Raising Boys

Intrigued by my 5 year old son’s behaviour and the effect it has upon our family, I found myself attending a lecture by the acclaimed Australian family therapist Steve Biddulph entitled "Raising Boys". It opened my eyes to an obvious truth that I have always overlooked – boys need men.

Now note that I say men rather than fathers. Yes, for many boys their father is the primary man in their life, but many single mothers bring up boys very successfully because they seek out other men for their sons to develop relationships with. So why do boys need men?

Historically, and we’re talking pre-Industrial Revolution here, men took a very active role in bringing up boys. Not just their own sons, but their sons’ friends in the local community, too. Men were teachers in the broadest sense – counsellors, helpmeets, everything in fact that women try to be now. Yes, many men try too, but one of the main differences between now and then is that back then men had time.

They didn’t leave the house early for a ten hour shift at the mine or a ten hour day in the city. Their work was centred in the local community where the boys lived – they were involved in each other’s lives in the very deepest sense. Now, many fathers return home too late to see their children in the evenings. Those that make it home in time are often too tired to show anything other than their crabby side. It is the remarkable father who can come home and immediately switch down a gear in order to tune into their son’s thoughts, concerns and play activities.

Well, you may be saying – we are all doomed then, there is nothing we can do about dad’s job, so are our sons going to be damaged as a result? Certainly, one of Steve Biddulph’s aims is to effect change in men’s lives, to develop a ‘men’s movement’ for which he has great respect. And I can see his point.

Consider the changes between our lives, our mothers’ and our daughters’. We can see the huge leaps forward that women’s lives have enjoyed. My mother was not expected to pursue a full education or get a good job. When she married, my father expected her to give up work. I on the other hand went through primary, secondary and tertiary education, getting a degree in civil engineering of all unfeminine things. I worked until I had my second child. For my daughter I hope that things will be even better, that she will have fewer struggles than I did in achieving her aims, that there will be greater equality in the numbers of each sex pursuing careers in law, medicine, engineering and other predominantly male pursuits where women still have to be better than men in order to keep up with them.

But what changes have been wrought in men’s lives over those same years? Some, but not many positive ones. Today’s fathers struggle against replicating the lives of their own fathers – out at work all day, too tired and irritable to spend time with their children when they come home in the evenings. Spending weekends catching up on office paperwork or simply too exhausted to function with the rest of the family. Will it be the same for our sons? Where is the lobby calling for shorter working days that leave space for family life? Where is the voice that values men’s role as fathers, that seeks statutory paternity leave, paternity pay, family leave? It is out there, but it is still only a whisper.

To help us parents to develop a better framework for raising boys, Steve Biddulph sets out five golden rules – although I am sure he would hate that phrase. Number one for fathers is spend time with your son. Forget quality time; it’s an eighties concept that doesn’t work with children. They can’t switch on and off at being a son to match you switching on and off being a parent. Children need quantity time. They need time to build up a relationship with their father, a confidence in him and an understanding of him. Only then will boys start to access the ‘maleness’ of their fathers and learn from it how to be male themselves.

Point two is play rough and tumble games with your son and, equally importantly, teach him how to wind down. Steve Biddulph sees play wrestling between father and son as an important way of teaching boys how to air their natural physical feelings and how to control them. He advises fathers to say, when the rough and tumble gets over the top (as it will at first) – ‘your body is precious, my body is precious, we’ve got to take care while we do this – can you handle that?’. This process teaches boys and important lesson – when they are older they will be bigger and stronger than their mothers, their sisters and their girlfriends. They have to be able to control that in a way that leaves them feeling comfortable as a man, not emasculated or in a seething inner rage.

Number three is honour their tender feelings. People used to think (and some still do) that you turn boys into men by stamping out their tender side, that you need to ‘harden them up’. Well, we know now that feelings don’t go away, they just get bottled up and this does men no good at all. Fathers will do a huge service to their sons if they can show them that expressing their feelings is part of being male (and their future wives and children will thank you, too).

Parents also have to teach their sons to show respect for women. Now, while this is an ongoing process for us as parents, it can hit a hiccup for sons when they reach the age of 14 or so and huge surges of testosterone swill around inside them. It is at this point, Biddulph maintains, that it suddenly clicks in a boy’s head that if he doesn’t obey his mother, there is nothing she can do about it. He is bigger than she is and he rudely disregards her. It is essential at that point that dad weighs in with the immortal words ‘don’t talk to your mother like that’. A teenage son needs to know that he is the child and you, the parents, are a team responsible for bringing him up. Disrespectful behaviour will not be tolerated. If dad says nothing, or worse, sides with his son, that boy is going to lose his respect for women pretty fast.

Finally, Biddulph slips in do the housework as his fifth rule. He reckons that boys should be taught to participate in the functioning of the house, that they should share in the responsibility for the smooth running of it. Clearly that will be a lot easier if dad does his part and can teach by example. He sets a target here – a ten year old boy should be preparing one evening meal for the family a week. Nothing fancy, just something like pasta and a prepared sauce that he can manage and will give him a real sense of achievement. As Biddulph puts it, ‘imagine if you have five children – it’s great!’, you only have to cook at weekends!..

At the end of Steve Biddulph’s talk I was entirely convinced of the merit of his argument and questioning my own attitude which has been ‘I will do most of the child rearing (I don’t work) and my partner can just do the last little bit (he works full time)’. Well, that looks like a recipe for disaster for my son (and to a lesser extent my daughter, too) and may explain some of the problems I have with my son’s behaviour. He is, as I frequently explain to friends and family, ‘all boy’, By which I suppose I mean he is a streotypical young male. I know I don’t want him to be a streotypical adult male, so perhaps it is time for us to find a way for his father to take a more active role in raising him. My partner is the grown man, our son his apprentice – we have to find time and space for them to be together.

PS Steve Biddulph’s lecture focused on raising boys because he feels boys, and many men, are in crisis over their identity. Girls were mentioned only occasionally, not because their development is unimportant, but simply because we were there to learn about our sons. For more information about raising boys and girls I suggest you have a look at Steve Biddulph’s books:-

• Manhood, Finch Publishing, Sidney, 2^nd edition 1995
• The Secret of Happy Children, Angus & Robertson, 3^rd edition 1993
• More Secrets of Happy Children, Angus & Robertson

Angus & Robertson is an imprint of Harper Collins Publishers, Australia. You can obtain these books by mail order, tel 01892 518 424.

The lecture was organised by Parent Network, a voluntary organisation that brings parents together to discuss issues around raising children. For more information about their activities, contact the North London organiser, Valda Dagnell on 0171 281 9322.

Many thanks to Tessa Palfreyman for contributing this article.