Is It More Than Boys Being Boys?

By Harriet Barovick

Until Kip Kinkel opened fire on his schoolmates in Springfield, Ore., in May, everyone thought he was just a regular kid. A little angry, maybe, with a gruesome sense of humor. Mostly, just a boy. But even before the frantic second-guessing over the tragedy began came two books to suggest that boys being boys--or what the world tries to make of boys--may have been a big part of the problem.

Michael Gurian, a Spokane, Wash., therapist and author of A Fine Young Man, and Harvard psychiatry professor William Pollack, author of Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood, argue that boys are in crisis from emotional undernourishment. Though our culture views them as testosterone-driven demons, boys are much more fragile than many adults realize. And that's about all they agree on; where they clash is on the origin of the difficulties and how to avert them.

Both grapple with a universal truth: boys have complicated relationships with their mothers. Pollack, who is alarmed by what he calls the "silent crisis" of "normal" boys, says we live in a confused society in which mothers are afraid to cling to their sons. On the one hand, we ask 1990s boys to be sensitive and expressive, and on the other, we saddle them with the culture's outdated notions of masculinity. The result is what Pollack calls the ever present "boy code"--a stoic, uncommunicative, invulnerable stance that does not allow boys to be the warm, empathic human beings they are. The "gender straitjacketing" starts, Pollack says, during the early years, when boys suffer their first and most momentous trauma: premature separation from their well-meaning mothers. Fearful that maintaining a close connection will result in the shaming of their sons (name calling from peers, disapproval from adults), mothers disconnect, usually by the time their boys are five or six. When boys feel ashamed of their dependence on Mom, when they are discouraged from emotional expression, they withdraw, creatively and psychically. They become lost.

Not exactly, insists the anthropologically oriented Gurian, who focuses on adolescent boys. Boys--who are just being who they are--are making a natural, and critical, separation. And by the way, moms cling too much. Boys are more independent than girls at ages 5 and 6. To suggest something is wrong with this is to "pathologize" boys. Indignant about society's ignorance of male biology, Gurian says we're basing our expectations on female models.

One of the biggest problems for boys in our culture, says Gurian, is that adults, especially female ones, need to be educated about "what a boy is." Evolved from hunter-gatherer primates whose main purpose was survival, boys' uniquely fragile brains are not equipped to handle emotive data in the same way girls' are. So boys are by their nature emotionally insecure. At the same time, their several daily surges of testosterone "hardwire" them to be dominant and physically aggressive and to solve problems quickly. It is the job of parents--in particular, fathers or male mentors--to help them resolve this contradiction and channel their natural attributes productively.

Gurian concedes that a solid relationship with Mom is important during infancy and early childhood. But by age 10 or so, boy raising should largely be a man's game, where values such as honor, compassion, integrity and respect for women are handed down with discipline and understanding. The ability to talk about feelings is worth striving for, but boys don't come to it naturally. Besides, there are other, equally important ways of achieving intimacy.

So is there any agreement at all on how to help avert crises? Sort of. Both advise boy-specific nurturing techniques, like engaging in action-oriented activity that will lead to conversation instead of asking direct "How do you feel?" questions. But Pollack says mothers (and fathers) must encourage a range of emotions and generally "stay connected" to their sons. The results of a recent study of 150 Northeastern boys (that provided some of the material for his book) led him to conclude that boys will eagerly communicate in a supportive environment. Gurian's all for connection, but primarily in the form of male bonding--with coaches, teachers, scout leaders, friends. What boys need, he says, are clans. And rituals of any kind--from dinners with Mom to ball games with Dad--should happen regularly as part of a life in which parents stay in closer touch with their kids.

The problem with both books is that they tend to rely on an oversimplified view of boys and their caretakers. On the whole, do we really see boys, as both claim, as toxic? Are we really surprised by Pollack's declaration that boys feel? Is it indeed a "well-kept secret," as his study finds, that boys count girls among their closest friends? Most important, do most mothers really thrust their young sons out into the world unprotected? And if so, might they be doing the same with their girls? Oddly, the hard evidence for this key thesis is absent from Pollack's study and book.

As for Gurian, no matter what one believes about nature vs. nurture, it's hard to argue against the common-sense view that spending time with worthy male mentors is a good thing. But his eerie near dismissal of mothers gets in the way of his often sensible argument and devolves on occasion into a paranoia about a world dominated by manipulative women. He calls Gloria Steinem a "victim" feminist. Women, he says, do not see "how neglected their emotionally disadvantaged adolescent sons feel" as a result of women's lack of interest "in male biology and thus its forgetfulness of the subtleties of the male soul."

Nonetheless, what Gurian and Pollack both bitterly lament--and convincingly illustrate--is the peculiar pain, and the potential loneliness, of being a boy in America today. Especially acute are the adolescent years, when boys look hulking and powerful but are in fact needy and terrified. The statistics are scary: adolescent boys are five times as likely to commit suicide as adolescent girls; adolescent boys are 1.5 times as likely as girls to be victims of violent crime; boys are more likely to be diagnosed with attention deficit disorder and mental illnesses; and boys commit violent crime at a higher rate than adults.

Sure, Gurian says, boys can't process emotional trauma as well as girls can, and without proper guidance can go haywire. And Pollack, as expected, says misdirected rage is a response to emotional repression and to society's message that anger is an acceptable male emotion. The latter argument--like Pollack's overall idea--seems more expansive and more convincing. But either way, we clearly ought to be paying more attention.