Dan Kindlon and Michael Thompson | What Boys Need

In our experience as therapists, we see many men lonely for the company of other men, and they have been so since high school or since the end of their college days. Many men do not know how to initiate or maintain significant friendships; too many men do not know how to open up to other men. We have a friend, a psychiatrist in Chicago, who played with a regular golf foursome for more than twenty years, and though they spent hours together each week, they did not disclose much information to one another. One day he came home to get his golf clubs, and his wife said, “Joe just called and said he may not be able to play golf today.” “Why not?” the psychiatrist asked. “Well, he’s getting divorced, and because of his financial arrangement, he may not be able to afford to keep up his club membership.” Dumbfounded, our friend replied, “He’s getting divorced? I didn’t know!” Even if, as we believe, male friendship may not need to be measured by the yardstick of personal disclosure, it is sad when a man cannot tell his golfing buddies of twenty years that his marriage is in serious trouble.

The loneliness of men has to be addressed in the lives of boys. Boys need to be encouraged to initiate friendships, maintain them, and experience the conflicts that arise in male friendship from different levels of athletic skill, from teasing, and from competition for the attention of girls. Too often boys lack both the resources and the will to resolve those conflicts and preserve friendships.

When we talk to mothers and other women about boys’ need for a model of a manhood of emotional attachment, we often get a dry laugh. What does that look like in a man? they want to know. And how can they possibly contribute to this as women?

First, encourage and support these friendships. Then recognize and accept that men’s friendships don’t always look the way you might expect them to look, or would like them to look, and that is because some of men’s attachments aren’t as close, aren’t as reliable, are too infected with competition compared to what women enjoy, and many of their friendships are just different from yours.

A colleague of ours was firm in her belief that girls’ friendships were better than boys.’ She had to question her assumptions one day when she watched four boys fishing from a nearby reservoir. As she sunbathed and watched the boys, they stood there, almost shoulder to shoulder, fishing for two to three hours, and they hardly talked. They certainly didn’t have a sustained conversation. But watching them for some time, she came to realize that there was a tremendous closeness between those boys—and between many boys and many men—that transcends conversation. She saw how intimate these boys were without conversation, how trustworthy was the silence between them. They loved being in one another’s presence, and that was what counted.

Most boys love being in the presence of men. They like watching their dads, they like being with them, they like playing with them. But they also need to speak of closeness from time to time, and that can be hard for dads to do. There are so many men who report that, as boys, they never heard their fathers say, “I love you.” So sometimes, it has to be arranged.

“Daddy and Me” programs of the kind sponsored periodically by schools, religious congregations, and community recreation centers offer a great model. These programs may range from the simplest kindergarten event to sophisticated travel adventures, or spiritual retreats for older sons and their fathers, but the good ones share some important common denominators: They carve out a time for father and son to be together. They put the two in a situation that takes Dad out of the boss’s seat and makes father and son partners instead. They include unstructured time for wandering and exploration, as well as some structured time for activities that are designed to strengthen the bond—not the competition or friction—between father and son. When we see fathers and sons in these programs, we typically see sons beaming at the undivided and uncritical attention they are getting from their dads, and we see how grateful the fathers are to have this organized, sanctioned chance to be this way with their sons. It is beautiful. That it is a planned event takes nothing away from it. The experience of emotional connection is genuine, and it shapes a boy in a genuine way.

7. Teach boys that there are many ways to be a man.

Over the years of our work at two all-boys schools, Belmont Hill School and Saint Sebastian’s School, we have had many boys come into our office, sit down, and say, “I’m not really a Saint Sebastian’s [or Belmont Hill] boy.” That a boy feels he must start off a session by announcing that he is different or sensitive, or not as athletic as the ideal makes us sad, because it means that he is measuring himself against a standard of idealized masculinity. Very few boys or men are tall, handsome, athletic, successful with women, endlessly virile, and physically fearless. If our culture is, as Mary Pipher, author of Reviving Ophelia, says, toxic for girls because it teaches them that there is only one definition of female beauty—and if that drives girls towards diets, eating disorders, and chronic low self-esteem—then we need to reexamine the messages we send to girls. That has been the great achievement of the last twenty-five years of research into the stress points in the lives of girls. Boys suffer from a too-narrow definition of masculinity, and it is time to reexamine that message, too.

We have to teach boys that there are many ways to become a man; that there are many ways to be brave, to be a good father, to be loving and strong and successful. We need to celebrate the natural creativity and risk taking of boys, their energy, their boldness. We need to praise the artist and the entertainer, the missionary and the athlete, the soldier and the male nurse, the store owner and the round-the-world sailor, the teacher and the CEO. There are many ways for a boy to make a contribution in this life.

Our boys are going to grow up to be many sizes, to possess many skills, and to do a wide variety of things. We must not disregard their many offerings; we must not make them feel that they do not measure up, that we disdain their contributions. We have to ask a lot of them, morally and spiritually, and we have to support them in their efforts to please us. And if they try to please us, we must communicate to them that they are not a disappointment to us. The only thing that will make growing up psychologically safe for our sons is for them to know that we value them and that we love them, and that we have every confidence that they will grow naturally into good men.

The only way to make a difference with a boy is to give him powerful experiences that speak to his inner life, that speak to his soul and let him know that he is entitled to have the full range of human experience. That permission is given to boys by teachers, by parents, by ministers, by aunts and uncles. And they do it by affirming for a boy that his vulnerability is human and acceptable. Once you understand that to be human is to be vulnerable—whether you are a boy or a girl—then you can to on and be brave, confident, and productive from a solid foundation. You don’t have to hide your vulnerability from yourself, and so you are not deeply afraid or fragile.

In all our years as therapists, we have never met a boy who didn’t crave his parents’ love and others’ acceptance and who didn’t feel crippled by their absence or redeemed by their abundance. Strong and healthy boys are made strong by acceptance and affirmation of their humanity. We all have a chance to do that every day, every time we are in the presence of a boy and we have a chance to say to him, “I recognize you. You are a boy—full of life, full of dreams, full of feeling.”

Excerpted from RAISING CAIN by Dan Kindlon, Ph.D., and Michael Thompson, Ph.D. Copyright © 1999, 2000 by Dan Kindlon, Ph.D. and Michael Thompson, Ph.D. Reprinted by arrangement with Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House.  All rights reserved. Buy it here.