The Way of Boys: Raising Healthy Boys in a Challenging and Complex World

admin — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 23:51:00 +0000

Having raised daughters and taught young girls, I know what is required to be competent in those roles. The nature and needs of boys, however, were foreign to me. I had very little experience with the care and nurturing of very young boys. I naively and wrongly presumed that a child’s gender was of little, if any, consequence affecting the parent/teacher role. In reality, infancy seems to be the only time of relative equality. Once these tiny beings begin developing skills of locomotion and communication, the gender dichotomy begins in earnest. It is at this point in development that one needs to understand fully just how inherently different boys are in all that is their journey toward maturity.

In this little gem of a book, Rao and Seaton gave me a wonderful look into this heretofore alien world. They present a wealth of boy knowledge in an anecdotal style, making this book an enjoyable read. The focus is predominantly on boys between two and seven years old, the time when most behavior problems arise. The authors clearly present methods to help caretakers address discipline and training issues successfully. Simply put, boys are not girls. We cannot successfully raise both genders from the same perspective. Boys tend to lag behind girls in skills acquisition, particularly language. Unfortunately, developmental expectations are lumped in somewhat generic lists of milestones, and herein lies the beginning of the unintentional assault on development in male children. It is the profound difference in thought process combined with the imperative need to expend energy that makes raising and educating boys much more challenging.

After a general introduction into the nature of boys, the text flows through the myriad of troubling behaviors that plague social and educational settings (e.g., making friends, bullying, competitiveness, fantasizing). The authors then set about guiding the reader through the problems associated with limiting physical activity and the tendency to perceive natural boy behavior as a sickness that must be wrangled with medication. They also offer parents solid guidance to help them in determining that which is in the best interest of the child when presented with fearful scenarios by educators and school administrators. The final chapter is a delightful light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel view, looking at some of the grown boys who had been youthful patients of Dr. Rao.

The Way of Boys is an absolute must read for anyone raising, educating, counseling, treating, and/or advocating for boys. Early-education teachers—who tend to be female—and mothers of boys need to be cognizant of the dynamic differences and be accommodating in the process so as not to stifle genuine development by trying to fit the proverbial square peg into a round hole. Boys are looking for the system, figuring things out, pushing the boundaries, and expending excessive energy in all that they do. I glimpsed this firsthand when I took my two-year-old grandson on an errand to the bank recently. He busied himself grabbing for, inspecting, and enthusiastically throwing the pens provided for patrons. Before reading this book, I would have been frustrated by this ill-mannered child. My girls NEVER did such at that age. By having this new knowledge, I was able to see him not as a bad child, but as a b-o-y. He taught me that I had to plan differently for him to avoid such temptations. I could not be mad with him for being male. This is what they do and how they think, and I love him for it.

Written by: Katherine P. Hutchison, October 12th 2009

Beyond the Icarus Factor: Releasing the Free Spirit of Boys

admin — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 20:21:00 +0000

By Richard Hawley

Park Street Press

It seems that every year for the last fifteen or so, children of one gender or another are considered neglected, voiceless, constrained by social mores. In neither case is the notion wrong, but rarely are all the social implications put together. Richard Hawley, for many years the headmaster of a boys’ school in Ohio, attempts to create - through his precious book, Beyond the Icarus Factor - a wider social theory using the myth of Icarus - that all men who have moved away from their “puer spirit” (“puer” meaning “boy” in Latin), whether by choice or by social pressure, are dissatisfied and live a life mired in, if not self-disgust, certainly self-distaste.

Richard Hawley’s book is poetic without being purposeful, idealistic without actually becoming interesting. The thesis he attempts to construct around the tragic myth of Icarus and Daedalus (and Daedalus’s oft-forgotten foster son, Perdix, whom Daedalus had killed before Icarus’s birth, lest Perdix’s talent threaten Daedalus’s established reputation) is vague and uncompelling. Hawley muses on Antoine de Saint-Exupéry as the ideal balance of “puer spirit” and adulthood, trashes psychoanalysis for destroying transcendence, but at no point does he move his (admittedly well-researched) work from the realm of the fluffy to the realm his students actually inhabit on a daily basis. His final chapter exudes us to appreciate the “ecstatic spirit afoot and aloft in the world,” but aside from keeping boys safe and loved he offers us little guidance on how this change, which he seems to view as a social revolution, is to be achieved.

Hawley’s social application of the myth of Icarus does have a strange poetic appeal to it, and my mistake may have been to come to the book with the expectation of rigorous social critique or social science. Instead of thoroughly addressing what he seems to consider a pressing social concern, Hawley explains how various works of literature (from Peter Pan _to _The Little Prince) are fantasies of boyhood, without delving into that fantasy’s relationship to reality. Hawley clearly has the knowledge for and interest in that relationship, but the connection sadly makes minimal appearance in his book.

Written by: Gemma Cooper-Novack, June 9th 2008