With the gunshots of Littleton and Taber echoing across the culture, we’re face-to-face with the pain that many boys grow up with–and express through violence. One father watches his own son–and tries to understand what kind of men we’re making.
By Ivor Shapiro (writing as Evan Vanovic)
First published in the August 1999 issue of Chatelaine
© Ivor Shapiro
“It’s OK, I don’t need a kiss.” The words were inevitable, I suppose, but hearing them, halfway through our summer vacation with our only child, Paul, just three and a half, was a shock. Do you have to start being a man so soon?
I don’t know when I first heard someone say, “Be a man,” but I know who said it and why. I was crying; in my mom’s view, boys did not do that. Men did not complain, did not need. Stoic endurance was something parents should teach every boy, to save him from an even harsher encounter with manly shame. In my case, the lesson never quite took. Adolescence found me–and left me–a bookish sensitive boy more likely to ponder than to pounce when provoked. In early adulthood, I discovered that real men come in diverse shapes and temperaments, and women weren’t necessarily averse to mine. For two decades, I watched gender roles grow increasingly unfashionable and all but forgot the notion of manliness.
Then I had a son. Or more exactly, I had a child who became, unmistakably, in the year he turned three, a boy. Within the four seasons of that year, Paul forced me to confront the reality that someday, he would be a man. The question was: what kind of man?
# # #
Spring. Suddenly, everywhere there’s gluttony for new words on the subject of raising boys. Pop psychologists have cooked up best-selling books with worried titles such as Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons From the Myths of Boyhood, Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys and, more optimistically, The Wonder of Boys. Newsweek comes out with a cover story on the “crisis points” in boys’ development. Boys are more likely than girls to present discipline and learning challenges in school and to be diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. They’re a lot more likely to use drugs, to drop out of school and to commit violent crimes–as the world is reminded whenever a troubled boy walks into a school with a gun. “Even boys who seem OK on the surface are suffering silently inside–from confusion, a sense of isolation and despair,” writes U.S. psychologist William Pollack in Real Boys. My boy has just turned three. As I read, my chest tightens.
# # #
Summer. Slowly, Paul is releasing the boy within him, a tough guy who grits his teeth to mask his pain (sometimes) and casually calls, “It’s OK…” after a high-speed collision between shoulder and cottage doorway.
This first refusal of a kiss comes, perhaps not coincidentally, in the wake of Paul’s first adoption of another boy as personal hero–12-year-old Angus, who drives an outboard from his folks’ place to our island cottage half a mile away by himself; Angus, who answers questions with a laconic “not really” or “sure,” responses swiftly established in Paul’s own vocabulary. Angus, whom Paul follows around with gleaming eye and who, fortunately, is a generous-spirited boy with a ready grin.
Under this influence, our son spends the summer working on his manly side. On the way to visit Angus and his sister, Paul sits in his own seat on the boat, not anyone’s lap. But he clutches his stuffed eagle tightly while setting off across the waves, as if to affirm that he really is only a little boy.
If Paul’s stoic overtures leave me uneasy, it’s at least partly because of my spring reading. The norm of male nonchalance is alive and well, say the researchers–and for evidence, they point to kindergarten classes. Most five-year-old boys have learned, during a shockingly early coming-of-age, to be ashamed of pain and vulnerability.
My son, my little man, you love cuddling your big brown bear–and to manhandle building blocks and fire engines. But now, you’re slowly stamping down the softness inside yourself. Until recently, we always knew what you were feeling–delight or dread, frustration or fatigue. Whatever it was, we encouraged you to trust us with its expression. What came out was, at first, primitive and wordless; then you startled us with, “I’m having a sad day” (or an angry one). Just yesterday, while the two of us lay on the cottage lawn looking out at the lake we both love, you murmured, “I’m happy to be here with you,” and my heart burst.
But almost as eagerly, you are now learning somehow to keep some feelings dark. Instead of saying what’s on your mind, you’ll sometimes walk away and slam a door. Where once you’d have reached out for a hug, you may spit, “Don’t touch me.” I yearn to ask you why.
