Real Boys

by William Pollack

  The crucial thing to remember is that simply because a boy like Evan can be gentle and low-key doesn’t mean he always has to be. In short, Evan can learn to choose when and how to express his full emotional capacities. For instance, Evan deliberately chose not to play the role of the Witch to avoid the taunting he’d face if he followed through with his original choice. Likewise, Evan can learn to temporarily hide his vulnerable emotions when he’s out with the football team and express himself more freely in safer contexts, such as when he’s among his closest friends or with his mom.

  In a similar way, women have learned to compete in previously all-male arenas by learning new codes of behavior that they apply in a limited context, such as on the job. When a woman is the head of a bank, she doesn’t cry on the job, but she might very well cry if her close friend went bankrupt and couldn’t pay her debts. In short, women have learned to broaden their emotional repertoire and apply responses that are appropriate for the situation in which they find themselves. Boys obviously can too.

  In fact, Evan will probably feel freer than other adolescent boys who have been more constrained by gender straitjackets. He may feel freer than most boys to pursue whatever interests he may have—football, cooking, or even playing female parts in theatrical productions. If his passions lead him outside the few rigid areas that the Boy Code says are appropriate, he will probably have the self-assurance to buck the stereotypes with humor and grace.

  When I talk about a boy choosing when to show his more sensitive side, I don’t mean the process I described of boys adopting a mask, a forced persona, to hide shame and insecurity. There’s a crucial difference between the two. Evan will not be forced to wear a mask out of fear or shame, because he has been allowed to develop a genuine, deep sense of self that enables him to freely and selectively choose when it’s safe to show the side of his personality that is outside the Boy Code.

  Some parents actually stand up for their boys and try to encourage other adults to see the downside of gender straitjacketing. For instance, when Sarah and I spoke further, she explained that when she met resistance from Evan’s third-grade teacher she scheduled a talk with her and Evan’s other teachers. She thought carefully about how to explain her position. She told the teachers that she valued Evan’s creativity and his caring quality and that she had worked hard to ensure that they survived. She gave a few examples of things she loved about Evan and after a while the teachers joined in. They talked for a while about how cooperative, empathic and fun Evan was. Then Sarah asked the teachers to help her maintain the development of those qualities and to communicate with her about them. “At first I don’t think I changed their minds a bit,” says Sarah. “I’m not sure I could have done that. But I started a good discussion among us. And now Evan is doing wonderfully.”

  Like Sarah, other mothers can become a new breed of coach for the less open-minded and help make the world safer for sensitive boys. Her love and unconditional support of her son can be a powerful counterpart to the shaming messages society delivers.

  BOYS WITH SINGLE MOTHERS

  Among some of our best coaches in this area are women who raise sons without fathers, due to divorce, a father’s death, or simply the choice of single motherhood. Because they are even more likely to be subjected to our culture’s discomfort with close mother-son relationships than women in two-parent families, single mothers tend to focus very carefully on what they are doing to raise their boys and how this affects them as they grow into men.

  Single mothers say they are almost universally counseled to find the boy a male role model, as if a mother cannot possibly raise her son alone, as if she will be unable to convey some vital secret about masculinity. Single mothers are particularly warned against being physically affectionate with their sons, as if any physical contact will automatically become sexual, simply because there’s no father in the house. Many single mothers I’ve met and counseled find it extremely hard to sort through this issue, to trust in their own ability to raise a son and to feel comfortable showing him affection. As a result, they may be more likely than other mothers to pull back from intimacy with their sons, which is unfortunate because these boys have no other parent to turn to for a closer relationship.

  But I believe most single mothers have excellent instincts about what to say and do—and about when to ask others for help—to ensure that their sons will grow into healthy young men. Single mothers, I believe, have a lot of good things to teach the rest of us about boys and masculinity.

  OLIVIA AND GEORGE

  Olivia found there was really only one time she needed to call on her ex-husband for help with George, now fourteen years old:

  “I remember calling my husband when George was still toilet-training and saying, ‘When you’re up here, can you show George how to stand over the toilet and pee? He’s getting to the age where he can do that, but he’s never seen a man naked, so how is he supposed to know how?’ ”

  It wasn’t that there weren’t other times Olivia wished her husband were around to handle specific parenting issues, but who among us, male or female, hasn’t occasionally wanted to hand tough parenting challenges to someone else? For example, Olivia remembers her reluctance to talk with her son about sex.

  “I’ll never forget it. A year ago when George was only thirteen years old, I came home from work one day and found him and his girlfriend in his room by themselves. I knew I had to talk about sex with him again—and soon. At that point, I really, really wished his father were there to do it. I wish I could have just gone off and made dinner and said, ‘Dear, you handle this. You know how to handle boys.’ But I couldn’t.”

  “What did you end up doing?” I asked.

  “Well, the upside is that we had a good talk—all about sex and relationships. We got through it. If we could get through that, we’ll get through anything!”

