Boys to men, continued

by Michelle Chihara

MICHAEL THOMPSON AND DAN KINDLON, Raising Cain

When Robbie, one of a group of seventh-grade boys, runs out of the room crying because he was teased for failing a quiz, Thompson engages a few of Robbie's friends in a group discussion. When can teasing hurt or go too far? he asks, and is met with silence. "They don't have a clue," he says. "They're not faking it to look cool or tough. They don't know how to read Robbie and don't even sense that they should."

Thompson is a staff psychologist for an all-boys independent school in the Boston area and the co-author, with Harvard professor Dan Kindlon, of Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys (Ballantine), a book that shares certain basic premises with Real Boys. Like Pollack, Thompson attacks boy culture's "tyranny of toughness" and "culture of cruelty" -- the ways in which, particularly in early adolescence, boys themselves are the strictest police of a harsh and narrow definition of what is masculine. Thompson sees a solution in what he calls "emotional literacy" -- the ability to look at Robbie and know when enough is enough. That means interpreting his signals, empathizing with his situation, and being able to articulate what feelings are involved.

Thompson, however, is a realist, and makes a point of saying that he and his co-author are not trying to "turn boys into girls." "A woman came up to me," says Thompson, "and in all goodwill said, `Isn't the solution that boys should acknowledge their feminine side?'. . . . When in my mind I see myself addressing seventh-grade boys and telling they should acknowledge their feminine side . . . I just visualize them jumping right out of their skins. They're homophobic to the point of being panic-stricken."

Instead, he suggests a solution that begins much earlier. "In our experience with families, we find that most girls get lots of encouragement from an early age to be emotionally literate -- to be reflective and expressive of their own feelings and to be responsive to the feelings of others," he says. Boys need some of the same training, instead of the "destructive emotional training" that presents aggression and anger as the only acceptable, "masculine" outlets for emotion.

The other part of the solution targets adults. Men -- boys' fathers, educators -- must "model" a "rich emotional life" for boys, so that boys can "create a life and language for [themselves] that speak with male identity." That means discussing with boys emotions that are typically considered feminine, like anxiety, sadness, and fear. And it also means expressing them ourselves. Kindlon and Thompson write: "A boy must see and believe that emotions belong in the life of a man."

NEWBERGER: in our society, the issue is "the choices [a boy] makes in situations that are morally challenging or tempting."

ELI NEWBERGER, The Men They Will Become

Pascal, a junior in high school, sees that the captains of his wrestling team have started hazing his freshman teammates with such severity that kids are quitting the team. When he confronts the captain, he gets called a "pussy," but the hazing stops. When an another argument starts up later, Pascal stands his ground: "If you want to hurt these kids, you're going to have to hurt me first."

How do we raise boys to make choices like Pascal's instead of the choice to haze the new kids? Eli Newberger, a pediatrician who teaches at Harvard and works at Children's Hospital, answers such questions by looking to boys' moral, rather than emotional, development. For Newberger, in our society the issue at stake is not a boy's emotional life, but his character -- "the choices he makes in situations that are morally challenging or tempting."

Newberger's clinical work has focused largely on child abuse and domestic violence, and he says he originally proposed a book about how to avoid "bad men," but his publisher suggested that instead he write about the pressing issue of raising good boys. The result is a philosophical, meditative book about boys' moral development, accompanied by a CD of songs that he describes as "jazz takes on male character." (One song is titled "It's a Sin To Tell a Lie.") Newberger plays the tuba on the recording.

The Men They Will Become: The Nature and Nurture of Male Character, due out in paperback next month from Perseus, also focuses on biology. "Our evolutionary heritage is woven into our genes, and programmed through hormones," he says. "Males are quite different from females in their relationships and as they confront moral challenges."

Newberger is less concerned about society's general definition of masculinity than about how we turn boys into people who will do the right thing when faced with moral dilemmas. His focus seems almost old-fashioned, despite its therapeutic bent: how do we make our young men internalize our values? He breaks boyhood into separate age periods, and then tailors his advice to "intellectual and social emotional tasks" specific to each period.

But even Newberger acknowledges that our culture teaches girls that "vulnerability is okay" and teaches boys to suppress almost any emotion besides anger. "Now," he writes, "in a day when women climb corporate ladders and pay mortgages, and when men are needed as nurturing fathers, teachers, and nurses, this difference in emotional expressiveness by gender may be outdated."

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Michelle Chihara can be reached at mchihara[a]phx.com.