“Because he’s growing up,” I might have answered until recently. But it seems a more scientific answer is “Because he’s a boy.” True, researchers differ on what causes the emotional silence of boys. For Dr. Pollack, it’s the result of subtle lessons from parents and from society starting at birth. For U.S. family therapist Michael Gurian, author of The Wonder of Boys, it starts at conception–boys are different emotionally, he says, because of what the XY chromosome does to the structure of the brain and to the production rate of that damned hormone, testosterone.
Either way, worldwide research has produced stunningly consistent snapshots of the emotional lives of girls and boys, and they’re as different as Barbie and the Incredible Hulk. As a baby, the typical boy cries a lot more than a girl does; at age five, the reverse is true. During early childhood, the typical boy starts changing “from a huggable bear to a stiff tree,” in Gurian’s words, and by elementary school, boys seldom express any feelings in any way. When a University of Connecticut researcher hooks girls and boys to a polygraph and shows them slides with threatening images, the machine records nervous sweat indicating fear in boys and girls alike–but it’s the boys’ faces that remain blank. There’s one great exception, according to Boston researchers Leslie Brody and Judith Hall: girls and women have more difficulty expressing anger than other emotions, while we of the male persuasion find anger the hardest emotion to restrain.
The hardest thing to notice, as I watch Paul metamorphose, is the subtle influence that I–enlightened I–exert. After Paul toughs out a bumpy boat ride to a nearby island, I ask him how he felt about the waves. “Happy?” he replies, with a question mark trembling in the air. But instead of probing for the fear (“It was scary, and you were brave”), I accept the “happy” as if it had an exclamation point.
My avoidance is conscious–let him focus on the pride, why not? But what am I afraid of in the question mark? According to researchers Brody and Hall, this is precisely how parents tend to behave toward boys. We focus them away from negative feelings (except anger), while more readily letting girls express sadness and fear.
That’s how we teach boys shame, which, once ingrained by peer pressure, becomes the centrepiece of male culture. It is but a short bumpy ride from feeling ashamed of our softness to hiding it with bravado–beating one another up, bashing gays, breaking the law, even killing ourselves. Statistically, we are much more inclined to do all those things than are women.
# # #
Labour Day weekend. Back in the city, Paul grunts, “Argh, I can do it,” as he heaves a large bag of groceries from the car to our house. “Way to go,” I call after him with unfeigned pride. Mere months ago, I was worrying over Paul’s fear of heights and apparent lack of determination, but through the summer I watched wonderingly as his brave new self climbed surefooted to the top of obstacles or rapped a paddle on a beaver’s house, loudly warning the invisible beast away from “our” trees.
Would I take this much pleasure in my child’s hardiness if that child were a girl? I hope so; can’t know so. Sex expectations today, more than ever, form devilish cocktails: girls must be sassy and soft; boys tender and tough. The problem is that being sensitive (or smart, for that matter) is, like, wussy. “It’s…a lot cooler to show an assertive girl than to show a sensitive boy,” was what TV writer and producer Mitchell Kriegman, creator of Clarissa Explains It All, said in explaining to a New Yorker writer why he never considered featuring a boy as the centrepiece of a show for teens.
So, today’s boys get less leeway than girls to be who they can be. What’s left for boys is to be strong. If I watch the men around us through what I imagine to be Paul’s eyes, the burly hydro workers up ladders impress me more than the trim dads in playgrounds, the ones who wear cotton sweaters and talk gently and walk like the actor one (female) friend of mine calls “Leonardo What’s-his-name, that wuss.” It’s toughness–sheer physical strength–that remains in this androgynous age to distinguish men from women. We’re simply stronger than women are. Well, not I, personally, and maybe not What’s-his-name, but Eric Lindros is.
It therefore seems inevitable that while Leonardo gets girls’ attention, it’s men like Eric who will be adored by my boy. And, in my core, I find, God help me, that I approve. My vision of manhood remains closer to Paul’s bulldozer-driver voice (the deep one he uses for construction games) than to my own singsong tones.
As a boy, I knew what a man was supposed to be, and slowly learned it’s OK to be different. As Paul grows up, I somehow want him to have that same opportunity; even if his idea of manhood is flawed, I’d sooner he have one than not. This need of mine confounds everything I thought I believed about the sexes. I just deeply know that my son shouldn’t grow up genderless any more than a girl should.
