Summarizes author, educator and
psychotherapist Michael Gurian, "Our culture is hard on all kids, but the way in
which boys are underprivileged as a gender is pretty severe."
Gurian, the father of two girls, is the author of The Wonder of Boys: What Parents,
Mentors and Educators Can Do to Shape Boys into Exceptional Men.
"Just about anyone who has raised a son has noticed how the boy often changes over
the years from a huggable bear to a stiff tree," he writes. What we need to do to
raise strong, responsible, sensitive men, he says, is to value a boy’s natural
propensities for competition and aggression. We need to provide an extended family, along
with the nuclear one, relationships with mentors and intense support from a child’s
school and community. We need to understand our boys and to build their
self-esteem—not try to turn them into females—so that they can, in turn, create
fulfilling lives and nurturing, long-term relationships for themselves.
Controversial, yet not confrontational, Gurian calls himself a "family
feminist."
He spoke with Nexus publisher Ravi Dykema in our Boulder office.
NEXUS:
Why do you say that boys are underprivileged?
MG:
First, I think girls and boys have troubles. I think our culture is
hard on all kids, so I don’t like the competition between privileges and
victimizations. However, boys appear to be emotionally more fragile, although this is very
difficult to track. After a divorce, just about every study shows that it takes much
longer for the male child to come back to equilibrium than the female child. Other areas
we can look at statistically are brain disorders, for instance ADHD (Attention Deficit
Hyperactive Disorder), hyperactivity. We have 1.2 million boys on Ritalin, so most of our
hyperactive kids are males. Why? Some of it’s environmental, but some of it seems to
be in the brain chemistry of the male. There are probably weaknesses. The other part is
socialization, culture. Our culture doesn’t raise its males very well. A lot of them
are mentally ill and a lot of them are suffering.
NEXUS:
The culture raises its girls better?
MG:
I think the culture’s hard on both boys and girls, I’ve got
two daughters, so I’m supportive of anything we do to take care of girls. If we look
at the question statistically, the culture is much less hard on females than on males. You
look individually, the culture’s hard on both. The culture is like every other
culture since the beginning of time. The males are disposable, and the females are not,
and that’s how it’s always been.
NEXUS:
What do you mean, the males are disposable?
MG:
The males are the ones who do the dangerous jobs and who die in war
and who die on the hunt. The females have the safer jobs, because that’s how
we’re built and every culture through the 4 million years of human history says
"we must protect the female, because she’s carrying the kids and the male will
be the one who does the dangerous jobs." That’s still true now. Our males die in
a 20-to-1 ratio to females on the job. Males are still doing the dangerous jobs. The
culture is set-up to be hard on females in one way, which we’ve identified, I think,
pretty well in the last 30 years, and it’s hard on males in another way, which we
haven’t done much to identify. I think my book helps to show the fact that males are
emotionally neglected. The culture isn’t set up right now to raise them to be
emotional beings. We think that some of the thought disorders are probably because we
aren’t raising them from the beginning to feel their feelings.
NEXUS:
Are there actual differences between the female and male brain?
MG:
The male brain tends to be a more spatial brain, and the female brain
tends to be a more verbal brain. By "spatial" I mean that the male uses up more
space and his brain is a hunting brain, which is concerned with objects moving through
space. We have millions of years of hunting. In fact, the brain developed to hunt, until
10,000 years ago. Males are not hunting animals now; they’re hunting basketballs,
soccer balls, tennis balls, footballs, any ball. Now the female brain will love it, too.
This isn’t to say women can’t do sports. It’s just that the tendency of the
male brain is to be spatial. In the classroom, the male child, according to many studies,
uses up more space. He fidgets. He incorporates objects into his space, and he relates to
them as objects. The tendency for the female is to use less space and to relate to objects
verbally, in other words to create a relationship with the objects, a relationship in
which she’s mirrored and there’s an imaginary audience. This goes all the way
through life. That’s just one element.
Then you have testosterone, which is the hormone that the male child is driven by,
especially in adolescence. So you have a more physically aggressive creature who’s
using up more space. His brain isn’t processing a lot of feelings verbally. Even, the
corpus collosum, which is just one of the hardwired, structural differences in the brain,
is smaller in the male brain, so there’s less cross-talk between the two hemispheres.
