The Complete Parenting Collection

The Complete Parenting Collection Steve Biddulph Australian writer and lecturer Steve Biddulph presents his bestselling parenting guides Raising Boys and Raising Girls, available for the first time in a single eBook-only volume.In the global phenomenon Raising Boys, Steve Biddulph shares and gives practical and honest advice to parents so they can recognise the different stages of boyhood and learn how to raise happy, confident and kind young men. Biddulph has updated his classic book to explore more important topics and to offer parents real-life situations, thought-provoking insights, humour and help.Raising Girls acts as both a guidebook and a call-to-arms for parents. The five key stages of girlhood are laid out so that you know exactly what matters at which age, and how to build strength and connectedness into your daughter from infancy onwards. It is both fierce and tender in its mission to help girls more at every age. It’s a book for parents who love their daughters deeply, whether they are newborns, teenagers, young women – or anywhere in between. The Complete Parenting Collection Steve Biddulph Raising Boys and Steve Biddulph’s Raising Girls Contents Cover (#u4fda6eee-526d-592e-ae96-3cd597885d84) Title Page (#u9115079e-92c0-53aa-8943-f73196999f0b) Raising Boys (#u65a9d97a-8f7b-5d34-97ed-7ea0332672a8) Steve Biddulph’s Raising Girls (#litres_trial_promo) Also by Steve Biddulph (#litres_trial_promo) Copyright (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) Raising boys Why boys are different – and how to help thembecome happy and well-balanced men Third edition Steve Biddulph Illustrations by Paul Stanish Table of Contents Title Page (#ua0ff9f82-e3b7-5a76-a7a0-350dd2fde95b) Preface to the new edition (#ua87a7512-7097-5279-9ed0-f6967f13d30e) 1 What is it with boys? (#u58a7b6e7-2553-52c2-bb55-d5979570e166) 2 The three stages of boyhood (#u353f57b5-f38e-5a85-b94e-956e80c6fe8b) 3 Testosterone! (#ucdf2c665-1522-5be4-a198-ea4d293b752b) 4 How boys’ and girls’ brains differ (#u6bb043a0-bf2e-5535-8f75-c7736409b4a7) 5 What dads can do (#u42520a01-0318-5f68-9d7c-f1d3b1d2193b) 6 Mothers and sons (#uff947750-3c23-59c5-9b39-781572153073) 7 Developing a healthy sexuality (#litres_trial_promo) 8 A revolution in schooling (#litres_trial_promo) 9 Boys and sport (#litres_trial_promo) 10 A community challenge (#litres_trial_promo) About the Author (#litres_trial_promo) Author’s notes (#litres_trial_promo) Copyright (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) Preface to the new edition (#ulink_1f150cae-b48d-5fea-b6af-a5098a5c77ea) As the twentieth century drew to a close, it was looking bad for boys. Mothers in the labour ward, when told, ‘It’ s a boy!’, groaned ‘Oh no …’ Girls in the 1990s were on the move, going places, focussed and confident, but boys were somehow all wrong – too noisy, too energetic, unmotivated at school, dangerous to themselves and others. And then they turned into – men! But those of us who worked with families – or who had boys of our own and loved them dearly – knew this wasn’t right. Two vital truths needed to be remembered: that boys were different, in small but important ways; and that by understanding their psychology, the stages of their development, their hormones and their hard-wired nature, we could raise them to be fine young men – safe, caring, passionate and purposeful. This book you hold in your hands was the first, worldwide, of a slew of boy books, and it helped the world to turn a corner. It was a bestseller in Australia, the UK, Germany, Japan, Brazil and fifteen other countries; but more than that, it was loved, kept by the bedside, dog-eared and much visited. People urged their friends to read it. Women nudged their husbands in bed and said, ‘Listen to this …’ Boys have real dangers in their lives. They are three times more likely than girls to die before the age of 21, and five times more likely to have problems at school. Millions of boys have lessened chances in life because we have failed to understand and love them. But all across the globe things are changing. Recent research has demonstrated that boys have turned around and are now less at risk than ten years ago. We are getting better at raising them. With this new realisation of boys’ needs – for exercise, for warm relationships with mothers, for fathers and other good men in their lives to be active and engaged, for schools that know how to teach in boy-friendly ways – we can now go much further. We can raise a generation of boys that are happier, more alive, more connected to the human race, just in time for a world that so badly needs good men. Boys are fun. They make you laugh. They are full of life, and can share that energy with you. They speak from the heart and are forgiving. So I have tried to put all those qualities into this book. Whether your son is a tiny baby, a young schoolboy, or a teenager surging with hormones and hopes, this book is for you. I hope you like it. And I hope that if, one day, your daughter has a baby son, she will say, ‘Wow, that’s fantastic!’ Steve Biddulph Tasmania, 2008 www.stevebiddulph.com Chapter 1 What is it with boys? (#ulink_be26bbd5-6dae-57b3-a9c1-ebfbf3469bca) Last night I drove into town for a meeting, or at least tried to, and the situation with young men was once again thrust into my face. Three cars ahead of me, the Pacific Highway was blocked. A car driven by a teenage boy, with four friends as passengers, had attempted to pull out into the traffic, but miscalculated. A truck coming up behind had hit the car and carried it 50 metres along the road, badly crushing it in the impact. Soon the emergency vehicles arrived: fire, police, ambulance. Men worked in teams, calmly but rapidly dealing with the situation. The young driver was gradually cut out of the wreck unconscious. His four male passengers had varying injuries, some serious. An older woman, perhaps the mother of one of the boys, came running from a nearby farm. A policeman gently comforted her. Maleness was everywhere – inexperience and risk on the one side; competence, caring and steadiness on the other. It kind of summed up for me the male situation. Men, when they turn out well, are wonderful – selfless, heroic, hardworking. But being young and male is so vulnerable, so prone to disaster. When we see a boy born these days, we can’t help wondering – how will he turn out? Boys at risk Thirty years ago, it was girls that everyone worried about. Across the world, a huge and spirited effort was mounted to raise the horizons of girls, to give them confidence that they could do anything they wanted with their lives, and to demolish the barriers to their achievement. And it’s working: today it’s the girls who are more sure of themselves, motivated and capable. More girls finish school, more girls go to university, and they get better marks. Parents of daughters often find that their girls are focussed, clear-headed, and know where they are going. Boys, by comparison, often don’t have a clue. They seem to be adrift in life, failing at school, awkward in relationships, at risk for violence, alcohol and drugs. The differences start early – visit any preschool and see for yourself. The girls work together happily; the boys pretend to be Indians attacking a wagon train in an old Western movie. They annoy the girls and fight with each other. In primary school the boys’ work is often sloppy and inferior. Teachers spend all their time containing the boys, and the girls miss out on attention. By the time they reach eight or nine, most boys don’t read books any more. They speak in one-word sentences: ‘Huh?’ ‘Awwwwyeaaah!’ In secondary school they don’t participate in debating, concerts, student councils or any non-sport activity. They pretend not to care about anything, and act like ‘it’s cool to be a fool’. At speech nights the teachers are embarrassed that no prizes seem to go to the boys. In the relationships department, many teenage boys are unsure about girls and how to get along with them. Some become painfully shy, others are aggressive and unpleasant when girls are around. They seem to lack even the most basic conversation skills. And the bottom line, the thing we parents feel in the pit of our stomach, is of course safety. By fifteen, boys are three times more likely to die than girls – usually from accidents, violence and suicide. Three times more likely to die! And for every boy who dies on the road, ten more are left brain-damaged or wheelchair-bound, the hidden casualties. In health terms, boys are like a developing country. Every parent of sons feels that fear when their sons go out with their friends – will they come home safe and sound? The good news Enough of the bad news. What we all want is young men who are happy, energetic, safe, hard-working and kind. That’s all! We want our boys to turn into fine young men who will be part of the solutions of the twenty-first century. And in the meantime, we need them to do the dishes and tidy their rooms! In the past ten years a huge amount has been learnt about the true nature of boys, which may surprise and delight you. For 30 years it was fashionable to say that boys and girls were really just the same. But as parents and teachers kept telling us, this approach wasn’t working. A vast amount of new research is confirming parents’ intuitions about boys being different in positive ways. We are beginning to understand how to appreciate their masculinity, and shape it into something good – not just squash it down. The chapter outline for this book In this book we will look at many breakthrough areas of understanding boys. In the next chapter we’ll explain first their three distinct stages of development: 1 zero to six – the learning to love years 2 six to fourteen – the time when fathers count most, and 3 fourteen to adult – when boys need mentors and adults who care, in addition to their parents. By knowing these stages, you will be prepared and more relaxed about what is coming next and how to deal with it. In the third chapter, we’ll examine the effects of hormones on boys’ behaviour, and how to help boys ride these powerful waves of development. Everyone knows about hormones, but when do they actually come into action, and what do they do? Why are thirteen-year-olds often dopey, and fourteen-year-olds so argumentative? And how do you handle this with understanding and maintain your sense of humour? In Chapter 4 we’ll show how boys’ brains are vulnerable, and how to stimulate their brains so they become good communicators. When you chatter and tell stories to little boys, this actually builds their brain connections, so they are more likely to become men who are good with words and feelings. The world no longer needs men who can wrestle buffalo. But it does need men with people skills. Next comes the vital place of fathers, and how to get it right even if your own father wasn’t all that great. Most men, it seems, want to improve on the way their father was, but don’t always know how. The fatherhood revolution is one of the most positive developments of the past 30 years. If you are a single mum reading this, we will also tell you what you can do to ensure your son has good men in his life. Then come some stories and clues about mothers and sons. Mothers need to be confident and proactive with their boys, helping them to feel okay around the opposite sex. A mum is a ‘practice girlfriend’, and she teaches a boy how to get along happily with women. Whether she knows it or not, she is setting the pattern for all his future relationships. Next we’ll talk about boys and sex, since this is a vital area that can make their life happy or miserable, depending on how it’s handled. Next – since school is where boys spend half their childhoods, there’s a chapter on how schools can be dramatically improved. It’s important that boys don’t start school too young, since their brains grow in a different sequence to, and slower than girls’. Starting too young can lead to a school life blighted by feelings of inadequacy and a hatred of learning. This information has changed tens of thousands of families’ timing on when they sent their sons to school, or even to childcare. We will also help you decide which teachers and which school will best help your boy. To round things off, we’ll tackle sport, which can be hazardous to boys’ bodies and souls – though when it’s done right it can be so good for them. Boys need sport, so we need sport to get its act together. And lastly, we’ll discuss the ways in which the whole community can support boys turning into men – because parents can’t do this without help. Parents need to be making choices even when their boys are still little babies, to ensure other adults are there for the boys as they navigate their teens. You need a circle of friends and an extended family to help a boy make it to adulthood unharmed. Interested? Mystified? Then it’s time to begin. Boys can be just great. We can make them so. Understanding is the key. Chapter 2 The three stages of boyhood (#ulink_cb7ce2de-dede-5f3a-ac5e-37f5b4075e97) Have 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 they appear to be changing 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 program 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 Eskimos 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 The first stage of boyhood is from birth to six – the span of time when 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. 2 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. 3 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 strife 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. 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. 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 playing – 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!) Gender differences begin to show Some gender differences between boys and girls do begin to appear early on. Here are just a few discoveries researchers have made: Boy babies are less aware of faces. Girl babies have a much better sense of touch. The retinas in the back of boys’ eyes are differently made, so they see more movement, and less colour and texture. Boys grow faster and stronger, yet they are more troubled by separations from their mother. Boys in toddlerhood move around more and occupy more space. Boys like to handle and manipulate objects more, and build high buildings out of blocks, while girls prefer low-rise. At preschool boys tend to ignore a new child who arrives in the group, while girls will notice and befriend him or her. And sadly, adults tend to treat boys more harshly: studies have shown that parents hug and cuddle girl children far more, even as newborn babies. They tend to talk less to boy babies, and mothers of boys are likely to hit them harder and more often than they do girl children. This is sad because boys need the very opposite, to be taught gentleness and shown lots of laughter and physical closeness. 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’. 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. Researchers filmed mothers and babies going about their day, and discovered that joint attention sequences happen between 50 and 100 times a day. 