Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys

by Michael Thompson

If you ask a boy the question “How did that make you feel?” he very often won’t know how to respond. He’ll talk instead about what he did or plans to do about the problem.

boys do struggle with the same painful feelings of failure and rejection and not fitting in that we so easily attribute to girls. When they can’t hold the pain any longer, they act on it.

a boy needs male modeling of a rich emotional life. He needs to learn emotional literacy as much from his father and other men as from his mother and other women,

girls’ verbal abilities, on average, mature faster than boys’: they talk earlier and more fluently.

boys tend to be more physically active than girls, moving faster and staying in motion longer.

research shows that if a man wins a tennis match, or even a chess game, his level of testosterone rises and remains elevated for some time. The loser? His testosterone level falls.

The Semoi of Malaysia are one of the most peaceful societies known. Men don’t fight one another; husbands don’t beat their wives; parents don’t hit their children. What’s more, the Semoi children seldom fight among themselves. Assault, rape, and murder are virtually unknown. The Semoi believe that aggression is dangerous and that aggressive thoughts or even unfriendliness puts a person at greater risk for getting sick or having a bad accident. Thus, their children learn from a very early age that nonviolence is the way of the world.

A destiny of aggression isn’t born, it’s made, most notably in societies like ours in which aggressive impulses are allowed free rein. We can raise boys to be nonviolent if we so choose.

Parents can model emotional connectedness and empathy. They can listen to boys’ feelings without judging them, hear their problems without dictating solutions.

The average boy faces a special struggle to meet the developmental and academic expectations of an elementary school curriculum that emphasizes reading, writing, and verbal ability—cognitive skills that normally develop more slowly in boys than in girls.

Studies that track children’s development through the school years suggest that, by the third grade, a child has established a pattern of learning that shapes the course of his or her entire school career.

Many boys who are turned off to school at a young age never refind the motivation to become successful learners. Even among those who press on to achieve success later in life, the emotional scars of those troubled years do not fade.

“What do women have trouble understanding about boys?” “They don’t like to be gotten mad at.” Alan makes a simple point—that boys don’t like being yelled at and yet that makes up a large part of their lives.

“Adults feel justified in yelling at boys because they are so ‘bad’ all the time.”

the distinction between a good class and a bad class, from his point of view, has a lot to do with the freedom it offers to stand up and walk around.

Much of the time a boy’s experience of school is as a thorn among roses; he is a different, lesser, and sometimes frowned-upon presence, and he knows it.

It would be easy to criticize the boys for the predictable failure of their hurried and flawed first-round catapults, easy to shame them by comparing their rambunctious work style to the calmer, more efficient style of the girls. But this teacher saw something different. In addition to the well-executed planning and building by the groups of girls, she recognized in the boys a risk-taking energy and an enthusiasm that were of real value to the class.

Boys generally are an active lot, and often impulsive. Their energy is contagious, especially among other boys, and that physical energy can translate into a kind of psychological boldness.

They often are the risk takers, seemingly oblivious to the potential hurt of a fall or sting of a reprimand. Whether their choices might eventually prove to be brave or reckless, boys are often in the middle of an action before they consider the consequences.

Boys are direct; they act and speak in...

many teachers identify the ordinary boy pattern of activity, attitudes, and behaviors as something that must be overcome for a boy to succeed in school.

Some researchers have suggested that the preponderance of boys among the learning disabled (60 to 80 percent of learning disabilities occur in boys) would disappear if eight-year-old boys were taught in classes with six-year-old girls, because learning disabilities are diagnosed based on assessment of reading ability at a certain age compared with intellectual potential (IQ test results) at the same age.

Boys who feel feared, discounted, or unduly revered in school suffer a kind of emotional isolation that only intensifies their own fears, feelings of unworthiness, or arrogant expectations of entitlement.

Research conducted in the 1960s by Harvard psychologist Robert Rosenthal and his colleagues shows convincingly how this occurs in the classroom. In this study, teachers were told that, based on sophisticated psychological testing, certain of their pupils were “bloomers” who would show remarkable intellectual gains over the course of the school year. What the teachers were not told was that the tests were fake and that the students had been selected randomly. Despite this, the “bloomers” did end up showing greater intellectual gains than their “non-bloomer” classmates. When teachers were prepared to see students as learners, they communicated high expectations and their confidence in the students’ abilities. Students who were “bloomers” fulfilled the expectations.