So, when a boy—or man— takes in emotive data, it doesn’t get across to come
out as a verbalization, and it certainly takes more time.
So all of these things put the male at an emotional disadvantage. What the culture used
to do to give males some emotional room was create huge kinship systems, male kinship
systems, like an ashram, or the masons, or warrior systems. In any system where
there’s community, males flourish a little better because they don’t get as much
as females do out of a one-on-one relationship, since they’re not as verbal. Males
need a lot of people around them, a lot of personnel. That’s why they join gangs.
They want a larger group around them to give them ways to bounce, because sitting down and
talking to their mom, they zone out pretty quickly. The problem is, especially when he
hits puberty and testosterone takes over, he gets less and less verbal. By the time he
gets married, he’s a different creature. The woman’s working from a more verbal
model and he’s working from a more physical/spatial model, and this is a big problem
we have in relationships.
NEXUS:
What do you have to say to moms to give them some help with their sons?
MG:
Moms complain that their kids don’t hear them, but more often
than not, that their sons don’t hear them. We know that the male brain does not take
in as much sensory data and as well as the female, so male children do not hear as well as
female children. A strategy that works for moms is to use more than one sense when they
have something important to say to the kid. For example, if they’re walking through
the room and they’re in a rush, and they say "Hey, we gotta go now. Put your
shoes on," and the boy’s building blocks or he’s on his computer. They
should assume he didn’t hear them, because the male brain is much worse than the
female with background noise, etc. What they need to do is to stop their motion, walk up
to him, maybe hold him gently by the arms, look him in the eye and say "It’s
time to get ready to go." Three sensory inputs: tactile, visual, oral. Or at least
stop and look him in the eye so that you know he heard you. That one thing, many moms tell
me, has worked for them.
The second thing: Moms will say "I’m talking to him and he doesn’t hear
me. Even though I know he’s listening, he didn’t really listen." One of the
things that’s happening there is that the moms are using too many words and the son
has zoned out. So, instead of getting to the concrete detail, which is what the son is
listening for, she will say "We need to go to the store because we need to buy Uncle
Al some Pepsi because we’re going to go to the reunion out at Aunt Judith’s
house, and you know Aunt Judith just got done with her back surgery, and so, when you get
to the store, I want you to buy a half gallon of skim milk." He’s zoned out. He
didn’t hear her say, "I want you to buy a half gallon of skim milk,"
because when he’s taking in all this verbal input, at a certain point he shuts down.
Since we know this about the way his brain works, moms know they have to be more concrete.
And dads should, too. It’s not a "mom" thing. Any caregiver needs to be
more concrete with the kid. And this is going to work for girls too, to a certain extent.
NEXUS:
These are handy suggestions, but what are some of the big mistakes that
we find parents now making with boys?
MG:
The biggest mistake we make is in the social systems within which we
raise boys. We don’t have enough people raising them. For example, single mothers are
working as hard as they can. But to have a family system in which one female caregiver is
raising, for instance, adolescent boys, is a disaster waiting to happen. And single
mothers agree with me on this, and they know I’m not attacking them. And it’s
true for single fathers as well. It’s a disaster because this is one caregiver trying
to raise a child whose brain system isn’t set up to get what he needs from one
relationship
In the book I talk about the three-family system, that males are tribal creatures. They
are group-process oriented; they’re not as one-on-one oriented so they need three
families. I think this is good for girls, too. I think it’s good for any human being.
First, a boy needs the nuclear unit, however it’s shaped. Could be gay, as far as
I’m concerned, whatever is the nuclear unit that is raising him.
Then he needs the extended family unit, which can include blood relatives if they are
around, or the parent’s best friend who takes an interest in the boy. Anyone who
forms a mentorial bond with the boy is extended family. In early childhood, it’s
daycare workers. They are second family members to kids.