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 make eye contact and sing to or tickle him. He impacts on you, and you on him. The exchange goes on, a ‘prewords’ conversation – it’s delightful and warm. 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 a 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. PRACTICAL HELP BOYS AND EARLY CHILDCARE What we are about to tell you next might cause distress to some parents. There are past readers of this book who have stopped reading right here, angry and confused. But the job of a psychologist is to tell you the facts, so here goes. If at all possible, a boy should be cared for by his parents or a close relative (apart from the occasional trusted babysitter) until about age three. Group care of the institutional kind does not suit a boy’s nature below this age. This doesn’t mean that boys put into long daycare at six months will all become psychopaths, but it does mean that they will be more at risk. And, thanks to a number of large-scale studies around the world we know that this ‘risk’ can take three forms. Firstly, increased misbehaviour, especially in the form of aggression and disobedience. Secondly, anxiety – to a degree that might even harm development (this is measured by using stress-hormone tests). And thirdly, their relationship with you may be weakened: studies have shown that boys are more prone than girls to separation anxiety and to becoming emotionally shut down as a result of feeling abandoned. They seem less able to hold in their minds that Mum (or Dad) loves them, and is coming back. Also, a boy of this age may deal with his anxiety by becoming chronically restless or aggressive. Experienced daycare staff talk about the ‘sad/angry boy syndrome’ – a little boy who feels abandoned and anxious, and converts that into hitting and hurting behaviour. He may carry this behaviour into school and later life. But daycare isn’t all bad news. Good daycare or, even better, a preschool with trained teachers can certainly play its part when children are older or when parents need to work to survive. But you need to know the facts so as to make a balanced decision. Daycare is a pretty second-rate place for toddlers, it’s positively deficient for babies, and some children are really harmed by it in ways that are hard to see on the surface. If the above is depressing news for you to read, we agree. The corporatised world is not kind to parents. Paid parental leave is really what parents need, and more and more countries are adopting it. Flexible work and guaranteed time off are being found to be helpful all around the world. But we always have some choices and some trade-offs we can make. If you can avoid or minimise daycare for your boy under three, you will never regret it. The process keeps going right into little-boyhood. A mother shows delight when her child catches frogs or 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 sudden ‘switching on’ of boys’ masculinity at this age. Even boys who have not watched any TV suddenly want to play with swords, wear Superman capes, fight and wrestle, and make lots of noise. 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, 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. 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. 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 focussed 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. 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. 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 rugged nine-day wilderness trek.) Single parents need to be networked: being involved in a church, sporting group, extended family, or 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 TV when all were asleep – and they kept this commitment to their own wellbeing. (For more help on single parenting, see here (#litres_trial_promo)) 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, 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 specialty. Bathing is good: they are slippy 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 awkward 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 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. 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 in charge through your clarity, focus and experience, not through being bigger and meaner. Do listen to your kids, and take their feelings into account. You are on a gradient, from being totally in charge of a baby or toddler, through to being on an equal footing with a 21-year-old who pays for dinner. Talk with your partner about the big picture: ‘How are we going 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 early secondary 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! PRACTICAL HELP WHEN BOYS ARE SHORT Parents sometimes worry if their son is not growing as tall as other boys. Indications are that this worry is needless. A study of 180 boys aged eight to fourteen found that short children are no more likely to be maladjusted than taller children. Earlier research suggested shorter youngsters were more likely to be shy, anxious or depressed, but times have changed, and more recent studies have not found this to be so. If a child is praised and valued, and has good communication within the family, then being different will cause much less stress. In the study, short boys described themselves as less socially active, but did not have more behaviour problems than boys of average height. Girls in the study often had even better mental health than girls of normal height. Children whose parents were short themselves seemed to have far fewer problems, probably because of the good role-modelling being provided by their parents. These parents were less likely to be worried or seek medical help for shortness. In the US, 20 000 children have taken human growth hormone to overcome shortness, a treatment costing tens of thousands of dollars. But doctors recommend the hormone treatment only when it is medically necessary, such as when kidney failure or other conditions have caused a deficiency in the growth hormone. Paediatricians do not believe that psychological reasons are sufficient to justify the treatment, which is painful, inconvenient, and can do more harm than good. 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 percent over his pre-puberty amount! 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 midteens 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. 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. 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 women 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. 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. 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 in your DVD rental store for Searching for Bobby Fisher, Finding Forrester and The Run of the Country.) 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 the Lakota experience with many modern-day sons and their mothers, who (according to writers like Babette Smith in Mothers and Sons) 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. 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 scored 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. 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 programs 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. 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 sport, 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! 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. 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!). 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. 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). Special announcement: gender differences are real! Our ideas about gender differences have changed dramatically over the years. For many centuries, biological difference was used as a reason to keep women’s lives in narrow roles. The waste of talent and the frustration of life chances was horrendous: women were not allowed to vote, get equal pay, own property, and so on. They were not supposed to join the paid workforce, or if they did, it was as a nurse, never a doctor; a secretary, never a boss. Turning this on its head – affirming that women could do anything men could – was one of the most important social movements of the twentieth century. Then, for about thirty years – from the 1960s to early 1990s – it was thought that boys and girls had no differences other than those we ‘created’ through conditioning – the clothes and toys we give them, and how we treat them. Well-meaning parents and lots of preschools and schools got quite fanatical about this, working hard to get the boys to play with dolls and the girls into the Lego. It was felt that if we raised all children the same, then gender differences and problems would disappear. But gradually the evidence mounted that there were important and immutable differences that were simply wired in. (Some were blindingly obvious: for instance, in all cultures girls enter puberty two years before boys do, which causes much havoc in the world of schoolyard romance.) With the advent of brain-scanning technology, this argument was pretty much settled. Today we are focussed on understanding the differences and making sure they aren’t a problem. If a girl’s brain develops more quickly than a boy’s, we can plan accordingly so this can be managed in schools and homes. If a boy has an inbuilt need to be active and use his body a lot, we can work out ways for this to happen that don’t mean he is ‘bad’. We can be sure to read to boys so that they become more verbal and better able to talk to girls! We can have less blame and more understanding. In the next two chapters we will look at two major differences that are very significant in learning to help our sons grow up well: 1. how hormones (such as testosterone) influence boys’ behaviour, and what to do about it, and 2. how boys’ and girls’ brains grow differently and affect their ways of behaving and thinking. PRACTICAL HELP KNOWING THE DIFFERENCES Some of the real gender differences are so obvious that it’s amazing they were overlooked. For example, the average boy has 30 percent more muscle bulk than the average girl. Boys are stronger and their bodies are more inclined to action. They even have far more red blood cells (the original red-blooded boy!). It has nothing to do with gender conditioning. We have to give boys plenty of chance to exercise – girls too if they want it. Boys will need extra help to control themselves from hitting both each other and girls. Girls need help to learn not to use their better verbal skills to needle and demean boys. And so on. This doesn’t mean saying, ‘Every boy must …’ or ‘Every girl must …’. After all, some girls are stronger and more physical than many boys. (Some girls need training in nonviolence. In one Sydney school, some parents removed their sons because the girls kept hitting them.) Gender differences are generalisations that are true enough of the time to be very helpful. 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 just 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, makes some amazing 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. 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 percent 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 – making sweeping claims from fairly obscure studies. 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 also possible 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 percent) 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. And Dr Sax adds that perhaps boys should sit at the front of the class, not the back. Chapter 3 Testosterone! (#ulink_7884b49a-48a3-5d14-97ca-06820b3ef0d2) Janine is pregnant – seven weeks pregnant – and very excited. She doesn’t know it yet, but her baby is going to be a boy. We say ‘going to be’ because a foetus doesn’t start that way. It may surprise you to know that all young creatures start life being female. Boys are mutated girls! The Y chromosome that makes a baby into a boy is an ‘add-on’ chromosome which starts to act in the womb – to give a boy the extra bits he needs to be a boy and to stop other bits growing. A male is a female with optional extras. That’s why everyone has nipples, though not everyone needs them. The testosterone cycle In Janine’s baby’s tiny body, at around the eighth week of pregnancy, the Y chromosomes stir in the cells and testosterone starts being made. As a result of this new chemical presence, the baby starts to become more of a boy, growing testicles and a penis, and making other more subtle changes in his brain and body. Once the testicles are formed (by the fifteenth week they are fully developed), they start to make testosterone, too, so he becomes progressively more and more masculine. If Janine is very stressed, her body may suppress the testosterone in baby Jamie’s body, and he may not fully develop his penis and testicles, so he will be incompletely developed at birth. He will catch up, however, in the first year. Right after birth, young Jamie will have as much testosterone in his bloodstream as a twelve-year-old boy! He has needed all this testosterone to stimulate his body to develop male qualities in time to be born. This ‘testosterone hangover’ will result in him having little erections from time to time as a newborn. By three months of age, the testosterone level will drop off to about a fifth of the birth level, and throughout toddlerhood the level will stay pretty low. Boy and girl toddlers (I’m sure you’d agree) behave pretty much the same. At the age of four, for reasons nobody quite understands, boys receive a sudden surge of testosterone, doubling their previous levels. At this age, little Jamie may become much more interested in action, heroics, adventures and vigorous play. His dad may well find that this age is a good one because Jamie can now play ball games, and they can do gardening together: they can interact in ways that were not possible when he was little and helpless. At five years of age, the testosterone level drops by a half, and young Jamie calms down again, just in time for school! Enough testosterone is still around for him to be interested in activity, adventure and exploration, but not especially interested in girls. Somewhere between the ages of eleven and thirteen, the level start to rise sharply again. Eventually – usually around fourteen – it will increase by some 800 percent over the level of toddlerhood. The result is a sudden growth and elongation of his arms and legs – so much so that his whole nervous system has to rewire itself. In about 50 percent of boys, the testosterone levels are so high that some of it converts into estrogen, and breast swelling and tenderness may be experienced. This is nothing to worry about. Brains go out the window Around age thirteen, the reorganisation of Jamie’s brain, linked with the rapid growth of his body, makes him dopey and disorganised for many months. His mother and father have to act as his substitute brain for a while! If they’re not aware of the reasons for this, parents can wonder where they have gone wrong. But if Jamie’s parents know