Article 9
Boys will be Boys
Developmental research has been focused on girls; now it’s their brothers’ turn.
Boys need help, too, but first they need to be understood.
BY BARBARA KANTROWITZ AND CLAUDIA KALB
IT WAS A CLASSIC MARS-VENUS EN-
COUNTER. Only in this case, the woman
was from Harvard and the man—well,
boy—was a 4-year-old at a suburban Bos-
ton nursery school. Graduate student Judy
Chu was in his classroom last fall to
gather observations for her doctoral dis-
sertation on human development. His
greeting was startling: he held up his fin-
ger as if it were a gun and pretended to
shoot her. “I felt bad,” Chu recalls. “I felt
as if he didn’t like me.” Months later and
much more boy-savvy, Chu has a differ-
ent interpretation: the gunplay wasn’t
hostile—it was just a way for him to say
hello. “They don’t mean it to have harsh
consequences. It’s a way for them to con-
nect.”
SOURCES: DR. MICHAEL THOMPSON, BARNEY BRAWER. RESEARCH BY BILL VOURVOULIAS—NEWSWEEK
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Article 9. Boys will be Boys
Researchers like Chu are discovering
new meaning in lots of things boys have
done for ages. In fact, they’re dissecting
just about every aspect of the developing
male psyche and creating a hot new field of
inquiry: the study of boys. They’re also
producing a slew of books with titles like
“Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons From the
Myths of Boyhood” and “Raising Cain:
Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys”
that will hit the stores in the next few
months.
What some researchers are finding is
that boys and girls really are from two dif-
ferent planets. But since the two sexes
have to live together here on Earth, they
should be raised with special consideration
for their distinct needs. Boys and girls have
different “crisis points,” experts say,
stages in their emotional and social devel-
opment where things can go very wrong.
Until recently, girls got all the attention.
But boys need help, too. They’re much
more likely than girls to have discipline
problems at school and to be diagnosed
with attention deficit disorder (ADD).
Boys far outnumber girls in special-educa-
tion classes. They’re also more likely to
commit violent crimes and end up in jail.
Consider the headlines: Jonesboro, Ark.;
Paducah, Ky.; Pearl, Miss. In all these
school shootings, the perpetrators were
young adolescent boys.
Even normal boy behavior has come to
be considered pathological in the wake of
the feminist movement. An abundance of
physical energy and the urge to conquer—
these are normal male characteristics, and
in an earlier age they were good things,
even essential to survival. “If Huck Finn or
Tom Sawyer were alive today,” says
Michael Gurian, author of “The Wonder of
Boys,” “we’d say they had ADD or a con-
duct disorder.” He says one of the new in-
sights we’re gaining about boys is a very
old one: boys will be boys. “They are who
they are,” says Gurian, “and we need to
love them for who they are. Let’s not try to
rewire them.”
Indirectly, boys are benefiting from all
the research done on girls, especially the
landmark work by Harvard University’s
Carol Gilligan. Her 1982 book, “In a Dif-
ferent Voice: Psychological Theory and
Women’s Development,” inspired Take
Our Daughters to Work Day, along with
best-selling spinoffs like Mary Pipher’s
“Reviving Ophelia.” The traditional, uni-
sex way of looking at child development
was profoundly flawed, Gilligan says: “It
was like having a one-dimensional per-
spective on a two-dimensional scene.” At
Harvard, where she chairs the gender-stud-
ies department, Gilligan is now supervis-
ing work on males, including Chu’s
project. Other researchers are studying
mental illness and violence in boys.
While girls’ horizons have been ex-
panding, boys’ have narrowed, confined to
rigid ideas of acceptable male behavior no
matter how hard their parents tried to avoid
stereotypes. The macho ideal still rules.
“We gave boys dolls and they used them as
guns,” says Gurian. “For 15 years, all we
heard was that [gender differences] were
all about socialization. Parents who raised
their kids through that period said in the
end, ‘That’s not true. Boys and girls can be
awfully different.’ I think we’re awaken-
ing to the biological realities and the socio-
logical realities.”
But what exactly is the essential nature
of boys? Even as infants, boys and girls be-
have differently. A recent study at Chil-
dren’s Hospital in Boston found that boy
babies are more emotionally expressive;
girls are more reflective. (That means boy
babies tend to cry when they’re unhappy;
girl babies suck their thumbs.) This could
indicate that girls are innately more able to
control their emotions. Boys have higher
levels of testosterone and lower levels of
the neurotransmitter serotonin, which in-
hibits aggression and impulsivity. That
may help explain why more males than fe-
males carry through with suicide, become
alcoholics and are diagnosed with ADD.
The developmental research on the im-
pact of these physiological differences is
still in the embryonic stage, but psycholo-
gists are drawing some interesting compar-
isons between girls and boys (chart). For
girls, the first crisis point often comes in
early adolescence. Until then, Gilligan and
others found, girls have an enormous ca-
pacity for establishing relationships and
interpreting emotions. But in their early
teens, girls clamp down, squash their emo-
tions, blunt their insight. Their self-esteem
plummets. The first crisis point for boys
comes much earlier, researchers now say.