Then the third family is the larger social systems, like churches, school and the
media. The media has become a third family member, because our boys are bonding with media
figures. I’m arguing that the boy needs three families and that probably the greatest
problem we have in our culture right now would be that we don’t give boys three
families. Our crime rate, as you know, is predominantly created by young males who were
raised by single moms. Again, it’s not the single mom—it’s not about her
doing a bad job—it’s about a social system that has forgotten that you
can’t raise males that way.
NEXUS:
If the boys were raised with the social structure they need, how would
they turn out differently?
MG:
They would be emotionally healthier, for one, which in itself is
profound. That would mean that they would have more longevity in their partnerships later
on in life. They wouldn’t abandon families as much. They’d be better at
marriage. They’d have a core self. They would be more flexible. They would develop
more of themselves. The metaphors I use are that when we’re raising a male through
adolescence, we need to know that he’s both a warrior and an artist, and we need to
develop both sides in him. So, if we give him all the personnel he needs and all the love
that he needs, including the separation process, and male mentors and three families, we
will be doing a lot more to help him channel the testosterone, which is the warrior part,
and help him channel the natural and beautiful sensitivity that a boy has. Every mom who
hugs her 5-year old boy and every dad knows this boy is a beautiful sensitive creature.
The artist and the warrior both have to be, both need a lot of personnel to come out. When
we don’t give a lot of personnel, we end up with one of them coming out too much.
It’s often the warrior part, because that’s physical and fits the hormone, the
testosterone. But when we give them more, what we bring is a better generation of boys who
take better care of themselves and better care of their women and of their kids and of
their society. It’s a better way to do it.
NEXUS:
Is the nuclear family, the typical system in our society, adequate to
that? In your estimation.
MG:
Every family is its own unit, and every family’s doing as good a
job as it can, and many nuclear families have done beautifully. But I’m saying that,
as a cultural vision, to have only a father and a mother taking care of a set of boys, has
inherent problems. Probably the father will be gone most of the time because of work.
That’s not enough male contact for the boy. Now the mother is working a lot more,
too, so the boy is getting even less emotional bonding because she’s gone.
NEXUS:
What’s the consequence of putting babies in daycare centers
full-time when they’re six weeks old and then leaving them there until they’re
in school?
MG:
That’s a very difficult thing. I agree with Barry Brazelton, who
I think is the best in the country in child psychiatry. His argument is if a mom (or dad)
can stay home for two years, this is better for attachment, because those two years are
the biggest years of brain development. They’re the biggest years when attachment is
needed. If the family can make any sacrifice at all so one parent can stay home, they
ought to try. But if the dad and mom both have to go back to work, then the second best
alternative is consistent daycare personnel, because in order to attach, the child needs
to bond with a consistent caregiver. That means smell, sounds and the feeling of a
person’s energy. What the parents should do is find a daycare center where the staff
doesn’t turn over often and where that infant will be held a lot in the first few
weeks and months of life, by one person who will be a consistent caregiver. Studies show
that it’s better for the mom to stay home. Period. But in daycare centers where we
have a consistent primary caregiver, the kids flourish, studies also show. So the idea
here isn’t that it’s mom or a daycare provider. The idea is consistent primary
caregiver.
NEXUS:
What’s another flaw in our current system of raising boys that has
some consequence later?
MG:
There are two big things, I would say, and they’re related,
looking at the family system. One would be lack of father, and related to that is too much
mother. I wrote a book on each of those: The Prince and the King was on lack of
father, and Mothers, Sons and Lovers was on too much mother. We were brought up in
nuclear families, most of us, and the father was gone most of the time. Many mothers,
without realizing it, used their sons as surrogate husbands because they really
weren’t getting from the men emotionally what they needed. The broader problem is the
mother bonding with the son and asking him to feed her emotionally in ways that her
partner should be doing or that she should be getting from her own feminine culture, from
her girlfriends, from other adults. We have a lot of males who were raised by moms who
were what I call "over-mothered" emotionally. So when those males go through the
separation process, those moms don’t generally let them go. There are many
consequences. For example, by the time he’s 40 he’s will do things like take his
mother’s side in an argument, not his wife’s. He will have what we call
push-pull intimacy. He’ll get close to his wife, but as soon as he gets too close,
he’ll pull far away. There isn’t a consistent rhythm of intimacy with this man.