this is all part of puberty, and take a relaxed – if vigilant – attitude, then things should work out just fine. By age fourteen, the testosterone level is now at a peak, and pubic hair, acne, strong sexual feelings and a general restlessness may well drive Jamie and everyone around him slightly crazy. For most families this is the most challenging year of raising boys – take comfort that if you hang in and stay caring and firm, it does pass. The later teens find boys getting increasingly more sensible and mature. When Jamie reaches his mid-twenties, things settle down, hormonally speaking. His testosterone levels are just as high, but his body has become used to them and he is not quite so reactive. His erections are a little more under control! The hormone continues to endow him with male features – high cholesterol, baldness, hairy nostrils and so on – well into later life. On the plus side, the testosterone gives him surges of creative energy, a love of competition, and a desire to achieve and to be protective. Hopefully his energies will be channelled into activities and career choices (as well as a happy sex life) which bring all kinds of satisfaction and benefits. In his early forties, Jamie’s levels of testosterone begin a very gradual decline. He goes for several days at a time without thinking about sex! In the bedroom, quality replaces quantity. In the world, Jamie now has less to prove, and is more mellow and wise. He assumes quiet leadership in group and work situations, rather than having to prove who’s boss. He values friendship and makes his best contributions to the world. Each boy is different What we have described here is the pattern for the average boy. There is great variation among males and also lots of overlap between the sexes. Some girls will have more testosterone-type behaviour than some boys, and some boys will show more estrogen-type behaviour than some girls. Nonetheless, the general pattern will hold true for most children. Understanding boys’ hormones and their effects means we can understand what is going on and be sympathetic and helpful. Just as a good husband understands his partner’s PMT (premenstrual tension), a good parent of a boy understands his TNT (testosterone needing tuition). PRACTICAL HELP TEENAGE BOYS AND DRIVING CARS The biggest single worry for most parents of boys is safety. In the adolescent years, as he spends more time away from your direct care and his mobility and independence grows, it’s hard to relax and just ‘let go’. And in fact there is growing evidence that this fear is well grounded, that we are letting go too soon. This is especially true in the matter of driving cars. Every year the newspapers carry stories of small towns or suburban communities across the nation devastated by multiple fatality crashes, where four or five teenagers die in collisions caused by immaturity and inexperience. As a community we care deeply about the lives of our young people, and this has prompted some astounding research into why boys die like this and how to prevent it. It has been discovered that one boy on his own driving a car, aged in his late teens, is relatively safe. Today’s emphasis on driver training and 50-100 hours of practice driving with an adult supervising (usually Mum or Dad) means young men have greater awareness and skill than young drivers in our day. They probably drive too fast at times, but are also more focussed on and attentive to their driving, so they do not fare too badly as long as alcohol is not involved. However, if you add a male passenger in the car, things begin to change: the young driver takes more risks, and the chances of a fatal crash increase by 50 percent. If the passenger is a girl, however, a male driver usually becomes protective and careful, and is actually safer than he is on his own. The next part will shock you. If you now add one or more other young people in the back seat, the death rate of the driver increases by over 400 percent. The distraction, the need to impress, and the difficulty of staying in a calm, careful state of mind, mean that all those in the car are at serious risk. This is especially so after dark, and of course is much worse with drugs or alcohol present. This astonishingly clear research has lead to law reforms that are saving lives around the world. In Australia, a bereaved father, Rob Wells, who lost his son along with three other boys in a single car crash, has campaigned to persuade governments in several states to restrict young drivers carrying more than one passenger, especially late at night. These laws have worked very effectively in New Zealand and Canada for many years. Meanwhile, it helps that parents know about this ‘brain overload factor’ – the ‘maturity bypass effect’ of having friends in a car – and can make informed decisions. Psychologists now believe seventeen-year-olds are too young to drive groups of friends about at any time. You have ferried them about for sixteen years already; why not do it for another year or two, to know they won’t die or kill their friends? A year or two later, and with more experience, they will be so much safer. At seventeen, teenagers can sound persuasive. They can say the right things. But it’s later, under pressure, that their brains are not able to cope. The last thing parents of dead teenagers ever hear them say is, ‘I’ll be fine, Mum’. Why boys scuffle and fight Testosterone affects mood and energy levels; it’s more than just a growth hormone. There’s no doubt it causes energetic and boisterous behaviour. That’s why, for centuries, horses were gelded to make them better behaved. Testosterone injected into female rats makes them try to mate with other female rats and fight with each other. It makes certain parts of the brain grow and others slow down their growth. It can grow more muscles and less fat, and it can make you go bald and bad tempered! How testosterone affects the psychology of males can be illustrated by a famous study. A tribe of monkeys in a laboratory was closely observed to learn about its social structure. Researchers found that the male monkeys had a definite hierarchy, or pecking order. The females’ hierarchy was looser and more relaxed, based on who groomed whose hair! But the males always knew who was boss, sub-boss, and sub-sub-boss, and had frequent fights to prove it. Once the researchers had worked out the monkey dynamics, they set about stirring up trouble. They captured the lowest-ranking male monkey and gave him an injection of testosterone. Then they put him back with the tribe. You can guess what happened next. He started a boxing match with his ‘immediate superior’. Much to his own surprise, he won! So he went and took on the next monkey! Within twenty minutes he had worked his way up to the top and tossed the biggest monkey off the highest branch. Our hero was small, but he had testosterone! He became the ‘acting manager’. Sadly for him, this was not to last. The injection soon wore off, and our little hero was knocked back all the way down to the bottom of the heap. It’s a lot like politics! The point is that testosterone influences the brain and makes boys more concerned with rank and competition. Boys need order In their book, Raising a Son, Don and Jeanne Elium tell the story of an old scoutmaster who comes and sorts out a hopelessly rowdy scout troop in their city. This is the ‘scout troop from hell’: the boys are always fighting and damaging the hall, nothing is being learnt, and many gentler boys have left. It’s time for a clean sweep. On his first night with the troop, the scoutmaster sets some rules, invites a couple of boys to shape up or leave, brings in a clear structure, and begins teaching skills in an organised way. He successfully turns the group around: in a couple of months it is thriving. The scoutmaster explained to the Eliums that, in his experience, there are three things boys always need to know: 1. Who’s in charge? 2. What are the rules? 3. Will those rules be fairly applied? The key word is structure Boys feel insecure and in danger if there isn’t enough structure in a situation. If no-one is in charge, they begin jostling with each other to establish a pecking order. Their testosterone-driven make-up leads them to want to set up hierarchies, but they can’t always do so because they are all the same age. If we provide structure, then they can relax. For girls, this is not so much of a problem. Many years ago I spent time in the slums of Calcutta to learn about families there. At first glance, Calcutta seemed chaotic and frightening. In fact, though, there were ganglords and neighbourhood hierarchies – and these, for better or worse, provided a structure for people to live their lives. You were safer with a structure – even a mafialike structure – than with none. As a better structure was provided by religious or community leaders who were trustworthy and competent, life improved. Wherever you see a gang of boys looking unruly, you know the adult leadership is failing. Boys form gangs for survival – it’s their attempt to have a sense of belonging, order and safety. Boys act tough to cover up their fear. If someone is clearly the boss, they relax. But the boss must not be erratic or punitive. If the person in charge is a bully, the boys’ stress levels rise and it’s back to the law of the jungle. If the teacher, scoutmaster or parent is kind and fair (as well as being strict), then boys will drop their ‘macho’ act and get on with learning. This seems to be an in-built gender difference. If girls are anxious in a group setting they tend to cower and be quiet, whereas boys respond by running about and making a lot of noise. This has been mistakenly seen as boys ‘dominating the space’ in preschools, and so on. However, it is actually an anxiety response. Schools which are very good at engaging boys in interesting and concrete activities (such as Montessori schools, where there is a lot of structural work with blocks, shapes, beads and so on) do not experience this gender difference in children’s behaviour. Not everyone accepts that hormones affect boys’ behaviour. Some feminist biologists have argued that men have testosterone through conditioning – that it comes from being raised that way. There is actually a partial truth in this: one study found that boys in scary or violent school environments produced more testosterone. When the same school introduced a more supportive environment – where teachers did not abuse or threaten, where bullying was tackled with special programs – the boys’ levels of testosterone dropped measurably. So environment and biology both play a part, but environment only influences the hormone. Nature – and boys’ inbuilt calendar – creates it. Success with boys means accepting their nature while directing it in good ways. If you know what you are dealing with, it’s a whole lot easier and you don’t need to blame anyone – just help them find a better way. PRACTICAL HELP AMAZING TESTOSTERONE FACTS In the animal kingdom, one kind of hyena – the spotted hyena – is born with so much testosterone that even the female pups have a pseudo penis and their labia resemble testicles. The pups are born with a full set of teeth, and are so aggressive that they often eat each other within a day or two of being born! In a rare condition of boy babies, which is found in the Dominican Republic, testosterone does not take effect in the womb because of a missing enzyme. These boys are born without a penis or testicles – looking in fact more like girls, and raised as such. But at about twelve years of age, testosterone is produced in their body and the boys suddenly develop into ‘real’ boys, growing a penis and testicles, getting a deep voice, and so on. They apparently then live normal lives as men. They are known as ‘penis at twelve’ children. A condition called Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia can give girls excess testosterone in the womb, but this is remedied once the child is born. Although they are hormonally normal from then on, these girls show above-average athletic skills, as well as a preference for male playmates, toy cars and guns, and ‘masculine’ clothes. An excess sensitivity to testosterone, or an excess of it, has been linked significantly to mathematical ability, left-handedness and a very high incidence of asthma and allergies. Estrogen – the female counterbalancing hormone to testosterone – has been shown to cause nerve cells to grow more connections. Females have smaller brains, but these are better connected! Baritone singers in Welsh choirs have more testosterone than tenor singers. Baritones are also more sexually active! Making love raises your testosterone level. The more you get, the more you want – at least for a couple of days! Winning at sport or politics also raises your testosterone level. Stress and loneliness lower it: they lead to more estrogen being produced so you can cope like a woman! One final testosterone fact – perhaps the most amazing of all – illustrates the intricate dance between biology and behaviour in the development of higher animals. Are you ready? Here goes … Mother rats frequently lick the genitals of their male babies, and this helps the latter’s brains to become fully male. And guess what? It’s the presence of testosterone in the urine of the baby male rats that seems to trigger the behaviour. If baby female rats are given testosterone injections, the mother licks their genitals, too! If baby boy rats are castrated, the mothers don’t lick them any more (a double tragedy!). But wait, it gets more amazing. The rats that are licked in this way develop a masculine-functioning pituitary gland, whether they are male or female. Female rats given the licking treatment behaved like male rats for the rest of their lives. And when the licking was replaced by a researcher stroking the male or female rats with a paintbrush each day, the same long-term physical changes to the brain took place. Of the hundreds of studies I have seen, this one probably tells us more about how complex the interaction is between nature and nurture in developing gender characteristics. (And that is perhaps the only conclusion we can draw from it!) There are physical and social influences at work all the time, in complex interaction, to produce healthy and functioning males and females. Gender differentiation does not just happen automatically. Without affection and stimulation, we know children don’t grow as well or become as intelligent as their potential would allow. We have to bring nurturing and parenting skills to bear, to help our kids both develop physically and find a comfortable gender identity. How did male and female differences come about? Evolution is constantly changing the shape of all living creatures. For instance, early humans had huge jaws and teeth for chewing raw food. But when fires and cooking were discovered, over many generations our jaws and teeth became smaller because our food was softer to chew. If we have a few thousand years of eating fast food, we may end up chinless altogether! Some gender differences are obvious in human beings – size, hairiness, and so on. But the main differences