Raising Boys: Why Boys are Different – and How to Help them Become Happy and Well-Balanced Men. Steve Biddulph
their company. From an emotional viewpoint, the father is now more significant. The boy is ready to learn from his dad, and listens to what he has to say. Often he will take more notice of his father. It’s enough to drive a mother wild!
This window of time – from about age six to the fourteenth birthday – is the major opportunity for a father to have an influence on (and build the foundations of masculinity in) his son. Now is the time to ‘make time’. Little things count: playing in the backyard on summer evenings; going for walks and talking about life and telling him about your own childhood; working on hobbies or sports together, just for the enjoyment of doing it. This is when good memories are laid down, which will nourish your son, and you, for decades to come.
Don’t be deterred if your son acts ‘cool’, as he has learnt to do this from his schoolmates. Persist and you will find a laughing, playful boy just under the surface. Enjoy this time when he really is wanting to be with you. By mid-adolescence his interests will pull him more and more into the wider world beyond. All I can do here is plead with you – don’t leave it too late!
Fourteen and Onwards: Becoming a Man
At around fourteen years of age a new stage begins. Usually by now a boy is growing fast, and a remarkable thing is happening on the inside – his testosterone levels have increased by almost 800 per cent over his pre-puberty amount!9
Although every boy is different, it’s common for boys at this age to get a little argumentative, restless and moody. It’s not that they are turning bad – it’s just that they are being born into a new self, and any type of birth always involves some struggle. They are needing to find answers to big questions, to begin new adventures and challenges, and to learn competencies for living – and their body clock is urging them on.
I believe this is the age when we fail kids the most. In our society, all we offer the mid-teens is ‘more of the same’: more school, more of the routines of home. But the adolescent is hungry for something else, something new. He is hormonally and physically ready to break out into an adult role, but we want him to wait another four or five years! It’s little wonder that problems arise.
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What’s needed is something that will engage the spirit of a boy – that will pull him headlong into some creative effort or passion that gives his life wings. All the things that parents have nightmares about (adolescent risk-taking, alcohol, drugs, unsafe sex and criminal activity) happen because we do not find channels for young men’s desire for glory and heroic roles. Boys look at the larger society and see little to believe in or join in with. Even their rebellion is packaged up and sold back to them by advertisers and the music industry. They want to jump somewhere better and higher, but that place is nowhere in sight.
What Old Societies Did
In every society before ours – from the tropics to the poles – in every time and place that has been studied by anthropologists, mid-teen boys received a burst of intensive care and attention from the whole community. This was a universal human activity, so it must have been important. These cultures knew something we are still learning – that parents cannot raise teenage boys without getting the help of other adults.
One reason for this is that fourteen-year-old sons and their fathers drive each other crazy. Often it’s all a father can manage to love his son. Trying to do this and teach him can be just impossible. (Remember your dad teaching you to drive?) Somehow the two males just get their horns tangled and make each other worse. Fathers get too intense: they feel they are running out of time as a dad, and they see their own mistakes being repeated.
Once, when I was an inexperienced family therapist, we saw a family whose fourteen-year-old teenage son had run away and lived in the railway yards for several days. He was found, but it scared everyone, and the family felt they needed to get help. Talking to them, we discovered a remarkable thing. Sean was their youngest son, but he wasn’t the first to do this running away thing! Each of their three sons had ‘done a runner’ around this age. My boss, a wise and scarily intuitive man, looked the father straight in the eye. ‘Where did you go when you were fourteen?’ The father pretended not to understand but, with his entire family looking accusingly on at him, grinned foolishly and spilled the beans. He had been a teenage runaway at fourteen after huge fights with his dad. He’d never told his wife about this, let alone his kids. Without knowing it, though, he had become increasingly impossible, uptight and picky as his own sons reached that age. Effectively, unconsciously, he drove them to run away. Luckily, the family tradition called for coming home again, safe and sound.
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So fathers and fourteen-year-old sons can get a bit tense with each other. If someone else can assist with the male role at this age, then dads and sons can relax a little. (Some wonderful movies have been based on this – look out for Searching for Bobby Fisher, Finding Forrester and The Run of the Country, or all three seasons of the TV series Newsroom.)
Traditionally, two things were done to help young men into adulthood. First, they were ‘taken on’ and mentored into adulthood by one or more men who cared about them and taught them important skills for living. And second, at certain stages of this mentoring process, the young men were taken away by the community of older men and initiated. This meant being put through some serious growing-up processes, including testing, sacred teaching and new responsibilities. We’ll come back to this in the final chapter, on community.
We can contrast initiations such as the Lakota experience (see here) with many modern-day sons and their mothers, who (according to writers like Babette Smith in Mothers and Sons10) often remain in an awkward, distant or rather infantile relationship for life. These sons fear getting too close, and yet, being uninitiated as men, they never really escape. Instead, they relate to all women in a dependent and immature way. Not having entered the community of men, they are distrustful of other men and have few real friends. They are afraid of commitment to women because for them it means being mothered, and that means being controlled. They are real ‘nowhere men’.
It’s only by leaving the world of women that young men can break the mother-mould and relate to women as fellow adults. Domestic violence, unfaithfulness and the inability to make a marriage work may result not from any problem with women but from men’s failure to take boys on this transforming journey.
You might think that (in the old societies) the boys’ mothers, and perhaps the fathers too, would resent or fear their son being ‘taken over’ by others. But this was not the case. The initiators were men they had known and trusted all their lives. The women understood and welcomed this help, because they sensed the need for it. They were giving up a rather troublesome boy and getting back a more mature and integrated young man. And they were probably very proud of him.
The initiation into adulthood was not a one-off ‘weekend special’. It could involve months of teaching about how to behave as a man, what responsibilities men took on, and where to find strength and direction. The ceremonies we normally hear about were only the marker events. Sometimes these ceremonies were harsh and frightening (and we would not want to return to these) but they were done with purpose and care, and were spoken of with great appreciation by those who had passed through them.
Traditional societies depended for their survival on raising competent and responsible young men. It was a life-and-death issue, never left to chance. They developed very proactive programmes for doing this, and the