And women who have issues with fathers who abandoned them or who they perceive emotionally
abandoned them, do the same thing with men. And a lot of men now who were over-mothered
are marrying women who were under-fathered and we have a lot of push-pull intimacy because
of this.
Another big flaw would be the media. In the last 20 to 30 years, our social system has
changed a great deal. We’re getting input from this third family member called the
media that hasn’t yet been processed by the first and second family. And so, our
parents probably were complaining about what we learned from the media and how we were
dressing and all those things that drove them nuts. Those complaints are bigger now. Kids
are watching seven hours of TV a day, playing two hours of video games. These kids are
going numb. They’re relating to media, they’re relating to stories in the media
where emotion is enhanced, so they come to expect amplified emotion. Bruno Bettelheim
showed little kids all sorts of media, and he watched how they would then hyper-emote and
expect hyper-emotion from their comrades. It’s an incredible emotional experience for
a child. So our sense of emotionality is getting very skewed, and the media is a whole
other area that we have to look at with profound consequences.
A third area would be, specifically, in the parenting of boys, not understanding how
they work their emotions. For instance in The Wonder of Boys I list eight ways that
boys process emotion, and I show caregivers how they often misread emotionality in a boy.
For instance, boys are delayed reactors, more than girls are. Let’s say they’re
playing a street hockey game and one of the kids falls and skins his knee. There is a
probability that the boy is going to go ahead and make the goal before getting back to the
kid who skinned his knee. There’s a higher probability that a female would stop and
see the injury as a problem. It doesn’t mean that he’s not emotional, but
he’s delaying reaction. He’s like a soldier who can’t react emotionally
when his comrade’s killed or he’ll be killed. The male brain is formed for hunt
and for war, and it delays reactions. I suggest that parents wait. They bring it up to the
boy, and wait, and then bring it up 12 hours later or eight hours later. Don’t try to
get the kid talking about it right then, because he may not be able to. He may just tell
us what we want to know. We need to re-educate ourselves about how he handles emotion and
change the way we parent him so we can bring out more emotion in him and have a more
satisfying relationship. If we don’t know this about boys, one of the biggest
mistakes we make is to use too many words too quickly, and have too high an expectation
that the boy’s going to get it. The biggest negative consequence of that strategy of
parenting is that we think of our boy as somehow defective because he can’t respond
immediately. If the parent sees him for who he is and says "You’re fine the way
you are. I’ll adapt to you and I’ll help you to process your emotion the way you
process it," that builds self-esteem.
NEXUS:
Do caregivers and schools and officials treat boys inappropriately, as if
they’re not sensitive?
MG:
Yes, there’s a whole spectrum of problems there. One is
that there are certainly some people in our social system, sort of hyper-macho males, who
are trying to kill sensitivity in boys. Then there are the people who don’t recognize
how males express emotion, so they say that the male is not empathic or that the male is
not emotional, when in fact he is, but he’s doing it in his own way. Then there are
those people who try to make the boy into a female: if he were emotional, this is how
he’d act. There’s a whole spectrum of problems from different people in our
society because we don’t understand. The underpinning of all this is that we
don’t realize how fragile that boy is. Moms raising boys know how fragile they are. A
certain amount of toughness training is needed, but some people are suppressing the artist
that’s in the boy. Others will try to suppress the warrior and forget that it’s
in the warrior that a lot of boys experience their emotion, for instance anger. The way to
train that anger is by bringing out the warrior. The way to train the empathy is by
bringing out the artist. We need to do both.
NEXUS:
Any parting words before we end?
MG:
We are at the cusp right now, as I see it, of a revolution in
consciousness. This is actually the first time we’ve looked at boyhood, probably, in
human history. Feminism opened up those doors for us, and with our economic well-being we
have the luxury of saying to ourselves "How can we emotionally develop our male
children? How can we give our male children a better life?" Up to now, our male
children have been disposable; they’ve died younger than our female children;
they’ve died of more diseases; they’ve had more brain disorders; on and on it
goes. And we now are at the point where we have a social system that could actually
re-evaluate boyhood in a way that it never could before.
