in the railway yards for several days. He was found, but it scared everyone, and the family felt they needed to get help. Talking to them, we discovered a remarkable thing. Sean was their youngest son, but he wasn’t the first to do this running away thing! Each of their three sons had ‘done a runner’ around this age. My boss, a wise and scarily intuitive man, looked the father straight in the eye. ‘Where did you go when you were fourteen?’ The father pretended not to understand but, with his entire family looking accusingly on at him, grinned foolishly and spilled the beans. He had been a teenage runaway at fourteen after huge fights with his dad. He’d never told his wife about this, let alone his kids. Without knowing it, though, he had become increasingly impossible, uptight and picky as his own sons reached that age. Effectively, unconsciously, he drove them to run away. Luckily, the family tradition called for coming home again, safe and sound.
© Dragon Images/Shutterstock.com
So fathers and fourteen-year-old sons can get a bit tense with each other. If someone else can assist with the male role at this age, then dads and sons can relax a little. (Some wonderful movies have been based on this – look out for Searching for Bobby Fisher, Finding Forrester and The Run of the Country, or all three seasons of the TV series Newsroom.)
Traditionally, two things were done to help young men into adulthood. First, they were ‘taken on’ and mentored into adulthood by one or more men who cared about them and taught them important skills for living. And second, at certain stages of this mentoring process, the young men were taken away by the community of older men and initiated. This meant being put through some serious growing-up processes, including testing, sacred teaching and new responsibilities. We’ll come back to this in the final chapter, on community.
We can contrast initiations such as the Lakota experience (see here) with many modern-day sons and their mothers, who (according to writers like Babette Smith in Mothers and Sons10) often remain in an awkward, distant or rather infantile relationship for life. These sons fear getting too close, and yet, being uninitiated as men, they never really escape. Instead, they relate to all women in a dependent and immature way. Not having entered the community of men, they are distrustful of other men and have few real friends. They are afraid of commitment to women because for them it means being mothered, and that means being controlled. They are real ‘nowhere men’.
It’s only by leaving the world of women that young men can break the mother-mould and relate to women as fellow adults. Domestic violence, unfaithfulness and the inability to make a marriage work may result not from any problem with women but from men’s failure to take boys on this transforming journey.
You might think that (in the old societies) the boys’ mothers, and perhaps the fathers too, would resent or fear their son being ‘taken over’ by others. But this was not the case. The initiators were men they had known and trusted all their lives. The women understood and welcomed this help, because they sensed the need for it. They were giving up a rather troublesome boy and getting back a more mature and integrated young man. And they were probably very proud of him.
The initiation into adulthood was not a one-off ‘weekend special’. It could involve months of teaching about how to behave as a man, what responsibilities men took on, and where to find strength and direction. The ceremonies we normally hear about were only the marker events. Sometimes these ceremonies were harsh and frightening (and we would not want to return to these) but they were done with purpose and care, and were spoken of with great appreciation by those who had passed through them.
Traditional societies depended for their survival on raising competent and responsible young men. It was a life-and-death issue, never left to chance. They developed very proactive programmes for doing this, and the process involved the whole adult community in a concerted effort. (Some innovative ways we might go about this, appropriate to our times, are described in the final chapter, ‘A Community Challenge’.)
In the Modern World
Mentoring today is mostly unplanned and piecemeal, and lots of young men don’t receive any mentoring at all. Those doing the mentoring – sports coaches, uncles, teachers and bosses – rarely understand their role, and may do it badly. Mentoring used to happen in the workplace, especially under the apprenticeship system, whereby a young man learnt a great deal about attitudes and responsibilities along with his trade skills. This has all but disappeared – you won’t get much mentoring while stacking shelves at the local supermarket.
Enlisting the Help of Others
The years from fourteen until the early twenties are for moving into the adult world, for separating from parents. Parents carefully and watchfully ease back. This is the time when a son develops a life which is quite separate from the family. He has teachers you barely know, experiences you never hear about, and he faces challenges that you cannot help him with. Pretty scary stuff.
© Jack Frog/Shutterstock.com
A fourteen- or sixteen-year-old is far from ready to just be ‘out there’. There have to be others to act as a bridge, and this is what mentors do. We should not leave youngsters in a peer group at this age without adult care. But a mentor is more than a teacher or a coach: a mentor is special to the child and the child is special to him. A sixteen-year-old will not always listen to his parents – his inclination is not to. But a mentor is different. This is the time for the youngster to make his ‘glorious mistakes’, and part of the mentor’s job is to make sure the mistakes are not fatal.
Parents have to ensure that mentoring happens – and they should have a big hand in choosing who does it. It really helps to belong to a strong social group – an active church, a family-minded sports club, a community-oriented school, or a group of friends who really care about each other.