  OTHER SINGLE MOTHERS TAKE CHARGE

  Olivia is not alone in her gifts as a single mother. Another mother told me she found it difficult, as a woman, to intervene in the supreme bastion of masculinity—sports. But she handled it well. When a coach verbally abused her son, Chad, after he fell and injured himself, Deborah took action:

  “I called the athletic director of the school, which is not something that a mother does,” she explained. “Certainly you don’t do it lightly. For a year afterwards I had parents come up and say that was a very courageous thing to do—and very risky.”

  “That was quite courageous,” I agreed.

  “Well,” Deborah told me, “sports directors and coaches hate to see mothers meddling. They can get quite condescending and patronizing to mothers. And I think parents fear they will take it out on their sons. But it actually had positive results. The coach was remorseful about what he did to Chad, and the athletic director has been working on coaching styles. It still has a long way to go, but I’m glad I stuck up for my boy.”

  Deborah has also had to manage Chad’s tendency to feel that he should be the man of the family:

  “Occasionally Chad has tried to advise me on what to do with the family money or tell me how I should be running my business. I think he gets it in his head from somewhere that a family needs a male in charge. I tolerate it and he gets over it pretty quickly. He figures out I’m doing OK.”

  Clearly these single mothers are managing, and managing well. Single mothers face challenges to their authority from coaches, other parents, and especially their sons. While facing down these challenges and defying the gender stereotypes that say women can’t raise sons, single mothers open doors for all of us.

  Of course, any parent knows that a second set of hands, a second adult presence, is helpful for surviving and thriving, and it probably helps if the two adults have complementary capacities, to better split up the work and present a model for a broader range of behavior for children. But in many respects the gender of those individuals is less significant than we had often imagined.

  The real issue for the son of a single mother—
or the son of any mother, for that matter—is not the presence or absence of a man in the house but the mother’s attitude toward men in general. A woman who exudes hostility toward men can confuse her developing son’s sense of his own gender. A son can also be confused if his mother is passively dependent on men and gets involved with men who are controlling and aggressive. (But then, similar damage to a son’s development is done by fathers who exhibit unhealthy aspects of masculinity, such as aggressive, controlling behavior toward their wives.) In short, a single mother with adequate self-esteem and a healthy attitude toward men can be a wonderful parent of a son.

  We witnessed the phenomenon of well-adjusted families headed by mothers during World War II, when many sons had fathers who were absent for years. The boys did not become emasculated or effeminate in the predominantly female world in which they lived, but were perfectly able to develop healthy attitudes about their masculinity. I would suggest that they were helped because of their mothers’ overwhelmingly positive attitude toward their soldier-fathers. The entire country, mothers included, were proud of their men, sure that their strong masculinity was enabling them to fight effectively for a just cause.

  Mothers who have a positive attitude toward other men in their lives will naturally allow them into their mother-son relationship, thus broadening the boy’s exposure to father substitutes. This is helpful not because single mothering interferes with the development of masculinity or because boys somehow require testosterone-charged models, but rather because bringing adult male friends into a boy’s life simply means there will be more love to go around. By exposing her son to several empathic adult mentors, a single mother can shepherd her son along a healthy journey toward manhood.

  THE INTERNAL CONFUSION—WORKING ON YOUR OWN

  ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT BOYS

  Most mothers, whether single or not, know just the kind of boy they want to raise, and their struggle involves reconciling that ideal image with the one the old Boy Code still tells them is more appropriate. But sometimes it’s not society that’s affecting a mother’s attitude, but rather her own internal confusion about what she considers a good, healthy, “masculine” boy. Sometimes a mother’s own best ideals about equality between the sexes are tainted by her own unresolved confusion over masculinity. A mother might say she wants her boy to be sensitive, but her deeper, sometimes unconscious feelings might want her boy to be tough and athletic. In the same way, a woman might state that she wants a kind, sensitive man for a partner, but she might instead consistently choose to date men in the Rhett Butler-macho style. She may be so imbued with society’s ambivalence about masculinity that she has trouble giving her son a consistent, helpful message. Mixed messages increase a son’s confusion and sense of shame over his own masculinity, as he finds himself unable to live up to a mother’s ambiguous messages about what a man should be.

  To avoid this painful dilemma, I suggest moms try to look within themselves to examine their own ideas about masculinity. That journey is probably not complete until they have examined their own histories and thought about the men who probably taught them the most about masculinity: their fathers. If a woman grew up with a silent or absent father, as was common, for instance, in the 1950s, she may be uncomfortable with men who are expressive. She may find herself unconsciously, yet consistently, blocking her son from expressing his feelings.

  Another common role that fathers in the previous generation adopted was the covertly seductive father, the one who adored his little girl and felt free to comment on her appearance, clothes, and figure. As Ellen Kaschak has argued, this covert seductiveness has damaged many women in our culture, leaving them with the idea that their self-esteem is wrapped up in their ability to be attractive to men. A mother with this sort of history may find herself unconsciously being flirtatious with her adolescent son, believing in some deep-seated way that this is the only way to relate to a man.

