Dan Kindlon and Michael Thompson | What Boys Need

In this school, therefore, a child could leave the room and exercise as a matter of self-regulation. Boys were the most frequent users. Is this possible in every school? Almost certainly not; the group-based instruction and activities of most classes, and traditional policies regarding the need for safety and monitoring, would preclude such a solution in the vast majority of schools. However, the principle of allowing boys to exercise then they need to during the day is a powerful one. The head of one small private elementary school in Pennsylvania said to us, “It is amazing how much would boys will get done when going outside is the reward.”

If you ask boys in school what their favorite part of the school day is, they often answer, “You mean, besides P.E.?” Boys need space for their jumping, their energy, their exuberance. They need it in school, and they need it at home. Isn’t the finished basement the home version of the school gym? Isn’t an excessively neat and orderly home, a home without some safe free-play space, something of a torment for a boy?

Anne Roche Muggeridge, a mother of four sons, wrote a piece titled “Boys Should Be Boys,” in which she declares:

Don’t treat your boys with tranquilizers. Like those old-fashioned headmasters, simply wear them out. My husband made a rink every winter in our garden, and all the neighborhood boys played there night and day. They used to come in to use the bathroom, in their skates. They played floor hockey using their baby sister as a goal. They broke the bottom landing while competing in how many steps they could clear in jumping over her. I miss them. They grew up to be kind, gallant, honest, funny, devout, stoic, brave, and generous. I miss them. [The Roxbury Latin School Newsletter, Roxbury, Massachusetts]

Here is someone who appreciates and has faith in boys. Many parents of boys do embrace the physicality of boys in this way; some do not. Most teachers of boys also love boys; some, unfortunately, do not. Boys are tremendously sensitive to adults who do not have a reasonable tolerance for boy energy, and when they do sense that a person has a low threshold of boy tolerance, they usually respond to it as a challenge.

Activity level isn’t just an issue with little boys. Teenage boys bump and push. When we sit down with a group of adolescent boys in almost any school setting, there is an inevitable physicality even to something as simple as finding a place to sit and sitting in it. If there are desks and chairs, then those get jostled about with plenty of scraping and bumping; if there is a couch, then there will be a moment of scuffling to see who sits where; if it’s on the floor, then there will be the pig pile of boys, and others rooting about for the right spot. We’re not talking about physical aggression, just a vibrant, active body language that’s always in use. They knock one another’s hats off; they sprawl across furniture and occupy dinner tables and family room floors in a way that seems larger than necessary. Sometimes they don’t watch where they are going, and sometimes they just enjoy throwing their weight around. Wouldn’t you, if two years ago you used to weigh 100 pounds and now you weigh 175? When you are a boy, it is just plain fun being big!

And if—as was the case two winters ago at Belmont Hill School—there is a fresh snowfall on the hill outside the headmaster’s office and he has left his two children’s sleds outside the house, why then, you start to sled, and then two of you sled, and then three get on a sled in a giant pile, and who cares if you’re wearing gray flannel pants and blue blazers and the temperature is ten degrees? You take off the blue blazer, hang it on a fence post, and you are ready to sled. And then you try to miss trees by a close margin, and then you try to push a friend off midhill. And older teachers are appalled; they think the standards are slipping—boys didn’t used to do this (but of course, they did). They did, they do, and they always will. Boys need to learn how to manage their physicality to do no harm, but they need not be shamed for exuberance.

3. Talk to boys in their language—in a way that honors their pride and their masculinity. Be direct with them; use them as consultants and problem-solvers.

Because boys are miseducated to fear excessive feeling and vulnerability, it is important to communicate with them in a way that honors their wish for strength and does not shame them. They often act as if they were allergic to direct emotional appeals of the kind that might work with girls. As therapists, to engage a boy in conversation, we often need to communicate differently with him than we would with a girl.

With girls we can ask, “How are you feeling?” and most of the time they can tell us.

More often with boys our questions must be more specific: “How angry are you about being sent here?” “Why do you think you were sent here?” “What are your parents so worried about?” “Do you think the situation warrants seeing a therapist?”

Boys may be reluctant to talk about their feelings, but they love problem-solving; they love to be consulted. We have had many boys refuse to come to family therapy, some even refusing to get out of the car and walk into the building. What usually works is to walk out to the parking lot and say to a boy, “Look, I understand that you don’t want to be here and you don’t believe in this stuff, but I am giving your parents advice on how to manage you and I feel acutely uncomfortable doing it without your input.” We have had boys come to sessions and say they will not talk, but they talk if you present them with problems, if you don’t saddle them with the entire weight of talking. In our work with boys, we often find that we need to lead with our feelings and allow a boy to pick or choose between options. For example, if a boy describes a situation that seems terrifying or full of grief, we will say, “I don’t know you well enough to know how you felt, but it seems to me that you were in a pretty scary situation there. I would have been frightened had I been in your shoes.” A boy can always say, “No, that’s not true of me,” at which point he is also likely to correct our misimpression with additional thought we can then explore.

One doesn’t say to a boy, “I’m sure you must have been scared.” If, in response to the adult’s laying his or her emotional cards on the table, a boy says, “Well, maybe I was scared a little,” the therapist, or any adult, can then reply with real empathy, “I can sure understand that.” That experience, repeated briefly hundreds of times, can make a boy feel that his feelings are valid, that many other boys and adults share his sense of vulnerability.

If you want to know something about your son’s emotional responses, ask him about how his friends feel, whether it was an unnerving situation for someone else”

• How did he help his friend?
• Could he have used help in that situation?
• What does he think of the way the adults handled the situation?
• What would he have liked to see you do had you been in a position of authority?
• Does he think that a woman might have handled the situation differently than a man?

Boys like to discuss what is masculine and what is feminine—so do girls, for that matter—what is innate and what is learned. Boys are happy to discuss what is true of them and what is not. We’ve never met a boy who wouldn’t respond to a series of yes-no questions.

The problem with boy-adult conversation is that adults get exasperated because they expect a different kind of communication. Adults expect much of adolescent boys because boys look big and want adult privileges. But if they haven’t had much practice talking, or they think it isn’t manly to talk, berating them or being disappointed in them won’t help. It only discredits the adult in the eyes of the boy.

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