You need to have these kinds of friends to provide what uncles and aunts used to – someone who cares about and enjoys your kids. These friends can show an interest in your youngsters, and ask them about their views. Hopefully they will make your kids welcome in their homes, ‘kick their bum’ occasionally, and be a listening ear when things at home are a little tense. (Many a mother has experienced a big fight with her teenage daughter, who then runs off to tell her woes to her mum’s best friend down the road. This is what friends are for!)
You can do the same for their kids, too. Teenagers are quite enjoyable when they are not your own!
What If There Is No Mentor Available?
If there are no mentors around, then a young man will fall into a lot of potholes on the road to adulthood. He may fight needlessly with his parents in trying to establish himself as independent. He may just become withdrawn and depressed. Kids at this age have so many dilemmas and decisions – about sexuality, career choices, what to do about drugs and alcohol. If Mum and Dad keep spending time with him, and are in touch with his world, then he will keep talking to them about these things. But sometimes there will be a need to talk to other adults, too. In one study, it was shown that just one good adult friend outside the family was a significant preventative of juvenile crime (as long as the friend isn’t into crime!).11
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Young men will try their best to find structure and direction in their lives. They may choose born-again religion or an Eastern cult, disappear into the internet, follow Emo or Goth music and fashion, play sport, join a gang or go surfing. These pursuits may be helpful or harmful. If we don’t have a community for kids to belong to, they will make their own. But a community made up only of the peer group is not enough – it may be just a group of lost souls, without the skills or knowledge to help each other. Many boys’ friendship circles are really just loose collections that offer very little sharing or emotional support.
The worst thing we can do with adolescents is leave them alone. This is why we need those really great schoolteachers, sport coaches, scout leaders, youth workers and many other sources of adult involvement at this age. We need enough so that there is someone special for every kid – a tall order. Today we mostly get mothering right, and fathering is undergoing a great resurgence. Finding good mentors for the kids in our community is the next big hurdle.
STORIES FROM THE HEART
A LAKOTA INITIATION
The Native American people known as the Lakota were a vigorous and successful society, characterised by especially equal relationships between men and women.
At around the age of fourteen, Lakota boys were sent on a ‘vision quest’, or initiation test. This involved sitting and fasting on a mountain peak to await a vision or hallucination brought on by hunger. This vision would include a being who would bring messages from the spirit world to guide the boy’s life. As the boy sat alone on the peak, he would hear mountain lions snarl and move in the darkness below him. In fact the sounds were made by the men of the tribe, keeping watch to ensure the boy’s safety. A young person was too precious to the Lakota to endanger needlessly.
Eventually, when the young man returned to the tribe, his achievement was celebrated. But from that day, for two whole years, he was not permitted to speak directly to his mother.
Lakota mothers, like the women of all hunter-gatherer groups, are very close and affectionate with their children, and the children often sleep alongside them in the women’s huts and tents. The Lakota believed that if the boy spoke to his mother immediately following his entry into manhood, the pull back into boyhood would be so great that he would ‘fall’ back into the world of childhood and never grow up.
After the two years had passed, a ceremonial rejoining of the mother and son took place, but by this time he was a man and able to relate to her as such. The reward that Lakota mothers gained from this ‘letting go’ is that they were assured their sons would return as respectful and close adult friends.
STORIES FROM THE HEART
THE STORY OF NAT, STAN AND THE MOTORBIKE
Nat was fifteen, and his life was not going well. He had always hated school and found writing difficult, and things were just mounting up. The school he went to was a caring school, and his parents, the counsellor and the principal knew each other and could talk comfortably. They met and decided that if Nat could find a job, they would arrange an exemption. Perhaps he was one of those boys who would be happier in the adult world than the in-between world of high school.
Luckily Nat got a job in a one-man pizza shop, Stan’s Pizza, and left school. Stan, who was about thirty-five, was doing a good trade and needed help. Nat went to work there and loved it: his voice deepened, he stood taller, his bank balance grew. His parents, though, began to worry for a new reason. Nat planned to buy a motorbike – a big bike – to get to work. Their home was up a winding, slippery road in the mountains. They watched in horror as his savings got closer to the price of the motorcycle. They suggested a car, to no avail. Time passed.
One day Nat came home and, in the way of teenage boys, muttered something sideways as he walked past the dinner table. Something about a car. They asked him to repeat it, not sure if they should. ‘Oh, I’m not going to get a bike. I was talking to Stan. Stan reckons a bloke’d be an idiot to buy a motorbike living up here. He reckons I should wait an’ get a car.’
‘Thank God for Stan!’ thought his parents, but outwardly they just smiled and went on eating their meal.