# # #
October. I’m beginning to think there is an animal growing inside my son. Tension has moved into space previously occupied by tenderness and sometime almost every day it explodes as rage. He is guilty of assaults with weapons from sand to shovels and of the most vicious of bites–offences that are swiftly followed by tantrum tears.
Testosterone-laden as such rage may seem, its likely root is a plain fact: Paul has started nursery school. As an only child, he has lost the world in which he was forever the centre, and now must line up for things! The demotion clearly grieves and frightens him.
On this troubling stage, I think the idea of male strength offers Paul the gift of a role. There’s a clarity in it: the confidence and endurance at the heart of apparent maleness may make him feel stronger. So, where once he walked sweetly and gently through the world, bending often to smell any flowers he passed, now he struts, legs splayed, shoulders rotating.
Pondering the strut, I find it far less “cute” than others do; to me, it seems a signal, not of poise, but of dread. In the mornings, I watch him steeling himself–rousing the strut–before he slowly settles into his pseudo-manly rhythm at nursery school. Then between dinnertime and bedtime, he shucks this inner man in sudden eruptions that peel off the layers and allow him, by the time he says his last “night-night,” to be just a little child again.
Winter. Paul has settled into school and enjoys new activities and new friends. With relief, his mother and I have watched Paul’s rage abating and his male identity smoothing into something approaching equilibrium. Yes, he tears through the house in long underwear and bathrobe worn Batman-style, shooting guns hand-rolled from newspaper and emitting a motorcycle roar. But as he whizzed by my study yesterday, he stopped dead at CBC Radio’s offering of Beethoven’s “Pastoral Symphony” and fixed a knowing smile on me. “Flying ponies,” he said (remembering Disney’s Fantasia) and curled into my chair to listen, wordlessly adjusting my arm about him just so. Likewise, most mornings when I drop him off at nursery school, he demands a goodbye hug and kiss–but only if he’s sure his buddy Tom is not watching, in which case he throws me a wave without pause.
Thus, Paul’s manly shame battles his softness as it will, no doubt, for years to come. If the mix comes out just right, he will neither be labeled a sissy nor feel trapped in the persona of an emotionless tough guy who will someday have to learn, painfully, how to be a human being in a relationship.
Given the harshness of this world that boys must inhabit, the advice offered by the boy-parenting gurus, Pollack, Gurian & Co., ranges from common sense to trite. Give your boy undivided attention once a day; don’t tease or taunt him. When discussing emotions, make your point and then shut up. When he’s ready to talk, let him express his feelings in private.
Much of this is sound advice for parents of girls as well as boys; much of the rest leaves me cold. If my boy’s in distress, they say, I should give him a back rub or tell him, “Let’s shoot some baskets.” (Like, yeah, watch your portly dad’s totally humiliating spikes for a while; give yourself a laugh.)
Sorry, the only man I can offer Paul as a model is me, and he will have to make of that what he can. And he himself is more than the sum of his hormones and sex parts. Sure, the “average” boy exhibits clear differences from the “typical” girl. But Paul is not an average and nor is any child on earth.
Lorna Wright, Paul’s school principal, has spent 10 years as director of St. Cuthbert’s Preschool in midtown Toronto, and in that time she has watched most boys gravitating to different activities from, and interacting differently than, most girls. A boy might grab a toy back, whereas a girl might say, “You can’t come to my party.” But in every class, Wright says, there are exceptions. “So, if we can treat each child as an individual, a child with individual needs, then I hope we can step in and encourage when we are seeing a child with difficulty, whether it’s a boy or girl.”
That sounds like sound advice for a parent too; good enough for me.
My little man, you will soon, they say and I know, no longer be “mine” at all. You will be “theirs”–your peers’–until finally, increasingly and not without some pain, you become a real man, your own man. And what kind of man? That mystery is one among many in your future. When my mother said, “Be a man,” she meant don’t cry, don’t be afraid. Your mother and I will continue to tell you it’s OK to cry, to fear, to live the life of the soul. I doubt that “Be a man” will ever pass our lips.
But you won’t let that stop you.