are the hidden ones. These came about through taking very different roles for a very large part of our history. Hunter-gatherer societies divided the work very much along gender lines. For 99 percent of human history, the women mostly gathered, and the men mostly hunted. Hunting was a specialised activity. It required quick team action, sudden and strong muscular activity in short bursts, and you had to be very single-minded. Once the chase was on, there was no time for discussion. Someone was in charge, and you did what you were told – or got gored or eaten by a large animal. The women’s work of gathering seeds, roots and insects was different. It allowed time for discussion, required finger dexterity and sensitivity, and included the care of babies and children. As a result, human females have finger sensitivity several times greater than males. The women’s work required caution, constancy and attention to detail – whereas hunting required a certain degree of recklessness, or even self-sacrifice. Women’s bodies became generally smaller but better able to persist and endure. Men’s bodies were better at rapid bursts of strength but were more likely to be laid low by a dose of flu or an ingrown toenail! The differences were not great, and some role flexibility probably helped. So we ended up a species with slight but significant differences between male and female bodies and brains. The hunter-gatherer tradition continues to have a problematic legacy. In the developing world (where many people still live by agriculture), the men often do not work as hard as the women. Presumably they are waiting to fight someone or hunt something! The links between sex and aggression There is some support from primate studies for the idea that males with more power have higher sex drives. Men in sports teams that win have a higher testosterone level (after the game) than those who lose. And, according to historians, many great leaders (US President Kennedy, for instance) had very high sex drives, to a degree that was really rather tragic and disabling (it’s kind of hard to run a country when you want to keep racing off to have sex all the time). One study of juvenile delinquency in the 1980s found an intriguing connection – that boys were several times more likely to get into trouble with the police in the six months before their first sexual experience. In other words, they calmed down a bit once they started having sex. Since almost all boys masturbate at this age, it can’t just have been the release of sexual frustration. Perhaps the boys felt they had ‘joined the human race’ when they found a real-life lover; perhaps they felt more loved. (We don’t recommend this as a cure for crime, but it makes sense.) Sex and aggression are somewhat linked – controlled by the same centres in the brain and by the same hormone group. This has been the source of enormous human tragedy and suffering, inflicted via sexual assaults on women, children and men. Because of this connection, it is very important that boys are helped to relate to women as people, to have empathy and to learn to be good lovers. Blaming hormones is never an excuse for male aggression; and it’s vital that we separate the stimuli of violence from the stimuli of sex. We shouldn’t really make or show movies that link the two. The rape-revenge plot of many B-grade movies is a bad connection to make. Most pornography in fact is pretty dismal role-modelling for good relating or sensitive and joyous loving. Where are the movie depictions of tender, sensuous, playful and boisterous lovemaking, with plots that include conversation, sharing and vulnerability, so that mid-adolescent boys can learn a fuller kind of sexuality? Even adult men can get the wrong idea. A matchmaking agency recently had to counsel a man in his sixties who was being far too sexually forward on ‘dates’ that the agency arranged. The man, a very gentle and considerate farmer (widowed two years earlier), had researched copies of Cosmopolitan magazine to find out what today’s women liked, and was acting accordingly! Overcoming sexual violence probably starts younger still. It may just come down to treating children more kindly. Raymond Wyre, a British expert on working with men who sexually abuse children, found in his work that while not every sex offender had been the victim of sexual assault (though many had), everyone without exception had been the recipient of a very cruel and uncaring childhood. It was the lack of empathy, resulting from never having been shown consistent understanding and kindness, that he felt was the key factor in someone being able to sexually assault another human being. Guiding the ‘high-drive’ boys Testosterone provides energy and focus. A boy with high levels of the hormone makes good leadership material. Early in the school year, teachers often notice a certain kind of boy who will either become a hero of the class or a complete villain. For this boy there is no middle ground. This type of boy stands out by his: challenging behaviour and competitiveness greater physical maturity, and high energy levels. If the teacher is able to befriend such a boy and direct his energies in good ways, the boy will thrive and be a plus in the school. If the teacher or parent ignores, backs off or is negative towards the boy, then the boy’s pride will depend on defeating the adult, and problems will compound. These boys have leadership potential, but leadership has to be taught from an early age. IN A NUTSHELL Testosterone in varying degrees affects every boy. It gives him growth spurts, makes him want to be active, and makes him competitive and in need of strong guidelines and a safe, ordered environment. It triggers significant changes:- at four – into activity and boyishness- at thirteen – into rapid growth and disorientation, and- at fourteen – into testing limits and breaking through to early manhood. The boy with testosterone in his bloodstream likes to know who is the boss, but also must be treated fairly. Bad environments bring out the worst in him. The boy with lots of testosterone needs special help to develop leadership qualities and to channel his energies in good ways. A boy needs to learn empathy and feeling, and be shown tenderness if he is to be a sexually caring being. Some girls have a lot of testosterone but, on the whole, it’s a boy thing – and it needs our understanding, not blame or ridicule. Testosterone equals vitality, and it’s our job to honour it and steer it in healthy directions. Chapter 4 How boys’ and girls’ brains differ (#ulink_eea083ba-0bfb-5f20-894c-35300bb8732c) Twenty years ago, we rarely acknowledged differences in the brains of boys and girls, for fear this would imply gender inequality. Today we know that there are numerous differences, and by understanding these, we can build on boys’ and girls’ strengths and address their weaknesses, so both can be the best they can. For parents this can be a real revelation. A miracle of growth The brain of a baby in the womb grows very rapidly, developing in a month or two from just a few cells into one of the most complex structures in nature. By the sixth month of pregnancy, a foetus has impressive abilities, all controlled by its brain – such as recognising your voice, responding to movements, even kicking back when prodded! It can be seen with ultrasound to be actually moving its mouth as if it is singing in the womb. At birth the brain is still only partially formed and only a third of its eventual size. It takes a long time for the brain to be completed. For instance, the language part of the brain is not fully formed until about the age of thirteen, which is why it is so important that boys are kept up with reading through the primary school years. From very early on, gender differences are evident in the unborn baby’s brain. One difference is that a baby boy’s brain develops more slowly than a baby girl’s. Another difference is that the left and right sides are less well connected in a boy. All animal brains have two halves. In simple animals (like lizards or birds) this means that everything is duplicated. A bang on the head might wipe out part of one half of the brain, but the other half can take care of things! However, in humans (who have a lot more to think about), the two brain halves specialise somewhat. One half handles language and reasoning; the other, movement, emotion and the senses of space and position. Both halves ‘talk’ to each other via a big central bundle of fibres called the corpus callosum. The corpus callosum in boys is proportionately smaller in size, so there are fewer connections running from one side to the other. Boys tend to attack certain kinds of problems (such as a spelling quiz or word puzzle) using only one side of their brain, while girls use both sides. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) brain-scanning technology shows us that: the ‘lights go on’ all over a girl’s brain, while in a boy they tend to be localised on one part of one side only. Why the difference? The brain of a baby before and after birth grows rather like a tub of alfalfa sprouts accidentally left in the sun – brain cells keep getting longer and making new connections all the time. The left half of the cortex grows more slowly than the right in all human babies, but in males it is even slower still. The testosterone in a boy’s bloodstream slows things down. Estrogen, the hormone that is predominant in the bloodstream of baby girls, actually stimulates faster growth of brain cells. As the right half grows, it tries to make connections with the left half. In boys, the left half isn’t yet ready to take the connections, so the nerve cells reaching across from the right cannot find a place to ‘plug in’. So they go back to the right side and plug in there instead. As a result, the right half in a boy’s brain is richer in internal connections but poorer in cross connections to the other half. This is one possible explanation of boys’ greater success in Mathematics, which is largely a ‘right side of the brain’ activity (and their greater interest in taking machinery to pieces and leaving the bits lying around!). But we must be careful not to overdo these conclusions, as sometimes parental expectations, practice and social pressure also influence skills and abilities. It’s clear that practice actually helps more brain connections to be laid down permanently, so encouragement and teaching actually affect the shape and power of the brain in later life. PRACTICAL HELP LEARNING TO COMMUNICATE Communication is essential to life. Yet sadly, in every classroom, there are usually four or five children who can’t read, write or speak well. And among these children, boys outnumber girls by four to one! This is now thought to be the result of boys’ brains not being quite so well organised for language. But there is no need to just let this be. If you want to prevent your child having learning or language problems, there is a lot you can do to help, according to neuroscientist Dr Jenny Harasty. Dr Harasty and her team found that in females, two regions of the brain dedicated to handling language are proportionately 20 percent to 30 percent larger than in males. But no-one knows whether these regions are larger at birth or because girls get more practice at using them, causing them to grow. Whatever the cause, we do know that the brain is very responsive to learning experiences if these are given at the right age. And for language, that age is zero to eight. In adolescence and adulthood we go on learning, but the older the child, the harder it is to change that early wiring of the brain. You can help your boy learn to communicate better, starting right from when he is a baby. This means that he will be a better reader, writer and speaker when he goes to school. Here’s how … 1. ‘TALK THEM UP’ – ONE STEP AT A TIME Children acquire spoken language one step at a time. Babies under one year of age will begin to babble and gesture very enthusiastically, telling us they are ready to learn verbal communication! This is the time to start to teach them words. With a baby who babbles, repeat a word that seems to be what he means. Baby says ‘gukuk, baguk!’ and points to his toy duck. You say ‘Ducky! John’s ducky!’ Soon John will be saying ‘Ducky’ too. With a toddler who says single words, like ‘milk!’, you say a couple of words, such as ‘milk bottle’. This helps him to move on to joining pairs of words together, and so on. A child who is saying words in twos and threes can be stretched further by imitating you in whole sentences. For example, he says, ‘Gavin truck!’ You reply, ‘Gavin wants a truck? Here’s Gavin’s truck!’ And so on. In short, kids learn best if you speak back to them one step ahead of the stage they are at. And they love the game – all human beings love to communicate. 2. EXPLAIN THINGS TO CHILDREN EVERY CHANCE YOU CAN This is a great use of the many times when you are just doing routine things with your children – travelling, doing housework, going for a walk, doing the shopping. Use this time to chatter, to point things out, and to answer questions. Surprisingly, some very loving parents (who care for their kids well) seem not to realise that kids’ brains grow from conversation. Don’t be shy – explain things, tell them stories! For example, ‘You see this lever? This makes the wipers go. They swish the rain away from the window.’ ‘This vacuum cleaner makes a big wind. It sucks the air and pulls the dirt into a bag. Would you like a turn?’ This kind of talk – provided you don’t overdo it and bore your child senseless – does more for your child’s brain than any amount of expensive education later on. 3. READ TO YOUR KIDS FROM AN EARLY AGE Even when your child is just one year old, you can enjoy books together – especially the kind that have rhymes and repetition. ‘Humpty Dumpty’ and ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’ work just fine. From enjoying them on your knee or snuggled up in bed, children learn to love books, looking at the pictures and enjoying the sound of your voice. You can ‘ham it up’ a little by making funny voices or by being dramatic. As your child gets to have favourite stories, you can play a ‘predicting’ game: ‘And the little cat went …?’, pausing so your child provides the ‘Miaow!’