Dan Kindlon and Michael Thompson | What Boys Need

Using a boy as a consultant does not mean doing everything he wants. Absolutely not! But it does mean giving him a hearing. It helps if you have been doing it since he was young, because the practice you have shared together of talking, listening, and consulting will have helped your son know what is good judgment and what is not. If you have listened to him seriously, he’ll listen to himself seriously.

Is communicating with boys sometimes difficult? Yes, it often is. Is it impossible? Almost never. Only with the most angry, contemptuous, and suspicious boys is conversation impossible. If you are willing to ask consultative questions, put your emotional cards on the table, and not be disappointed with brief answers, you can communicate with boys. Above all, you have to convey your respect for a boy’s psychological defenses, his wish to be strong, and his need to appear stronger than he feels. There is no need to berate him for his desire to be a competent boy, a respected boy among his peers and in his own mind. If you honor that, he can feel that he does not need to be so guarded, and he will talk.

4. Teach boys that emotional courage is courage, and that courage and empathy are the sources of real strength in life.

If you ask a boy about courage, he’s likely to use the word bravery in his answer somewhere, and if you ask him to give you an example bravery, he’s likely to turn to popular movies or perhaps an act of physical heroism that he’s seen covered in the news or read about for school, or maybe a classmate’s willingness to stand up to a bully. Popular movies aimed at boys seem to prize only one kind of courage: standing up to a physically larger opponent. The willingness to fight an enemy, to outwit a dinosaur, to defeat an alien monster, to look into the eye of a villain with a gun, is the media’s definition of male courage.

Adventure and ware stories are as old as time, and boys show a special fascination for them. Watch little boys act out their dramas of courage and they are typically situation of warfare. But that is not all that boys want to see or all they want to know about. Boys and girls are hungry for stories of emotional courage.

Each January, when the life and times of Martin Luther King, Jr., become the topic of class discussion in most schools, boys and girls are impassioned by their study of the slain civil rights leader. They hear King’s courage in his stirring speeches, in books or documentary films about his nonviolent marches for civil rights. They also witness the courage, not only of King, but of the many other “ordinary people” of that period who took a stand against racism within the landscape of their own lives and communities. Students encounter a similar message of emotional courage as courage in their study of American slavery, the Holocaust, the international human rights movement, and environmental activism.

Boys are not halfhearted in their interest in these topics. They love heroes; they all have dreams of greatness. Boys are open to inspiration. What kind of models are we offering them?

Outside the studies of emotional courage in school, we find a sad dearth of such images or opportunities for recognizing emotional courage in daily life for boys. Men, in particular, are rarely celebrated for moral or emotional courage. Men in the news are almost always there because they represent power, sill, or wealth; men in entertainment programming are either dominators like Arnold Schwarzenegger, who is fearless, or good-natured nitwits like Tim Allen on Home Improvement, where the context of sitcom life simply doesn’t include emotional courage.

Most important, boys need models of emotional courage in their own lives, not just in the media. We need to recognize and identify for them emotional courage in the lives of women and men, in our families, and in the lives and children and others around us. In life and art, we need to provide boys models of male heroism that go beyond the muscular, the self-absorbed, and the simplistically heroic. Many adults display emotional courage in their work or personal lives, but rarely do we allow our children to witness our private moments of conscience or bravery. We need to speak of it, and we need to recognize out loud the emotional courage of those people around us who, in small ways daily, exhibit personal courage—to make a class speech, to be active despite handicaps, to learn a new language, to step forward to help when it would be easier to look away. When we give emotional courage a face and a form—our own or someone else’s—we leave an indelible impression. Boys can and will respond to the complexity of real courage.

Mark Twain’s description of courage bears repeating, “Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear—not absence of fear.” Boys need to learn that it is part and parcel of true emotional courage in a man to accept fear and other feelings of vulnerability in himself and others.

A father was putting his seven-year-old son, Charlie, and the son’s friend Jeff to bed on a sleepover night at Charlie’s house. Charlie was going through a period in which his sense of vulnerability was heightened: he had fears of many things. Charlie was focused on tornadoes, because he had heard a news report about the tornadoes that had hit Nashville, Tennessee, very hard and because his family had close friends who lived in Tennessee. Even with Jeff in the room, Charlie express his fears without hesitation:

“Dad, I’m not going to be able to go to sleep because of the tornadoes.”

“Charlie, there won’t be any tornadoes tonight, I promise.”

“But, Dad, there are tornadoes.”

“I know, Charlie, but not in Boston.”

“I’m not going to be able to go to sleep, Dad, I’m sure I’m not.”

Jeff, the friend who had been listening to this exchange and who had undoubtedly experienced fears in his young life, spoke to Charlie across the dark room. “Charlie, I just banged my head on the wall by mistake. Maybe that’s the sound that scared you.”

“No, Jeff. It wasn’t that. It’s the tornadoes.”

Charlie appreciated the effort to reassure him, but he couldn’t take comfort in Jeff’s words because it wasn’t the sound in the room that had frightened him; it was the fear in his heart, and his thoughts were not so much about killer winds as about loving friends he worried were in the path of danger.

The father heard the friend’s effort to calm Charlie and realized that his own efforts to persuade had been pointless. So he asked, “Would it help if I lay down with you and put my arm around you?”

“Yes, Dad, but you have to stay.”

The father stretched out beside his son and put an arm around his shoulder. “I will stay until I’m sure you’re asleep. Will that be okay?”

“Yes, Dad. Can you hug me tighter?”

(Continued)