Dan Kindlon and Michael Thompson | What Boys Need

I could not get up off the ground. My face was wet with tears and mud. My teammates did not even bother to look at me. They looked as if they didn’t want anything to do with me. The only thing that was of any comfort to me was a comment from the player who had scored.

“Nice try,” he said.

A teacher had made it safe for Casey to write the essay, the school made him feel proud of writing it, and he got a lot of positive feedback from children and parents. He was twice hero, not just because he was a soccer goalie but because he had written about his internal experience in a heartfelt and direct way.

What is a “safe environment” and how does a parent create one? In a family, anything that is a ritual provides the possibility for emotional “safety” because it is a familiar niche of time—a protected space—in which there is no pressure to perform, no pressure to measure up, and no threat of judgment. Many mothers tell us that they visit with their sons at bedtime, giving the familiar back rub or enjoying a chat about the day, especially in the early years before adolescence. Perhaps they prepare breakfast for their boys or share an interest in reading, music, sports, or outdoor activities. Fathers tell us of doing yard work with their sons or going for haircuts, going bowling, bicycling or hiking, or building models. Mother or father, you might drive our son to soccer practice or stay for the baseball games; you might read the sports pages together in the morning or work puzzles on Sunday afternoons. If in that shared time together a parent communicates openness, acceptance, and affection, then a boy learns these values of relationship.

Many people think that the only way to hold the interest of boys is to offer them stereotypical “boy” entertainment and role models: tough-guy move stars and “iron man” athletes. If you want boys to listen at a school assembly or banquet, a professional athlete is almost always a sure bet because athletes instantly command boy respect. But does that mean that athletes are the only people boys will listen to? To capture the hearts and minds of boys, do you have to cater to conventional boy interests? To assume that is to trivialize and underestimate the spiritual and intellectual interests of boys.

We know the head of a boys’ school who invited a Franciscan monk to speak to the school body. Before the assembly began, the monk said to his host, “I’d like to do a brief meditation before I start to speak, and I’d like to take questions at the end.” The head of the school did everything he could to politely discourage the monk from doing either of those two things because he was afraid that the boys wouldn’t respond well. But boys love novelty, they love risk taking, they love courage; this monk had all three.

He stood up and said, “Before I speak, I’d like to conduct a meditation. Would you all close your eyes and put your hands on your knees.” They all did, and he led through a meditation. He then spoke about some important moral and spiritual issues and concluded, asking, “Do you have any questions for me?” There was a long silence, and the head of the school was acutely uncomfortable, fearing that no boy would evince any interest at all and the school would be embarrassed. But the monk was completely unfazed by the silence. He stood quietly and waited. Finally, a hand went up. The boy, showing the admirable boy quality of directness, asked the question that must have been on the mind of every boy in the assembly room: “Why would anyone want to become a monk?” When the monk answered the question with authenticity and directness, twelve hands went up with additional questions. Many boys wanted know what was going on in the monk’s mind. It was unlikely that any of these boys would go on to choose a life of spiritual contemplation, but their curiosity about the inner life was evident.

As a parent, one of the most important things you can do is talk about an inner life with boys. If you reveal your struggles and your thoughts, they may or may not respond instantly with insight, but they will absorb the experience and be shaped by it. These often are the moments they remember the most. Boys may talk about the Red Sox with their fathers, and years later they may remember fondly going to Fenway Park, but what they tell us about in therapy are the times when the parental curtains parted, when they say their mother’s courage, or their father’s tenderness or tears, or the time that their father shared the story of some terrifying struggle with them, acknowledging fear as a “real man” emotion.

No, a parent cannot successfully regale a son with stories of her or his college years. An adolescent boy is too interested in his own life to listen to such stories for long. But a mother or father can, in a relevant moment, share deep feelings about a moral dilemma she or he faced. If your fifteen-year-old seems disinterested in the moment, drop it, but don’t give up. Despite the look on a teenage boy’s face, his disinterest or cynicism won’t last forever, and he has a hungry mind that wants and needs to know how to deal with the emotional challenges of life as well as the technological and athletic challenges.

2. Recognize and accept the high activity level of boys and give them safe boy places to express it.

We visited a Montessori school in Minneapolis, Minnesota, that was housed in a large, old public school building with high ceilings and spacious halls. Outside of every classroom there was a space on the floor, marked off by tape, inside of which lay a jump rope. Any student who felt restless was allowed to go there to jump role. Because the Montessori method relies so much on individual work and creative expression, a class is rarely all working on the same thing at the same time.

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