. Prediction is a very important part of reading. Good readers anticipate what word is coming next. Remember, whenever you’re playing learning games with kids, the trick is to be playful, making your children ‘stretch’ their minds just a little – which they will love to do. All kids benefit from these learning games – but for boys it is also a preventive step because of their disposition to be poorer at language if we don’t help them along. And it’s fun to do, anyway! Dr Jenny Harasty advises that if you have worries about your boy’s speech and language development (if he isn’t talking as well as you think he should), trust your intuition. Speak to a speech therapist from your local hospital or community health centre. Sessions of speech therapy are fun for children and can make all the difference to a good start. Whether the cause is hormonal or environmental, there is no doubt that these brain differences exist between men and women today. Because of their more connected brain halves, older women who suffer strokes usually recover more speedily and completely than men: they can activate extra pathways to the other half of their brain to do the job of the damaged parts. Girls who have learning problems improve more quickly with tuition for the same reason. And boys are more prone to problems resulting from brain damage at birth, and so on. This may explain the greater numbers of boys with learning difficulties, autism and many other disorders. Why is it important to know about brains? Knowing about the differences in boys’ brains helps to explain some practical difficulties that boys have, and what to do about them. If your brain is somewhat less connected from right to left, you will have trouble doing things well which need both sides of the brain. This involves skills such as reading, talking about feelings and solving problems through quiet introspection rather than by beating people over the head! Do these problems sound at all familiar to you? So now can you see the importance of all this brain research? Danger: sexism alert! There is a vitally important point to be made here. To say that ‘boys are different’ can very easily turn into an excuse for saying ‘they are defective’ or, worse still, ‘they can’t help it’. The same sort of generalisations were once applied to girls: ‘They’ll never be any good at science or engineering’, ‘They’re too emotional to be in responsible jobs’, and so on. So please take the following points on board very seriously: The differences are slight for most people. They are only tendencies. They don’t apply to every individual. Most important of all, we can help boys to overcome them. Helping the brain to grow We can work to help boys read better, express themselves better, solve conflicts better and empathise better – and so help them to be great human beings. Schools have equity programs to help girls in Mathematics and the sciences so they have access to these careers. We are now beginning to see that we can help boys with English, Drama and so on, which can better equip them to live in the modern world. (For some great ways to do this, see the chapter on schools, ‘A revolution in schooling’ (#litres_trial_promo).) Our brains are brilliant and flexible devices, always able to learn. Parents can teach a boy how to avoid getting into fights by working out better ways to join in a game or solve a dispute peacefully. They can help a boy learn skills like: how to figure out people’s feelings from their facial expressions how to make friends and join in a game or conversation, and how to read his own body signals – for example, to know when he is getting angry and needs to walk away from a situation. By working on these skills with their sons, parents are building connections from one side of their son’s brain to the other. PRACTICAL HELP STARTING SCHOOL: WHY BOYS SHOULD START LATER Brain differences have one huge implication – that of deciding when boys should start school. Read this next section carefully if you have a small boy: it may make a huge difference in his life. At the age of five or six, when children start serious schooling, boys’ brains are an astonishing six to twelve months less developed than girls’. They are especially delayed in what is called ‘fine-motor coordination’, which is the ability to use their fingers carefully and hold a pen or scissors. And since they are still in the stage of ‘gross-motor’ development, developing the nerves to their bigger arm, leg and body muscles, they will be itching to move their bodies around – so they will not be good at sitting still. In fact, until they finish their gross-motor development, they will not gain fine-motor skills. For boys, one leads to the other. (Girls do it in reverse: their brains go straight to finger coordination, and they often need help in body strengthening by bouncing on trampolines and playing basketball or swimming.) The other delay boys experience is in using words well. This affects being able to tell a teacher what they need, answer questions in class, and communicate verbally with other children. Many boys at five are still very young socially, and not really ready for the demands of a school environment. In talking to early childhood teachers, from country schools in outback Australia to big international schools in Asia and Europe, the same message comes through: ‘Boys should stay back a year’. For all kids, boys and girls, the calendar is a terrible way of deciding who should start school. Kids vary so much, and with a once-a-year intake some will always be young for their year. New studies from the UK show that kids who are young for their year actually do worse in school right through. Staying back for a year in these cases can be just the thing to make school more of a success in the twelve years following. It’s important to treat every child as an individual case and to think about each, not in terms of ‘how old?’, but rather ‘how ready?’ In boys’ cases, the answer is often: not yet. KNOWING WHEN TO START It’s clear that all children should attend nursery or half-day preschool from around four years of age, since they need the social stimulation and wider experiences it provides (and because parents need a break!). Unlike childcare, preschool has fully trained teachers who provide playful but appropriate learning experiences that are a halfway step to school. (Daycare centres may have ‘early learning’ in their names, but this is really just a marketing ploy: as one staff member told me, ‘That just means we have letters on the blocks’.) In preschool or nursery, it will become clear which boys are ready for school – they are happy to sit and do work in books or craft, and are able to talk happily – and which boys are still needing to run about, and are not yet good with a crayon or pencil. Most boys will fall into the second group. Based on your own observations, on discussion with the preschool teacher, and perhaps checking out what is expected of children going into primary school, you will soon get an idea – ready, or not ready yet. By taking another year in preschool, your boy has a whole year more to get ready to do really well in primary school. For most boys, this would mean that they move through school being a year older than the girl in the next desk – which means they are, intellectually speaking, on a par with the girls. By the late teens, boys catch up with girls intellectually but, in the way schools work now, the damage is already done. The boys feel themselves to be failures, they miss out on key skills because they are just not ready, and so get turned off from learning. Holding boys back is also much less unkind. Sitting still at a desk is often hard and painful for small boys. In early primary school, boys (whose motor nerves are still growing) actually get signals from their body saying, ‘Move around. Use me’. To a stressed-out Grade 1 teacher, this looks like misbehaviour. A boy sees that his craft work, drawing and writing are not as good as the girls’, and thinks, ‘This is not for me!’. He quickly switches off from learning – especially if there is not a male teacher anywhere in sight to give that sense that learning is a male thing, too. ‘School is for girls’, he tells himself. There is much more that we can do to make school boy- friendly. This is explored in the chapter on schools, ‘A revolution in schooling’. But the first question – is he ready yet? – is perhaps the most important place to start. In school, the same help is needed. One young female Maths teacher I know rarely lets a lesson pass without using some practical, hands-on example of what is being studied – often going outside to do it in a practical way in the playground. She found that the less motivated of her students could get a grasp of the concepts if they could see them in practice and do physical things with their bodies to comprehend the idea being taught. They were getting right-brain concepts to link to their left-brain understanding – using their strengths to overcome their weaknesses. This teacher’s boy students loved learning from her, she was adventurous, keen and cared about them. Boys are not inferior – just different Having a well-developed right side of the brain, as boys tend to do, has many pluses. As well as having Mathematical and mechanical abilities, males tend to be action-oriented – if they see a problem, they want to fix it. The right side of the brain handles both feelings and actions, so men are more likely to take action, while women tend to mull over something to the point of total paralysis! It requires extra effort for a man to shift into his left hemisphere and find the words to explain the feelings he is registering in his right hemisphere. Germaine Greer has pointed out that there are more male geniuses in many fields, even though many may be imbalanced characters on the whole, needing someone to look after them (usually a woman)! In an era when advertising and the media mostly portray men doing bad or stupid things, it’s important to remember (and to show boys) about the men who built the planes, made the art and music, laid the railroad tracks, invented the cars, built the hospitals, discovered the medicines and sailed the ships that made our world so wonderful, safe and interesting. There’s an African saying, ‘Women hold up half the sky’. But, clearly, men hold up the other half. A new kind of man The world no longer needs men who can wrestle with buffaloes or cut down trees with a flint axe. In the modern world, where manual or mechanical labour is less and less needed, we need to take that masculine ability and energy and redirect it to a different kind of heroic effort. This means adding language and feeling skills to the thinking and doing skills of boys – making a kind of ‘superboy’ who is flexible across all kinds of skill areas. If you think about it, the great men of history – Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Buddha, Jesus – actually were like this. They had courage and determination, along with sensitivity and love for others. It’s an unbeatable mix, and it is certainly needed today. IN A NUTSHELL The gender differences created by male hormones and male genes need to be handled in practical ways. The following sums up what you can do with your boy to help him be a ‘new kind of man’. Chapter 5 What dads can do (#ulink_4e3260a5-b648-5e83-a24b-986a01551b5e) My daughter is now a young woman, yet it seems like only yesterday that she was being born. That was a day to remember! We had planned on a home birth, but had a back-up plan for a hospital transfer if necessary. And sure enough, the labour ended with an emergency Caesarean at about 3 a.m. – not at all what we had hoped for. The pact I’d made with my wife Shaaron was, ‘Nobody else takes this baby’. So I was there in the operating theatre, and our baby went straight from the weighing scales and into my arms. While Shaaron recovered from the operation over the next few days, I slept on a stretcher bed on the floor of her hospital room, our baby tucked beside me, which often caused shrieks of shock from nurses who stumbled in for the 2 a.m change of shift. It was a great system – Shaaron knew our baby was close and safe, not off in a nursery somewhere, and I could hand her up to Mum for a feed at any time. Sometimes a nurse would discreetly ask Shaaron if this was what she really wanted. She would smile and say, ‘Yes, of course!’ Fighting to be a dad The experience of my daughter’s birth showed in a way what it is like to be a dad these days – you have to make a firm stand, sometimes even fight, to be allowed to be a dad. The world doesn’t seem to want you to be an involved parent: it would rather have you stay late at the office. Someone else will teach your children to hit a ball, play the piano and believe in themselves – you just pay the bills. Luckily, fathers are fighting their way back into family life, and very welcome they are, too. Twentieth-century fathering was something of a disaster. Our fathers’ generation included a few great dads, but most men of previous generations proved their love by working, not by playing, cuddling, talking or teaching – the things that kids really love. In those hard times of poverty and war, some dads were violent, scary or drank too much. Many were traumatised and were hard to get close to. Some men simply walked out on their families and never came back. So when we come to fathering our own children, it can feel strange, since we may have little knowledge of what good fathering looks like. We only have half the pieces of the jigsaw. But things are looking up. We know from studies across the developed world that fathers have increased the time they spend with children by 400 percent since the 1970s. Young dads today are determined to spend more time with their kids, and most of them succeed. In fact, with fatherhood, you never ‘fail’, as long as you don’t quit. As long as you are willing to have a go, you will always achieve more than you realise. Don’t be tempted to leave all the parenting to your partner. As we’ll see in this chapter, men bring different things to parenting to what women bring, things that are unique and irreplaceable. The more you do with your kids, the more you will rediscover your talents at fathering and your own unique style. There is nothing as satisfying as raising great kids. Reviving a lost art A lot of fathering of boys is simple. Here are some clues: Most boys love to be physically active, to have fun with their fathers. They love to hug their dad, and play-wrestle with him. (If they don’t like it, you’re probably being too rough!) They like to accompany you on adventures and experiences in the big, wide world – all the while feeling secure because dad seems so huge and capable (even if he doesn’t feel that way himself half of the time). They love to hear stories about your life, meet your friends, and see what you do for a living. They love you to teach them things – anything, really. If you don’t know about things like fishing or making stuff in sheds or fixing go-karts or computers, and so on, well, you can learn together. It’s trying that counts. PRACTICAL HELP MIRROR NEURONS In 2006 an incredible discovery was made: namely, the existence in the body of mirror neurons. These are a network of nerve cells that run alongside our motor nerves, and they have a unique role. They mirror, or imitate, everything we watch. So if we watch ballet, or football, or someone having a passionate kiss, our mirror neurons practise this action. The mirror actions are stored in our brain, ready to make it easier to copy what we’ve seen. (So every couch potato really does have an inner athlete, or rock star, or red-hot lover eagerly trying to get out!) This, we now know, is the reason that we can learn skills as fast as we do. But it’s a two-edged sword, because it means that everything kids see, they take into their brains and are inclined to repeat. The ramifications of this are huge. This certainly impacts on what we might allow children to watch