PRACTICAL HELP
BOYS AND HEARING
Colin is ten. He is in trouble at school because he doesn’t pay attention. He gets bored, starts to mess around, and gets sent to the principal’s office. Is he stupid? Bad? Does he have ADHD or ODD (Oppositional Defiant Disorder) or OCD (Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder) or any of the other Ds? Perhaps, but there’s another possibility. What if he just can’t hear? What if his teacher’s voice is too soft and he gets bored with its faintness, and at home he misses half of what is being said to him? Many parents joke that their son seems deaf when told to clean up his room. And school nurses have long noted that boys get blocked ears more frequently than girls. But there may be more serious factors at play.
Psychologist Leonard Sax, in his book, Why Gender Matters,12 makes some extreme claims about boys’ hearing. He presents research to show that boys do not hear as well as girls, and argues that boys need teachers who speak louder. He cites Janel Caine, a postgraduate student in Florida, who studied the effects of music on premature babies.13 These babies lie in their incubators all day, and Caine felt that perhaps some gentle music might help their growth and development. And boy, was she was right! In her astonishing findings, girl babies receiving music ‘therapy’ were discharged from the hospital on average nine days sooner than those who didn’t have the music. It really perked them up! But here’s the thing: boy babies did not show any such benefit. They either didn’t hear the music, or it didn’t affect them.
It’s actually hard to know what tiny babies hear – we can’t just ask them, ‘Did you hear that?’ But lately, some methods have been discovered that can tell if the brain is receiving the message that goes into the ears. Dr Sax claims that, in studies of ‘acoustic brain response’, girl babies have an 80 per cent greater brain response to sounds than baby boys do. And guess what frequency this is in? The frequency of speech.
The difference continues into adolescence and adulthood. This might explain that terrible syndrome – complained about by teenage girls worldwide – that Dad is always yelling at them, when Dad thinks he is using a gentle voice!
In a number of recent commentaries, however, Dr Sax has been accused of exaggerating or misrepresenting the research.14 And it does stand to reason that if a huge gender hearing difference was the norm, audiologists would have told us about it earlier.
Nonetheless, there is no harm in being more hearing-aware around boys. And dads, if your daughters wince when you talk to them, maybe talk a little softer.
It’s more likely that the problem of boys in school is not so much to do with hearing as with understanding. Australian audiologists Jan Pollard and Dr Kathy Rowe found that about a quarter of children aged six have poor auditory processing (separating what they hear into meaningful words). And most of these children (70 per cent) turn out to be boys. These children have trouble understanding a sentence if it has more than eight words in it! Because teachers often use much longer sentences when teaching, these kids are stuck trying to understand the first part while the teacher (or parent) is going full-steam ahead with the rest of the message. The researchers recommend that teachers use short sentences, and only go on speaking when they see that ‘lights-on’ effect in children’s eyes.15 And Dr Sax adds that perhaps boys should sit at the front of the class, not the back.
PRACTICAL HELP
OVERCOMING BOYS’ TENDENCY TO ARROGANCE
It’s possible that boys are naturally prone to a certain degree of arrogance. Until recently, boys were often raised expecting to be waited on by women. In some cultures, boys are still treated like little gods. In today’s world, the result can be an obnoxious boy that no one wants to be around.
It’s therefore very important that boys are taught humility – through experiences such as having to apologise, having to do work to help others, and always having to be respectful to others. Kids have to know their place in the world, or the world will most likely teach them a harsh lesson.
Whenever you are treated badly by youngsters – jostled in the street by a skateboarder, treated rudely by a young salesperson, or have your house burgled – you are dealing with youngsters who have not been helped to fit in and be useful.
Teenagers are naturally prone to be somewhat self-absorbed, to fit their morality to their own self-interest, and to be thoughtless of others. Our job as parents is to engage them in vigorous discussions about their obligations to others, fairness, and plain right and wrong. We must reinforce some basics – ‘Be responsible. Think things through. Consider others. Think of consequences’. Just loving your kids isn’t enough, some toughness is necessary. Mothers begin this, fathers reinforce it, and elders add their weight if it still hasn’t sunk in.
One good strategy is to have boys involved in service to others – the elderly, disabled people, or young children whom they help or teach. They learn the satisfaction of service, and they grow in self-worth at the same time.
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IN A NUTSHELL
In the years between birth and six, boys need lots of affection so they can ‘learn to love’. Talking and teaching one-to-one helps them connect to the world. The mother is usually the best person to provide this, although a father can take this part.
At about the age of six, boys show a strong interest in maleness, and the father becomes the primary parent. His interest and time become critical. The mother’s part remains important, however: she shouldn’t ‘back off’ from her son just because he is older.
From about fourteen years of age, boys need mentors – other adults who care about them personally and who help them move gradually into the larger world. Old societies provided initiation to mark this stage, and mentors were much more available.
Single mothers can raise boys well, but must search carefully for good, safe, male role models and must devote some time to self-care (since they are doing the work of two).