“There’s an outbreak of symptoms at age
5, 6, 7, just like you see in girls at 11, 12,
13,” says Gilligan. Problems at this age in-
clude bed-wetting and separation anxiety.
“They don’t have the language or experi-
ence” to articulate it fully, she says, “but
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ANNUAL EDITIONS
the feelings are no less intense.” That’s
why Gilligan’s student Chu is studying
preschoolers. For girls at this age, Chu
says, hugging a parent goodbye “is almost
a nonissue.” But little boys, who display a
great deal of tenderness, soon begin to
bury it with “big boy” behavior to avoid
being called sissies. “When their parents
drop them off, they want to be close and
want to be held, but not in front of other
people,” says Chu. “Even as early as 4,
they’re already aware of those masculine
stereotypes and are negotiating their way
around them.”
It’s a phenomenon that parents, espe-
cially mothers, know well. One morning
last month, Lori Dube, a 37-year-old
mother of three from Evanston, Ill., visited
her oldest son, Abe, almost 5, at his nurs-
ery school, where he was having lunch
with his friends. She kissed him, prompt-
ing another boy to comment scornfully:
“Do you know what your mom just did?
She kissed you!” Dube acknowledges,
with some sadness, that she’ll have to be
more sensitive to Abe’s new reactions to
future public displays of affection. “Even
if he loves it, he’s getting these messages
that it’s not good.”
There’s a struggle—a desire and need
for warmth on the one hand and a pull to-
ward independence on the other. Boys like
Abe are going through what psychologists
long ago declared an integral part of grow-
ing up: individualization and disconnec-
tion from parents, especially mothers. But
now some researchers think that process is
too abrupt. When boys repress normal feel-
ings like love because of social pressure,
says William Pollack, head of the Center
for Men at Boston’s McLean Hospital and
author of the forthcoming “Real Boys,”
“they’ve lost contact with the genuine na-
ture of who they are and what they feel.
Boys are in a silent crisis. The only time
we notice it is when they pull the trigger.”
No one is saying that acting like Rambo
in nursery school leads directly to trage-
dies like Jonesboro. But researchers do
think that boys who are forced to shut
down positive emotions are left with only
one socially acceptable outlet: anger. The
cultural ideals boys are exposed to in mov-
ies and on TV still emphasize traditional
masculine roles—warrior, rogue, adven-
turer—with heavy doses of violence. For
every Mr. Mom, there are a dozen Termi-
nators. “The feminist movement has done
a great job of convincing people that a
woman can be nurturing and a mother and
a tough trial lawyer at the same time,” says
Dan Kindlon, an assistant professor of psy-
chiatry at Harvard Medical School. “But
we haven’t done that as much with men.
We’re afraid that if they’re too soft, that’s
all they can be.”
And the demands placed on boys in the
early years of elementary school can in-
crease their overall stress levels. Scientists
have known for years that boys and girls
develop physically and intellectually at
very different rates (time-line). Boys’ fine
motor skills—the ability to hold a pencil,
for example—are usually considerably be-
hind girls. They often learn to read later. At
the same time, they’re much more active—
not the best combination for academic ad-
vancement. “Boys feel like school is a
game rigged against them,” says Michael
Thompson, coauthor with Kindlon of
“Raising Cain.” “The things at which they
excel—gross motor skills, visual and spa-
tial skills, their exuberance—do not find as
good a reception in school” as the things
girls excel at. Boys (and girls) are also in
academic programs at much younger ages
than they used to be, increasing the
chances that males will be forced to sit still
before they are ready. The result, for many
boys, is frustration, says Thompson: “By
fourth grade, they’re saying the teachers
like girls better.”
A second crisis point for boys occurs
around the same time their sisters are stum-
bling, in early adolescence. By then, say
Thompson and Kindlon, boys go one step
further in their drive to be “real guys.” They
partake in a “culture of cruelty,” enforcing
male stereotypes on one another. “Any-
thing tender, anything compassionate or
too artistic is labeled gay,” says Thompson.
“The homophobia of boys in the 11, 12, 13
range is a stronger force than gravity.”
Boys who refuse to fit the mold suffer.
Glo Wellman of the California Parenting
Institute in Santa Rosa has three sons, 22,
19 and 12. One of her boys, she says, is a
“nontypical boy: he’s very sensitive and
caring and creative and artistic.” Not sur-
prisingly, he had the most difficulty grow-
ing up, she says. “We’ve got a long way to
go to help boys… to have a sense that they
can be anything they want to be.”
