Book Review

Raising Children in America

Real Boys: Rescuing our sons from the myths of boyhood

N Engl J Med 1999; 340:67-68January 7, 1999

Article

Real Boys: Rescuing our sons from the myths of boyhood
By William Pollack. 447 pp. New York, Random House, 1998. $24.95. ISBN: 0-375-50131-2

It was probably inevitable, but is nonetheless welcome, that the troubled American conversation about the sexes would one day open up into a thoughtful consideration of what boys are fundamentally like and how they might best thrive. Until just past the midpoint of this century, the health and educational establishments drew their analyses from and directed their prescriptions to children generally. Sex-related peculiarities and differences were implicitly held to be less compelling than the universality of childhood experience. Thus, classic guides to child development from Benjamin Spock to Erik Erikson discuss childhood more or less generically. And although Erikson might point out “inclusive” and “intrusive” patterns of spatial organization and play on the part of girls and boys, both were seen as complementary expressions of a “phallic stage” of development believed to arrive on the same timetable, for the same reasons, and with the same urgency for boys and girls alike.

It makes for a fascinating exercise to reread Erikson in the light of today's sensitivities, for without question he assumes male experience as normative for both sexes. His observations of childhood are focused primarily on boys, to the extent that when he analyzes the difficulties of, say, culturally assimilating Dakota Indian children, he points out the disjunction between a pattern of nurturance that once prepared young bison hunters and the contemporary mandate to ready Dakota children for American public schools. In other words, the problem is a boy problem. Not surprisingly, Erikson's often luminous studies of historically transformative figures — Luther, Gandhi, Gorky, Hitler — all focus on males.

For the past quarter-century, there has been a virtual tidal wave of correction to the tendency to see boyhood as emblematic of childhood. Bolstered by widely held feminist assumptions, an altogether revised popular view of sex and sex roles has come to prominence in nursery and school room. The society of children is now seen as a battleground where, if ideological vigilance is relaxed, the little heirs of the patriarchy will establish a misogynist, violent regime in which the privileges and prizes will be hoarded by the boys.

Underlying this fear is the unstated assumption that males, and especially males banded together, are inherently toxic. As such they should be watched, disarmed, and diluted with feminine influence. Such notions have been given voice by distinguished college presidents, who, untroubled by any objective data, have declared to the press the peculiar formula “girls' schools are best for girls; coed schools are best for boys” — which raises, among other objections, the monstrous prospect of sacrificing what is best for girls in order to ameliorate the badness of boys.

Some of the honest confusion visited on child rearing and schooling over the past three decades is the result of an ill-considered tendency to impose valid concerns about sexual inequity in various arenas of adult life, especially the workplace, onto developing children. As a result, boys and boyhood have begun to be reconstructed, with the result that it has become increasingly difficult for a boy to find himself in playground, schoolroom, and story. Perhaps more darkly, it appears that we might be medicating and mending not just sick and deficient boys, but boyhood itself.

Out of this unhelpful climate, some hopeful and healing voices are being raised, including that of William Pollack, author of Real Boys. Pollack, a clinical psychologist who also codirects the Harvard–McLean Hospital Center for Men, has been thinking hard about the contemporary masculine condition for over a decade.

Coauthor, with R. William Betcher, of In a Time of Fallen Heroes: The Recreation of Masculinity (New York: Atheneum, 1993) and an editor of A New Psychology of Men (New York: Basic Books, 1995), Pollack has looked closely at infant boys' earliest parental relationships and found what he calls a normative trauma, “normative” in that every boy faces sex-specific challenges in coming to terms with his mother and his differences from his mother. There are both healing resolutions and pathologic arrests in response to the male trauma, and much of what Pollack has to say regarding boys is about how parents and educators can promote the former. Here, perhaps, Pollack is at his very best. He maintains that the saving development in a boy's experience is empathy — but empathy understood in a somewhat enlarged way. Pollack faults previous studies for defining empathic transactions so narrowly as to exclude more robust, more playful behavior. Or simply, we have tended to limit our understanding of empathy to its traditionally feminine expressions. Starved of empathy (rightly conceived), boys defensively inflate themselves in unattractive, antisocial posturings; nurtured empathically — with men doing their part — boys evolve into strong, multidimensional, empathic men themselves.

Real Boys is composed of summarized research findings, clinical observations, and straightforward advice on how to advance boys along their developmental trajectory. Pollack steers a sensible middle course through the potentially divisive issues. For instance, he alerts readers to the easy tendency to misread ordinary male development as attention-deficit disorder or attention-deficit–hyperactivity disorder, yet he reminds us that in some instances, medical and remedial intervention is good practice.

Pollack is in solid scientific control of current research, and he provides a lucid, objective guide to such sensitive issues as the origin of homosexual orientation and how to respond humanely to emerging homosexual boys. In conversational, nontechnical terms Pollack points the way through our most serious worries about contemporary masculinity: irrational preoccupation with arms and mayhem, a rising tendency to self-destruction, substantially poorer scholastic performance than that of girls, a worrying tendency toward risky and delinquent behavior.

Both individual care givers and institutions will find much to ponder in Real Boys. And again, the best news may be that we can consider what is good for boys without unnecessary ideological guilt. For it is perhaps no overstatement to suggest that the contemporary American view of childhood has been clouded. The undisputedly right assumption of the equal worth of every child has been mistranslated as a mandate for treating boys and girls the same. In consequence, we discover dubious gaps and deficits and entitlements where we once found distinctive masculine and feminine behavior. Or worse, we attempt to medicate or reshape one sex into the contours of the other — or those of a putatively “normal” child.

Real Boys is a thoughtful step in clearing the ideological air. Perhaps with an equally acute and generous Real Girls, we might set about addressing the needs of children from an appropriately respectful and loving perspective.

Richard A. Hawley, Ph.D.
University School, Hunting Valley, OH 44022