I often try not to see a boy who is struggling with the school environment. I prefer to work through his teachers and his parents, helping them to understand the issues without labeling the boy as a “patient” or a “problem.”

when she praised John on his reading effort, he smiled more and his negative banter faded out. And I faded out as a consultant as well. John didn’t need to have a meeting with a psychologist. That would simply have complicated his already cloudy feelings.

instead of responding to him as a negative person, they could help him “externalize” that negativity—define it as something separate from himself—and encourage him to rise up and defeat it.

This is a classic narrative therapy technique in which, instead of locating the problem inside the boy, you place the problem outside the boy and stand at his shoulder, allied with him in his struggle against it. When Norman acted in those negative ways, for instance, I encouraged his teacher to say to him, “I see that your bad mood has a grip on you today.” Or to say, when he was having a great day, “How did you keep your bad mood from ruining your day at school today? You must have tricked it. How did you do that?”

emotions tend to be expressed through movement or action.

When boys are excited and happy, they often get loud and physical: they shout, they jump, they run, they push and shove one another around, they run it off.

when the emotions are painful, a good run isn’t good enough. Physical activity can relieve some stress, but it doesn’t eliminate the source of it, and for that reason, physical activity—whether it’s running laps or punching a hole through the wall—isn’t enough. It discharges the energy around the feeling but not the feeling itself. It lets off steam but doesn’t turn off the burner under this emotional pressure cooker.

When school is not a good fit for a boy, when his normal expressions of energy and action routinely meet with negative responses from teachers and classmates, he stews in feelings of failure—feelings of sadness, shame, and anger, which can be very hard to detect beneath that brash exterior. Unable to “talk out” the emotional pressure, boys typically act out through verbal or physical aggression that walls them off emotionally from others, straining or severing emotional connections to the people and c...

“What are the reasonable expectations for a boy his age, and are there any plausible nonmedical explanations for his behavior?”

that it is important to think about the boy and his environment as a package. Even very active boys do quite well in a school with a high tolerance for a lot of movement.

We have seen boys whose behavior suddenly improves when they move to a class with a teacher who likes them and doesn’t think they are willfully bad.

most of what is being called ADD today would not have been called ADD fifteen or twenty years ago and that much of it falls within the normal range of boy behavior.

the challenge for all boys: to find the combination of support, empathy, appropriate structure, and expectations that works for boys, especially boys who are so significantly more distractible than their female classmates, boys whose level of spaciness or distractibility fits in least well in their school environment.

Boys can achieve a high standard of self-control and discipline in an environment that allows them significant freedom to be physically active.

When boys feel full acceptance—when they feel that their normal developmental skills and behavior are normal and that others perceive them that way—they engage more meaningfully in the learning experience.

“Kids pick up on how you feel about them as human beings. If they feel respected, if they feel liked and cared for, those boys are a piece of cake. These cold, angry boys melt in your hand because their basic needs are to be loved, cared for, respected. Boys have the same human needs as the girls.”

Harsh discipline—by which we mean both physical punishment in the form of hitting or spanking and verbal intimidation, which includes belittling, denigrating, scapegoating, and threatening—is not the answer for any child. Not ever.

If you are excessively cutting, unfair, or physically and verbally abusive with boys or with girls, they develop powerful, angry defenses against the treatment, or they become traumatized.

Men who have been hit, shamed, and humiliated as boys take it out on the world.

Many boys simply shut down emotionally at a young age and stay that way, unable to understand or express their feelings as they move into adult relationships in work, marriage, and family.

Deeply shamed, sad, and angry boys don’t just get over it with the passage of time. We know because we work with the angry, anxious, or depressed men so many of them grow up to be.

violence is the product of an exhausted mind,

harsh disciplinary practices increase significantly when parents feel stressed to begin with.

When parents carry around their own heavy load, they often take it out on their children.

We all get tired, overwhelmed, and angry at times. That’s often at the center of a boy’s imperfect behavior, and it’s at the center of a parent’s imperfect response.

when we use harsh discipline, we pass up that “teachable moment”—the window of opportunity for helping boys reflect on their actions and learn a better way.