In later adolescence, the once affection-
ate toddler has been replaced by a sulky
stranger who often acts as though torture
would be preferable to a brief exchange of
words with Mom or Dad. Parents have to
try even harder to keep in touch. Boys want
and need the attention, but often just don’t
know how to ask for it. In a recent national
poll, teenagers named their parents as their
No. 1 heroes. Researchers say a strong pa-
rental bond is the most important protec-
tion against everything from smoking to
suicide.
For San Francisco Chronicle columnist
Adnir Lara, that message sank in when she
was traveling to New York a few years ago
with her son, then 15. She sat next to a
woman who told her that until recently she
would have had to change seats because
she would not have been able to bear the
pain of seeing a teenage son and mother to-
gether. The woman’s son was 17 when his
girlfriend dumped him; he went into the
garage and killed himself. “This story
made me aware that with a boy especially,
you have to keep talking because they
don’t come and talk to you,” she says.
Lara’s son is now 17; she also has a 19-
year-old daughter. “My daughter stalked
me. She followed me from room to room.
She was yelling, but she was in touch.
Boys don’t do that. They leave the room
and you don’t know what they’re feeling.”
Her son is now 6 feet 3. “He’s a man. There
are barriers. You have to reach through
that and remember to ruffle his hair.”
With the high rate of divorce, many
boys are growing up without any adult men
in their lives at all. Don Elium, coauthor of
the best-selling 1992 book “Raising a
Son,” says that with troubled boys, there’s
often a common theme: distant, unin-
volved fathers, and mothers who have
taken on more responsibility to fill the gap.
That was the case with Raymundo Infante
Jr., a 16-year-old high-school junior, who
lives with his mother, Mildred, 38, a hospi-
tal administrative assistant in Chicago, and
his sister, Vanessa, 19. His parents di-
vorced when he was a baby and he had lit-
tle contact with his father until a year ago.
The hurt built up—in sixth grade,
Raymundo was so depressed that he told a
classmate he wanted to kill himself. The
classmate told the teacher, who told a
counselor, and Raymundo saw a psychia-
trist for a year. “I felt that I just wasn’t
good enough, or he just didn’t want me,”
Raymundo says. Last year Raymundo fi-
nally confronted his dad, who works two
jobs—in an office and on a construction
crew—and accused him of caring more
about work than about his son. Now the
two spend time together on weekends and
sometimes go shopping, but there is still a
huge gap of lost years.
Black boys are especially vulnerable,
since they are more likely than whites to
grow up in homes without fathers. They’re
often on their own much sooner than
whites. Black leaders are looking for alter-
natives. In Atlanta, the Rev. Tim Mc-
Donald’s First Iconium Baptist Church
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Article 9. Boys will be Boys
just chartered a Boy Scout troop. “Gangs
are so prevalent because guys want to be-
long to something,” says McDonald.
“We’ve got to give them something posi-
tive to belong to.” Black educators like
Chicagoan Jawanza Kunjufu think mentor-
ing programs will overcome the bias
against academic success as “too white.”
Some cities are also experimenting with
all-boy classrooms in predominantly black
schools.
Researchers hope that in the next few
years, they’ll come up with strategies that
will help boys the way the work of Gilligan
and others helped girls. In the meantime,
experts say, there are some guidelines. Par-
ents can channel their sons’ energy into
constructive activities, like team sports.
They should also look for “teachable mo-
ments” to encourage qualities such as
empathy. When Diane Fisher, a Cincin-
nati-area psychologist, hears her 8- and 10-
year-old boys talking about “finishing
somebody,” she knows she has mistakenly
rented a violent videogame. She pulls the
plug and tells them: “In our house, killing
people is not entertainment, even if it’s just
pretend.”
Parents can also teach by example. New
Yorkers Dana and Frank Minaya say
they’ve never disciplined their 16-year-old
son Walter in anger. They insist on resolv-
ing all disputes calmly and reasonably,
without yelling. If there is a problem, they
call an official family meeting “and we
never leave without a big hug,” says Frank.
Walter tries to be open with his parents. “I
don’t want to miss out on any advice,” he
says.
Most of all, wise parents of boys should
go with the flow. Cindy Lang, 36, a full-
time mother in Woodside, Calif., is contin-
ually amazed by the relentless energy of
her sons, Roger Lloyd, 12, and Chris, 9.
“You accept the fact that they’re going to
involve themselves in risky behavior, like
skateboarding down a flight of stairs. As a
girl, I certainly wasn’t skateboarding down
a flight of stairs.” Just last week, she got a
phone call from school telling her that
Roger Lloyd was in the emergency room
because he had fallen backward while
playing basketball and school officials
thought he might have a concussion. He’s
fine now, but she’s prepared for the next
emergency: “I have a cell phone so I can be
on alert.” Boys will be boys. And we have
to let them.
With KAREN SPRINGEN in Chicago,
PATRICIA KING in San Francisco, PAT
WINGERT in Washington, VERN E.
SMITH in Atlanta and ELIZABETH
ANGELL in New York
From Newsweek, May 11, 1998, pp. 54–60. © 1998 by Newsweek, Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.
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