  Far more common than the sexually seductive mother, however, is the mother who pulls back from a relationship with her boy out of fear of being inappropriate or simply out of a sense of strangeness. The most well-meaning mother may feel that she doesn’t know how to achieve intimacy with a boy, especially when he reaches puberty and suddenly begins to look very much like a man. Fear of Freud’s Oedipus complex haunts the most healthy of mother-son relationships. And yet, at this point, a boy may vitally need his mother as a mentor as he negotiates this all-important life passage.

  Much of a mother’s inner conflict and confusion could be eliminated, I believe, if we as a society were to clarify our expectations about what it means today to be a “man”—what we really hope for from our boys and men. My years of counseling boys and their parents make it clear that we don’t really want our boys to move across the country, live apart from us, and never call, although part of a mythic view of manhood is that boys must go through some solitary hardening ritual, some heroic mission, to prove their courage and solidify their masculinity. In Greek legend Odysseus doesn’t see his family—including his son Telemachus—for twenty years as his journey home from the Trojan War is extended by adversity and many adventures. In our more recent mythology, we have figures such as the Lone Ranger, who ride around the West performing heroic feats, unfettered by wives and children. And commercials tell us that any young boy can become a real man by joining the Marines, getting physically tough and proving himself on the battlefield.

  But these mythic images of solitary men no longer serve us. We live in an interdependent world, so that even the best corporate executives, heroic men of strong vision and action, sink or swim on their ability to work with others. We also live in a world where traveling even long distances is relatively quick and easy—and communicating over these distances is even quicker and easier—so that we don’t need to be training our boys (or any other group of our citizens) to withstand long, lonely, dangerous journeys. It’s time we rethink the merits of our old-fashioned male archetypes—the distant “warrior,” the “lone adventurer,” the “fearless hero”—and reconsider what we really want from our boys and men.

  I would suggest that most people’s image of a healthy male is one who can succeed on the job, on the athletic field, and in relationships, and change diapers. What we really want is for our boys to become strong, authentic individuals, to become capable both of acting heroically and of maintaining strong affectionate relationships to spouses, children, parents, co-workers, neighbors, and friends. Mothers are a key to this, and to helping our boys mature into self-respecting men who don’t need to cut off relational ties. If they refuse to give in to society’s outdated myths about the need for separation and instead let it be known loudly and clearly that they want to nurture boys to become emotionally open human beings, mothers give the message to young and adolescent boys that there’s no reason to sever their mother-son ties, no reason to harden themselves, and no reason to become the kind of emotionally disconnected adult male who will be disliked by many women.

  CARL: A REAL BOY

  A good example of a real boy is Carl, a bright, gregarious, and athletic high school senior who is extremely close to his extended family of Russian-Jewish heritage and an expert at negotiating within it. Carl spoke about how he chose to attend a prestigious college in a nearby state.

  “My guidance counselor told me that with my grades and my football record I had a lot of places to choose from, which is just great, but it made my decision really hard,” Carl explained. “When I told my parents about what he said, chaos broke out at the dinner table. Dad told me that I should try for an Ivy League school. I mean here’s someone who stowed away on a boat at age twelve to get to this country and has busted his butt ever since. I could just see the stars in his eyes as he thought Yale.”

  “Then my mother jumped in,” he continued. “She started praising N, the local university, which is good but not as good as she wanted to think. I could almost see her thinking, ‘My baby’s moving away.’”

  “My brother Danny started y
elling at me to choose a school with a good football team. You know what was on his mind. He wanted me to be a star so he could tell all his friends. I mean it was pretty funny, all these people talking at once, each telling me what they wanted for me. I started teasing them about it. I said, ‘C’mon, Dad. You just want to drive around with one of those Yale stickers on your car. And, Danny, you just want to watch me on TV. And aw, Ma, don’t you think I’ll survive without your cooking?’ We all ended up laughing, and, of course, in the end I didn’t choose any of the schools they wanted. But, I am at a school Dad’s proud of and I’m close enough to come home on weekends. As for football, who needs it? It gets too rough at the college level.”

  As Carl impressed on us, the presence of supportive relationships does not hamper a boy’s ability to become his own individual self. Carl is easily able to identify and act on his own interests, despite the fact that his family is close and all too ready to offer their own opinions.

  THE LASTING POSITIVE BENEFITS OF A CLOSE

  RELATIONSHIP WITH PARENTS

  When I counsel couples, I am often struck by the fact that many of the skills required to succeed in adult relationships are those we resist teaching to growing boys—skills of connection (empathy, negotiation, and compromise), instead of competitiveness; the ability to be dependent and vulnerable and to share one’s troubles, instead of the ability to keep a stiff upper lip and handle pain alone. And these are the very skills mothers are told by society not to encourage in boys, who may therefore grow into men who, in turn, insist that their boys also do without these skills.