on TV and in computer games, and it underlines the importance of not depicting violence or violent sex in the media. But it especially impacts on how we behave around our kids. If children see us always being grumpy, self-pitying, sneaky, lying and cheating, vicious or mean, they become that. They take in our actions, but also our moods and outlook. Many a man has been horrified to notice he has the same gestures, movements or expressions that his father used to have. Or he comes out with words or sayings that his old man used to use. Psychologists hear this all the time in their consulting room: ‘I hate the guy, and now I am turning out just like him’. This is not genetic, it’s ‘mirror learning’. It’s a good reason to really work on how you act around your kids. Kids learn your attitudes Kids don’t just learn from what you say to them, they take on your attitudes as well. A friend of mine, a Vietnam veteran, was driving with his children and pulled up at some traffic lights. An Asian family were among those crossing at the lights. My friend’s four-year-old, strapped into his booster seat in the back, suddenly made a racist comment! My friend recognised his own words, and was shocked to hear them from a child: they sounded ugly and wrong to him. He found a parking spot and pulled over. He told his child he was sorry he had ever spoken like that, and he didn’t want the child ever to speak like that either. Kids learn to love by watching you Children even learn about love by watching you. They love it when you show warmth to their mother, give her a compliment, flirt, exchange a cuddle or a kiss. Most small children cannot resist squeezing in whenever they see their parents hugging. They love to soak in the feeling of the two of you. When you are private, and close the bedroom door, children even learn from this some of the awe and mystery of love. Being respectful to their mother is important. So is being self-respecting – not getting into abusive or nasty arguments. Your son needs to see not only that women are never abused, but that a man can argue calmly, without fighting or lashing out – that he can listen, but also make his point and insist on being heard. Kids learn to feel by watching you Sons learn how to express their feelings by watching their fathers and other men. They need to see you showing all four of the basic feelings: 1. Sadness – when someone has died or a disappointment has come along 2. Anger – when something has been unjust or wrong 3. Happiness – when things go well, and 4. Fear – when there is danger. Dads have to show real care in expressing feelings around their children. The reason for this is that dads and mums are the pillars of a child’s world. Children don’t want to see those pillars come tumbling down. So while they need to know and see when we are angry, scared, happy or sad, they also want to know that we can ‘hold’ those feelings. This means that we can be afraid, but not rattled; mad, but not dangerous; happy, but not stupid; and sad, but not overwhelmed or dismayed. They don’t really want to see us losing our grip. But they are touched and helped if we can shed a tear or honestly express anger or fear, because they have those emotions all the time. Often, when men have an uncomfortable feeling, they will convert it into something more comfortable. Usually anger is the most comfortable feeling for men. When your little boy has got lost in the shopping centre or your teenager has taken a foolish risk, a father who can say, ‘I was scared’, has much more impact than one who yells and slams doors. If men act angry when they are really sad, scared or even happy, this can be pretty confusing for kids. Boys are trying to match their inner sensations with outer ways of behaving, and they need us to show them how this is done. Whatever happens in your marriage, don’t divorce your kids Divorce is a huge blow to a father’s hopes and dreams for his children. Some men feel so grief-stricken that they ‘cut and run’. Others have to fight the system to stay in contact with their children. It’s vitally important – whatever happens to your marriage – that you stay in your children’s lives. More and more fathers are sharing parenting equally (or more) after divorce. I’ve talked to men who, after divorce, decided it would be simpler for the children if they didn’t maintain contact. They always profoundly regretted this decision. STORIES FROM THE HEART SHOWING OUR FEELINGS A few months ago, something happened that made me want to cry, and I hesitated, knowing my twelve-year-old son was in the room or close by. I’d just received a phone call telling me that a good friend had terminal cancer. I went into shock, put the phone down and began to fight back the tears. I walked into the living room, thinking: ‘Is this okay? Is this how I want my son to see me?’ The answer came back: ‘Of course, it’s good that he sees me like this.’ I asked my wife for a hug, and stood there holding her and sobbing. I felt my son’s approach and then his hand on my shoulder – he was comforting me! The three of us stood there hugging. It was wonderful, incredible to have things reversed like that. Perhaps seeing me like that will mean that, when he needs to, he also will have access to the sweet release of tears. I don’t want him to be bottled up and volcanic when he meets the inevitable griefs of life. And I don’t think he will be. (A letter from Tony S.) There are some great organisations for separated dads that have sprung up, which are mostly constructive and very helpful. Also divorce courts are now more aware that kids need fathers in their lives, and will work to make sure that contact is shared and maintained. For your children’s sake, if your marriage comes to an end, learn to be polite and kind to your ex-partner, even if you don’t always feel it. Better still, work to preserve your partnership by giving that some time and attention too, before it’s too late. Rough-and-tumble games: what’s really going on? There’s a unique father behaviour that has been observed all over the world. Dads (along with big brothers, uncles and grandpas) love to wrestle and play rough-and-tumble games with little boys. They can hardly resist it. The men and the big boys get the little boys and throw them about. The little boys come running back and say, ‘Do it again!’ Sydney counsellor Paul Whyte puts it very plainly: ‘If you want to get along with boys, learn to wrestle!’ For a long time nobody understood why this was so – especially mothers, who are usually trying to calm things down, while dads seem likely to stir them up all over again! But it’s been found that what boys are learning in ‘rough and tumble’ is an essential lesson for all males: how to be able to have fun, get noisy, even get angry and, at the same time, know when to stop. For a male, living with testosterone, this is vital. If you live in a male body, you have to learn how to drive it. The big male lesson: knowing when to stop If you’ve ever wrestled with a little boy, say a three- or four-year-old, it always starts out happily enough. But often, after a minute or two, he ‘loses it’. He gets angry. His little jaw starts to jut out! He knits his eyebrows together and (if you haven’t spotted the warning signs yet) starts to get serious and hit out with knees and elbows. Ouch! A dad who knows what he’s doing stops the action right there. ‘Hoooooold it! Stop!’ Then a little lecture takes place – not yelling, just calmly explaining. ‘Your body is precious [pointing at boy], and my body is precious too. We can’t play this game if somebody might get hurt. So we need a few rules – like, no elbowing and no kneeing or punching! Do you understand? Can you handle it?’ (Here’s a tip: always say ‘Can you handle it?’ rather than ‘Will you keep to the rules?’, which sounds kind of wimpish. No boy is going to say ‘No’ to a question like ‘Can you handle it?’.) Then you re-commence. The boy is learning a most important life skill – self-control. He’s learning that he can be strong and excited, but can also choose where and when to back off. For males, this is very important. In adult life, a man will usually be stronger than his wife or partner. He must know how to not ‘lose it’, especially when he is angry, tired and frustrated. For a marriage to survive, it is sometimes necessary for partners to stand nose to nose, while saying some really honest stuff. This is called ‘truth time’ – the time when disputes that have been building up get aired and cleared up. (We wrote a book about this called The Making of Love.) A woman can’t have this kind of honest and intense discussion with a man unless she feels absolutely safe with him. She needs to know she will never be hit, and he needs to know in himself that he won’t hit. (In some marriages, it’s the woman who is the violent one, the woman who needs to make this commitment.) A real man is one who is in charge of himself and his behaviour. A real man can be furiously angry, and yet you feel utterly safe standing right next to him. That’s a tough call. But it begins in this small way, play-wrestling on the back lawn. Dads can do this, uncles, friends, even mums (though mums don’t enjoy it quite as much). STORIES FROM THE HEART WHAT FATHERS DO (by Jack Kammer) This could be dangerous, I thought. This is Los Angeles, early June 1992. And, besides, it’s getting dark. Stranded and alone, hauling a heavy suitcase along Washington Boulevard east of Lincoln Avenue, unable to find a phone that made sense or a taxi dispatcher interested in my fare, I was running late for my plane at LAX. I decided that this was a chance I needed, no, wanted to take. I approached three young Hispanic men standing outside their car in a fast-food parking lot. But first a little background. I had just spent four days in the mountains above Palm Springs at a conference of men who wanted to give the nation new hope for old and growing problems. We were a few of the big fish in the small pond that some have called ‘the Men’s Movement’. We agreed that what the nation most urgently needs right now is a massive infusion of strong, noble, loving, nurturing, healthy masculine energy to counteract America’s malaise, impotence and social pathologies. We talked a lot about the importance of fathers, both as an archetypal metaphor and as a practical reality. Back in the fast-food parking lot, I warily approached the three young, black-haired, brown-skinned men. ‘How ya doing?’ I said calmly and evenly. ‘I’m trying to get to LAX and I’m running late. The cabs and the phones aren’t cooperating. How much money would you need to take me?’ They looked at each other. One of them in a white T-shirt said to the one who must have been the driver, ‘Go for it, man.’ The driver hesitated. I said, ‘Name a price that makes it worth your while.’ He looked straight at me. ‘Ten bucks,’ he said. ‘I’ll give you twenty.’ ‘Let’s do it, man,’ said the T-shirted youth. The driver nodded and popped the trunk. ‘You wanna put your suitcase here?’ ‘No, thanks,’ I answered straight back. The image of being forced empty-handed out of the car was clear in my mind. ‘I’d rather keep it with me.’ ‘That’s cool,’ ‘the T-shirt’ said. So there I was, entrusting my life to what I hoped to be ‘positive male energy’. I was thinking we should go west to Lincoln Avenue. We headed east. Now what? But then we turned south and soon we were on a freeway. I knew it could have been stupid, but I took out my wallet, removed a twenty and said to the driver, ‘Here, I want to pay you now’. The driver took it with a simple ‘Thanks’. ‘So here I am, guys,’ I said. ‘I sure hope you’re going to take care of me.’ T-shirt, sitting in the back seat with me, my suitcase between us, smiled knowingly and said, ‘It’s okay, man. We’re good guys.’ I nodded and shrugged. ‘I sure hope so, because if you’re not, I’m in big trouble, aren’t I?’ They all laughed, and then T-shirt spoke up. ‘So where you from?’ ‘Baltimore,’ I answered. ‘Oh, man, it’s nice back east. That’s what they say. Green and everything.’ I smiled and nodded, ‘Yeah. And back east, LA is our idea of heaven.’ ‘Naah, it’s rough here, man. It’s hard.’ T-shirt was clearly going to be the spokesman. Every issue we men’s movement guys had talked about during our conference in the mountains was in this car. It was time for a reality check. ‘How old are you guys?’ I asked. They were sixteen and seventeen. They were all in school and had part-time jobs. T-shirt and the driver worked in a restaurant. The quiet young man riding shotgun didn’t say. ‘Tell me about the gangs. Are there gangs at your school?’ ‘There’s gangs everywhere, man. Everywhere. It’s crazy.’ ‘Are you guys in a gang?’ I asked. ‘No way, man.’ ‘Why not?’ I wondered. ‘Because there’s no hope in it. You just get a bullet in your head.’ ‘Yeah, but what hope is there for you outside the gang?’ ‘I don’t know. I just want to get a future. Do something.’ ‘What’s the difference between you guys and the guys in the gangs?’ ‘I don’t know, man. We just don’t want to do it.’ ‘Yeah, but why not? What’s the difference?’ I gently pressed. ‘I don’t know, man. I don’t know. We’re just lucky I guess.’ I let the question sit for a moment, then started up. ‘What about fathers? Do you have a father at home?’ I asked the youth in the back seat with me. ‘Yeah. I do.’ ‘How about you?’ I asked the driver. ‘Yeah, I got a dad.’ ‘Living with you?’ ‘Yeah.’ And the shotgun rider volunteered, ‘I got a dad, too.’ ‘How about the guys in the gangs? Do they have fathers living with them?’ ‘No way, man. None of them do.’ ‘So maybe fathers make a difference?’ I suggested. ‘Absolutely, man. Absolutely.’ ‘Why?’ I probed. ‘What difference does a father make?’ ‘He’s always behind you, man, pushing you. Keeping you in line.’ ‘Yeah. Telling you what’s what,’ driver and shotgun agreed. And I was taken safely right where I needed to go. On time. Without a hitch. The driver even asked what terminal I wanted. I met eighteen amazing men at the conference in the mountains. I am eternally grateful for their wisdom and their urge to heal the nation. But the most amazing men I met on my trip were these three, Pablo, Juan and Richard – amazing because, in spite of everything, they were trying to be good. And the men to whom I am most grateful are the men I never met. The men to whom I am most grateful are their fathers. It was their fathers who got me to the airport. It was their fathers who kept me safe. Teaching boys to respect women One day, in his early to mid-teens, each boy makes a very important discovery. A light globe goes on above his head. It suddenly occurs to him that he is bigger than his mother! Even the sweetest, gentlest boy just can’t help realising, sooner or later: ‘She can’t make me do it!’ The thought leads to action and, sooner or later, a boy will try to get the best of Mum by bluffing or intimidating her, even in subtle ways. This is an important teaching moment. Don’t panic, it isn’t necessary to worry or get scared. Picture this if you will. Fourteen-year-old Sam is in the kitchen. Sam’s job is to do the dishes – clear them up, scrape them off, put them in the dishwasher and switch it on. No big deal – he’s done it since he was nine. But last night, he didn’t finish the job. So, tonight, when his mother goes to get the dishes from the dishwasher (to serve up the meal his father has cooked!) they are in there, unwashed, with green fur growing on them. Sam’s mum naturally pulls him up. ‘What’s happened?’ But tonight Sam is fourteen! He heaves his shoulders back, he stalks about. Perhaps he speaks a little disrespectfully to his mother, under his breath. Now let’s imagine this family is really lucky. One, it includes a father. Two, he’s home. And, three – he knows his job! Sam’s father is in the lounge room reading the paper (kind of keeping an overview of things). He picks up on what is going on in the kitchen. This is his cue! Something deep inside him has been waiting for this moment. He folds his paper, strides to the kitchen, and leans on the fridge. Sam can feel him come in – it’s a kind of primeval moment, hormonal. He can feel the shift of power. The father looks long and hard at Sam and says some time-honoured words – words that you probably heard when you were fourteen. ‘Don’t speak to your mother in that tone of voice … ’ Now, Sam’s mother is a twenty-first-century woman, and is quite capable of dealing with Sam. The difference is she is not in it alone. Sam realises that there are two adults here who respect and support each other and who are going to bring him up well. The key feeling is ‘gentle but firm’. It’s as if they are saying to Sam, ‘You are a good kid, but you are not raised yet. We will work on that together to help you become a fine young man.’ Most importantly, Sam’s mother knows that she does not need to ever feel intimidated in her own home. It’s not a physical thing between the father and son, but a kind of moral force. If the father is for real, if he respects his partner and has credibility, then it will work every time, even if some more discussion is needed. The discussion should not be about the dishes, but about how to converse respectfully and safely. (If a mother is raising a boy on her own, things have to take a slightly different tack – this is discussed in the chapter on mothering, ‘Mothers and sons’.) STORIES FROM THE HEART IS IT ADD OR DDD (DAD DEFICIENCY DISORDER)? Several years ago, a man called Don came up to me after a lecture, and told me this story. Don was a truck driver and, a year earlier, his son, aged eight, had been diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder. Don read the diagnosis and, for want of better information, decided it meant his son Troy wasn’t getting enough attention. That, surely, was what ‘attention deficit’ meant! Don set himself the goal of getting more involved with Troy. He had always taken the view that raising children was best left to ‘the missus’ while he worked to pay the bills. Now all of that changed. In the holidays, and after school when possible, Troy rode in the truck with his dad. On weekends, whereas Don had often spent the time away with mates who collected and rode classic motorcycles, Troy now came along too. ‘We had to tone down the language and clean up our act a bit, but the blokes all understood, and some started bringing their kids, too,’ Don told me with a smile. The good news: Troy calmed down so much in a couple of months that he came off his Ritalin medication – he wasn’t ‘ADD’ any longer. But father and son continue to hang out together – because they enjoy it. Note: We are not saying here that all instances of Attention Deficit Disorder are really Dad-deficit disorders – but quite a lot are. (For more about ADD, ADHD and boys, see Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo).) Sadly, many dads don’t get this aspect of their role. I’ve seen dads come in to this conversation and say, ‘Why are you picking on the kid?’ or ‘Why are you making such an issue of it darling?’ or ‘Hey you guys, I can’t hear the TV!’ These dads are undermining their wives. This is a disaster, when a mother is doing the hard stuff, and the father cuts her legs out from under her. These men are in for a terrible time. The gods, and the women, smile on those men who stand alongside them without getting too heavy, and just add their support to the situation. STORIES FROM THE HEART LETTER FROM A FATHER Dear Steve, We have had many challenges with our son, and he with us! I’m pleased to say that things are going well for him. Other parents of boys might like to share some things we have learnt. The biggest difference between Matt and his sister Sophie was that Matt was very impulsive and had explosive energy. When he was eight, he ran straight out in front of a car without even pausing to look. Luckily the driver had seen Matt’s ball roll onto the road and was already braking hard! The car just missed him. Boys don’t seem to always think before they act. We really got it wrong with Matt in his early teens. Because his sister had been so easy to negotiate with, we assumed he would be the same. But he just didn’t do his housework, his homework, or keep to agreements about when he would be in. Reasoning wasn’t enough with him – until we realised he was crying out for firm boundaries and enforced consequences. We had been threatening him, sure, but just not carrying out consequences. When we finally did this consistently (feeling pretty mean sometimes), then he improved out of sight. The thing was, he was happier, too. I think some boys just need this. Something that really helped Matt was the peer support scheme. In Year 6 at primary school he had a nursery child to take care of and protect. This gave him a sense of being important and he came home full of stories about his younger charge – how the little boy learnt, what he got up to. We saw a whole different side to him. Then in Year 7 at high school, he had a Year 11 peer support boy who watched out for him in a bullying situation, so he benefited both ways. Around this time we learnt that although he was ratty at home, the teachers thought he was great at school! So it was just that he was letting off steam with us. Lots of parents I’ve talked to recognise this ‘school angel-home devil’ situation! At around fourteen and fifteen we felt Matt was drifting into his own world – rarely talking to us, just eating and disappearing, and giving us no insight into his world of school, his friends and so on. Our only communication seemed to be in telling him off. Luckily we always eat dinner together at the table, and this was the one time we got to talk. We resolved to have more time together – father and son weekends away. My wife decided to get out of the negative cycle and to give compliments to Matt, not just criticisms. He responded quite warmly. I think we had just got caught in a negative pattern. Boys do want to be friends; they don’t want to live in their own world, which is often quite lonely. We both benefited from a parenting course. The best things we learnt were: use ‘I messages’ (like ‘I was scared when you didn’t come home at the agreed time. I need you to make agreements you can keep.’) instead of ‘You are unreliable and useless! You had better come home or else!’; also, how to listen to kids’ problems, so they can talk them over, instead of jumping in with advice. We are a lot happier now, and Matt is a sociable and pleasant young man, instead of a surly boy. It’s important never to give up with your kids. Keep learning and getting help if you are stuck. You can always improve things if you try. Kids really need you to keep communicating with them. You don’t have to have all the answers When I was a young man, I studied martial arts in my spare time. I was pretty bad at it, but I liked the idea of being able to defend myself and others. Perhaps I would get a chance to rescue a beautiful maiden. The one time I got mugged though, the mugger didn’t use any of the attacks I had learnt to defend. I remember thinking, ‘Damn, I wish he would attack me the way I was taught! (Luckily the mugger had terrible timing, and some police actually came round the corner and arrested him in the act.) Being a father is rather like this. We men think we have to be completely prepared; or worse, we think that if we don’t know what to do, there’s something wrong with us. But parenthood is all about stuffing up. That’s how you learn. Kids keep changing, each kid is different, and it’s only by stuffing up that you get it right. The trick is to keep wide awake and see what works, and change if it doesn’t. As our kids reach new ages and create new challenges, we inevitably lose the plot at times. Can they stay at their new friend’s place overnight?, Is that film suitable for them to watch?, What is a fair consequence for this misbehaviour? … Sometimes it’s a difficult call. What to do? If you don’t have an answer on the spot, then it’s okay to stall. The best thing to do is simply talk it over with your partner or a friend. If you are both stuck, talk it over with other parents. My kids know that if they hassle me, I am more likely to give an unfavourable decision, so they have become more careful! But if I genuinely don’t know what to do or say, I reply, ‘Well, I’m not happy about it, but I’ll sleep on it and we’ll talk some more tomorrow.’ As long as you always follow up, this response works well. Family life is a work in progress. You only get in trouble if you ‘have to be right’ and you ‘have to show them who’s boss’. If you are human, it goes much better. Finding the balance is hard It’s okay to be unpopular with your kids once or twice a day! If you have lots of good time together and a long history of care and involvement to draw on, then you have goodwill saved up, like money in the bank. Sometimes dads are around so little, they want it all to be smooth sailing when they are there. But kids need to know when they do something wrong. It can be hard to find that middle point between hard and soft. Maybe it’s about being clear, and not about using power or force at all. I have a friend, Paul, who is very close to his kids – I admire and envy how natural a father he is. But he too gets it wrong sometimes. Paul told me once how he ‘lost it’ with his twelve-year-old son after a nightmare day at work. He exploded over some small thing and sent the boy off to his bedroom, yelling at him as he went. The son deserved hardly any of this, the yelling was louder than was necessary, the boy was wincing in fear – it was a disaster. Paul stood for minutes, ashamed and red-faced at what he had done. He realised it had to be fixed. He went and sat on the boy’s bed. He apologised. The boy said nothing, just lay face down on the bed. But ten minutes later, the father was in the bathroom. The boy walked past him on the way to brush his teeth and get ready for bed. As he passed, he uttered some words that touched his father’s heart in a most unforgettable way: ‘Why is it so hard to hate you?’ Dads do matter Even today, after a whole revolution in fathers’ roles, people still ask: do dads matter? Can’t mothers do it all? The research supporting the importance of dads is overwhelmingly clear. Boys with absent fathers, or with problem fathers, are statistically more likely to be violent, get hurt, get into trouble, do poorly in school, and be members of teenage gangs in adolescence. They are less likely to progress to university or have a good career. They marry less successfully, and are less effective fathers themselves. A good mum can make up for not having a father around, but it’s really, really hard work. Fatherless daughters are more likely to have low self-esteem, to have sex before they really want to, to get pregnant young, be assaulted or abused, and not continue their schooling. Families without men are usually poorer, and children of these families are likely to move downwards on the socio-economic ladder. Is that enough to convince you? Fathering is the best thing you are ever likely to do – for your own satisfaction and joy, and for its effect on the future of other human beings. And it’s good fun. PRACTICAL HELP DADS AND DAUGHTERS It’s not the topic of this book, but in case this is the only parenting book you ever read, here is something about girls. Mothers are the security blanket for daughters, their major support system, but dads are the self-esteem department. This is because for most girls, the opposite sex is important, and you are their practice person for the opposite sex. For this reason, you sometimes have five times the power your spouse has to either bless or wound your daughter. Think of it like a sword: you can either cut, or place it gently on her shoulder and say, ‘Arise, Princess’! So don’t ever, whatever you do, criticise her looks, her weight, or any aspect of her appearance. Not ever. You can debate what clothes she might wear if they are too revealing, but even here get her mother’s help. What you can do is spend time with her at sports, activities, even just driving her places, and above all, talk and be interested. Go to a movie with her, stop for a coffee and a chat when you shop together. A dad who is close to his daughter is so good for her, because he becomes the yardstick by which she measures boys. It’s as if she knows she is interesting, intelligent and worthwhile. Boys have to measure up to this – which eliminates 80 percent of them right off! This has to be a good investment! IN A NUTSHELL Make the time to be a dad. In society today, men are often little more than walking wallets. You have to fight to be a real father to your kids. Be active with your children – talk, play, make things, go on trips together. Take every chance you can to interact. Sometimes A(Attention) Deficit Disorder is actually D(Dad) Deficit Disorder. Share the discipline with your partner. Often your son will respond more readily to you – not from fear, but from respect and wanting to please you. Don’t hit or frighten boys – it just makes them mean to others. A boy will copy you. He will copy your way of acting towards his mother. He will take on your attitudes (whether you are a racist, a perpetual victim, an optimist or a person who cares about justice, and so on). And he will only be able to show his emotions if you can show yours. Most boys love rough-and-tumble games. Use these for enjoyment and also to teach him self-control, by stopping and setting some rules whenever the game gets too rough. Teach your son to respect women – and to respect himself. Chapter 6 Mothers and sons (#ulink_2568805d-bdbe-58ee-b984-26211b73acbd) This chapter was co-written with Shaaron Biddulph. Remember that first, quiet moment, when your new baby boy was lying in your arms and you got your first real chance to look at him – gazing at his little face and body? For mothers, it sometimes takes a while to realise that you really have a son, a boy. Most women say they feel more confident with a baby girl. They feel they would intuitively know what her needs will be. But a boy! At the birth of a son, some women will exclaim in horror, ‘I don’t know what to do with a boy!’ However well prepared we are rationally, the emotional response is often still, ‘Wow! This is unknown territory!’ The mother’s background Right from the start, a woman’s own ‘male history’ has an effect on her mothering. We needlessly, unconsciously set huge store on what sex a baby is. Many people can’t even really relate to a baby until they ask what kind it is. This shouldn’t matter, but it does. Every time a mother looks at her baby boy, hears him crying for her or changes his nappy, she is aware that he’s male. So, whatever maleness has meant to her will now come into the foreground. A woman remembers her dad and how he treated her. She has the experience of brothers, cousins and the boys she knew at school. And then all the men she has known – lovers, teachers, bosses, doctors, ministers, co-workers and friends. All these are woven into her ‘male history’, colouring her attitude to this unsuspecting little baby boy! Her ideas on ‘what men are like’, ‘how men have treated me’ and ‘what I would want to be different about men’ all begin to affect how she acts towards her child. As if that wasn’t enough, her feelings about this baby’s father also complicate the picture. As he grows up, does he look like his father? Does that make her love him more? If she is no longer with his father, or if there are problems, this can colour her feelings, too. A woman may be very aware of all these feelings, or this entire process might be totally unconscious. How we care for our baby boys All our earlier attitudes and beliefs about males will be reflected in our everyday care for our boys – each time we rush to help, or we hold back in order to let them do it for themselves; each time we encourage or discourage them; each time we cuddle them warmly or frown at them and walk away. All our responses arise from our internal attitudes towards having a baby – and having a male baby. It’s a big help if you adopt a curious attitude – of wanting to learn and understand about a boy’s world. As a woman, you cannot know what it’s like to be in a male body. If you didn’t have brothers (or a dad who was involved), then you have to get more information to find out what is normal in boys. It’s good to be able to ask your partner or male friends for information. Sometimes you just need practical knowledge. Mums help with learning about the opposite sex 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. Promoting a good self-image Many boys become painfully awkward by the time they are in secondary school. They seem ashamed of being male, big and full of hormones. (The media often portrays males as rapists, murderers, or inadequate fools, so a boy may easily feel quite bad about himself as a masculine being.) Mothers can do a lot to overcome this. I’ve heard beautiful comments from mothers to their sons: telling them from the age of about ten and upwards, ‘Wow, you are a great looking guy!’ when they try on their new clothes; or, ‘The girl who marries you is going to be so lucky’ when they do a good job around the house; and ‘I really enjoy your company’, ‘You’re interesting to talk to’, and ‘You have a really great sense of humour’. From these comments, the boy learns what girls like, and becomes more able to approach them in a relaxed and equal way. STORIES FROM THE HEART LETTER FROM A MOTHER Dear Steve, Reading Raising Boys, I wanted to add some things I feel so strongly about. To all the mothers out there – boys are different. So persevere in getting to understand and know them. Don’t, whatever you do, give up. Or become resigned and join the anti-boy group, with their weak jokes and tales of woe and ‘What can I do?’ sort of attitudes. There is a meeting point between mothers and sons. It’s up to you. It may not be obvious, it may take time and a number of attempts. Struggle is not a sign of failure, but of something new being born. Look for the good in your son. You will find it. Boys have tender feelings, and mothers have an essential part in keeping the child whole. Seeing how affectionate they can be at times makes you love them so much more. Give them a chance to play with and help younger children, and to look after animals. See how loving they can be. Share your son’s passions. Tom (my nine-year-old) and I have a wintertime ritual. On a Saturday afternoon we go to the second half of the local football game (which is about the right amount of time for us) and get in for free. We generally sit down by the fence, close enough to feel the earth and air move as the players surge past. Tom takes great pleasure in telling me who the players are and the rules, and I notice he often tells me the details he knows will interest me, like something about their lives outside football! The action is great, so vigorous and determined. The atmosphere at the historic ground is friendly and excited, a bubble of warmth on a cold afternoon. So different to watching it on the telly! It’s an urban adventure. Boys often need help in connecting with things – a piece of work at school, with using the library, computers, newspapers, encyclopedias. Help them to organise their homework, partition the task into ‘do-able’ chunks, set realistic goals and help them to get there. Make the task smaller so they can relate to it, so they don’t feel overwhelmed and give up. At the same time, don’t take over – make sure they have the joy of their own achievement. Expand your boys’ awareness, By walking, talking, noticing things, collecting things; by seeing how a tree changes with the seasons, or how a building project is developing. Show them how food happens – planning the purchases, choosing the fruit, the preparation and enjoyment of new foods. Involve them in planning family events and holidays. Show them how to combine their interests with those of others when planning. Make sure they get enough sleep and a balance of social and quiet time. This is basic but critical. Embrace bedtime rituals, stories, cuddles, tickling on the back, whatever, so they feel safe, loved and at peace. A shared repertoire of favourite stories is invaluable. Finally, you can really help your sons by supporting their relationship with their father. Fathers may not foresee and plan in the way you do, and this may limit their opportunities to what is nearest at hand. Gentle reminders can be appreciated. Put good men in the path of your son – a groovy music teacher, a valued handyman, a friend’s brother. Speak to them about good men, their qualities, and what you notice about how they act in different situations. Recall their past – tell them what beautiful babies they were, what their births meant to you, what rays of sunshine they are in your life. A deep harmony … a beautiful boy. With warm wishes JT PRACTICAL HELP LITTLE BOYS’ BODIES Penises and testicles are a bit of a mystery to mothers. Here are a doctor’s answers to some questions mothers commonly ask: Q: Should my son have two testicles visible? A: By the time of the ‘six-week check’ that all babies should get from the Child Health sister or doctor, both testicles should be able to be seen. Q: Is it okay to touch his penis to wash it? A: Of course! You have to wash around the penis and testicles when changing nappies and in the bath. Once out of nappies, a little boy can wash his own penis while you supervise. Q: Should I pull back the foreskin to keep his penis really clean? A: This is not necessary, in fact it’s not a good idea at all. At this age the foreskin is adhered to the end of the penis. Toddlers naturally pull back their foreskin little by little, and at about three or four years of age you will notice that it retracts. At the age of four, you can tell him from time to time in the bath to pull it back and wash around the end of the penis. Show him how to leave the foreskin back until he is dry after a shower, and how to pull the foreskin back when having a wee so as to keep urine from staying underneath it. Q: My son pulls and stretches his penis or pushes his finger inside it. Is this okay? A: Basically children won’t damage themselves, because if it hurts they’ll soon stop! Penises are a little fascinating to their owners, feel comforting to hold, and this is fine. Don’t make a fuss about it. Q: My son often holds onto his penis to stop himself weeing. Is that harmful? A: Most boys do this. Girls have strong pelvic muscles that can hold back their wee without anyone knowing they’re doing it. Boys are made differently, and can’t do this. So if they need to do a wee but are too engrossed in playing, they will often ‘hang on’. Encourage them to take a toilet break! Q: What name should we call our child’s penis? A: Call a penis a penis. Don’t make up silly names for it. Q: When boys are a little older, they sometimes get hit in the testicles during games. What should I do? A: Testicles are very sensitive – that’s why all the men crouch over in sympathy if someone gets hit in the crotch during a cricket match. But usually there is no lasting damage. Go with your boy to a private spot and check him out gently. If there is severe pain, swelling, bleeding, bruising, or if pain continues to make him cry for a long time, or if he vomits, then get him straight to a doctor. Otherwise just let him sit quietly and recover. If tenderness continues after a few hours, have him checked by a doctor. If you are in any doubt on these questions, talk to your doctor. It’s always best to be on the safe side. Always encourage children to be careful of each other’s bodies. Challenge your son or daughter strongly if they think harming other kids is funny or trivial. Come down hard on games that involve grabbing or hitting people in the genitals. Some TV shows treat these injuries as a joke, which they are not. Being hit in the genitals is about as funny as being hit in the breasts, and testicles are far more sensitive. (Our thanks to Dr Nick Cooling for this information.) STORIES FROM THE HEART AT THE SHOPS Julie and her son Ben, aged eight, were in town to do some supermarket shopping. Just outside the shop they saw two girls from Ben’s class at school, sitting on the bench. Ben gave a cheery ‘Hi’ to the girls, but instead of saying ‘Hi’ back, both girls just looked at the ground and giggled! Julie and Ben finished their shopping and went on down the street. Julie noticed that Ben was rather quiet, and asked how he was going. ‘Oh, I’m fine,’ said Ben (who, after all, is an Australian male and obliged to say this!). Julie wasn’t put off. ‘Did it upset you that those girls just laughed and didn’t say hello?’ ‘Umm … yes,’ admitted Ben. Julie thought for a moment before replying. ‘Hmm, well I don’t know if it helps, but I remember being a girl in Third Grade. You did have your favourite boy. But it was kind of awkward. If he spoke to you, especially if you had friends around, you might get embarrassed. So you just might giggle to cover it up. I don’t know if that fits here or not.’ Ben didn’t say anything, but he seemed to be walking taller all of a sudden! ‘Anyhow, it’s lucky,’ Julie went on, ‘that we’ve forgotten the milk! So we have to go back!’ And before Ben could even gasp, she swung round right there on the footpath and headed back to the supermarket. ‘You’ll get a second chance!’ she added. The girls were still there. This time they gave their own cheery ‘Hi’, and Ben had a conversation with them while his mother searched for the milk – which took a while to find! Adjusting your mothering to his growing up As a boy grows from helpless baby to towering teenager, your parenting style has to adjust with him. To begin with, you’re ‘the boss’, providing constant supervision. In the school years you teach, monitor and set limits. Later, you are a consultant and friend as he makes his own way. You gradually allow more and more responsibility and freedom. It’s all in the timing. Here are some clues to this. The primary school years In the primary school years a lot of gentle steering and helping goes on. Mothers watch their sons’ activities for dangers or for a lack of balance. They set a limit to TV viewing and computer time, so that boys get out and get some exercise. (Many schools have banned computer ‘play’ in lunch breaks because some boys never learn to socialise or interact – skills they really need.) Encourage your son to invite friends over, and be kind to and chat with them. Feeding them always helps! Ask them for their points of view and their ideas about school and their lives. It’s okay and important to monitor and check who will be there when your son visits a friend’s house. Are they well supervised? Boys can get into deep water if no-one looks out for them at this age. They shouldn’t be left alone in a house for long under the age of ten (though this depends a lot on where you live). Riding bikes around is not good after dark. And under ten, boys are not yet ready for the traffic on main roads. Their peripheral (sideways) vision is not yet fully developed for judging traffic speeds. At secondary school By secondary school, living with a boy is more a matter of fair exchange – ‘I’ll drive you there if you help me out here’, ‘If you cook, I’ll clean up’. A boy can accept the clear separation of his activities from yours. But stay friendly and available so that talking can still happen. Be sure to still have special times one-to-one. Stop for a drink and talk on shopping trips. Go out to the movies together, and have time after to talk. Some boys still love cuddles at this age, while others find it too intrusive. Find ways to show affection that are respectful of his wishes. Sit close on the couch, stroke his head at bedtime, tickle him – find the ways that he doesn’t mind. You may have to make a stand against a school or a sport wanting to dominate your kid’s life too much. (See ‘Homework Hell’ (#litres_trial_promo)). Allow your son to have a ‘health day’ or two once a term – a day off school when he doesn’t have to be sick, but can be peaceful by himself. Towards the end of high school, around the pressured time of major exams, help your son to study, but take a position that this is not the meaning of life, and that enjoyment and soul-time are also important. Let him know that his worth is not measured by exam results. In Australia a kind of competitive madness has developed around Year 12 exams. They’re portrayed as the make-or-break year of a person’s life. We can blaze a middle road here, encouraging kids to give school their best shot (all through late secondary school) but keeping it in proportion with the real goals of adolescence – which are to find what work you really love to do, while also developing socially and creatively. Here are some points to consider: Kids who get high Year 12 scores often bomb out at university, because they aren’t motivated by an actual interest in the subjects. Courses like medicine are starting to look for more balanced students who have done other degrees first or had other life experiences. Good exam results alone don’t make good doctors. Well-balanced youngsters are happier, healthier and more likeable employees, and become more successful in professional careers. Other courses and careers (such as teaching, nursing and ecology) can offer happier lifestyles and more human satisfaction than highly competitive fields like law, medicine and economics. Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. 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