The Wonder of Boys Quotes

“The quickest way to create a boy or man who lacks compassion is to judge and shame his feelings.”
― Michael Gurian, The Wonder of Boys: What Parents, Mentors and Educators Can Do to Shape Boys into Exceptional Men

“Boys need to learn the value of spiritual solitude. For the soul to grow, it needs those moments of no-stimulation, of wakeful peace. Because we adults don't usually practice enough solitude—because we are always 'doing' things—we often neglect to teach our boys to find solitude”
― Michael Gurian, The Wonder of Boys: What Parents, Mentors and Educators Can Do to Shape Boys into Exceptional Men

“Adolescent youths cry out for us to help them contextualize their life experiences.”
― Michael Gurian, The Wonder of Boys: What Parents, Mentors and Educators Can Do to Shape Boys into Exceptional Men

“Boys often need us to give them more time than girls need, and they often need us to connect their feelings to objects in the outside world.”
― Michael Gurian, The Wonder of Boys: What Parents, Mentors and Educators Can Do to Shape Boys into Exceptional Men

“Frequently I go to conferences and listen to speakers decry the absent father as somehow a new phenomenon. Though their recriminations against absent or emotionally distant fathers are generally meant to help society, at the same time they are built on a lie that evolution disproves generation after generation. Fathers have often gone to war, or the long hunt on the savannah, or to work in another village or city. But only in the last decade or so have manhood and fathering been trashed completely.”
― Michael Gurian, The Wonder of Boys: What Parents, Mentors and Educators Can Do to Shape Boys into Exceptional Men

“Working outward in concentric circles from the single mother's situation, we can easily draw a picture of what a 'good' mother-son relationship needs in order to flourish. In its ideal form, mom would be experiencing physical, material, social, and emotional support from four interdependent sources: an intimate partner who is also attached to the child; a select group of close friends and family; a wider community that supports mom's values and goals; and a maternity-flexible workplace.”
― Michael Gurian, The Wonder of Boys: What Parents, Mentors and Educators Can Do to Shape Boys into Exceptional Men

“The culture in which you parent, mentor, or educate boys exhorts them to be individualistic and group-oriented at once, but does not give them a tribal structure in which to accomplish both in balance. It used to be that the tribe formed a boy's character while the peer group existed primarily to test and befriend that character. Nowadays, boys' characters are often formed in the peer group. Mentors and intimate role models rarely exist to show the growing boy in any long-term and consistent way how both to serve a group and flourish as an independent self.”
― Michael Gurian, The Wonder of Boys: What Parents, Mentors and Educators Can Do to Shape Boys into Exceptional Men

“Boys must find ways to compete and see themselves as performing well. If they do not, if society does not provide them with these opportunities, they'll compete against society itself, abusing their community and themselves.”
― Michael Gurian, The Wonder of Boys: What Parents, Mentors and Educators Can Do to Shape Boys into Exceptional Men

“As our lives speed up more and more, so do our children's. We forget and thus they forget that there is nothing more important than the present moment. We forget and thus they forget to relax, to find spiritual solitude, to let go of the past, to quiet ambition, to fully enjoy the eating of a strawberry, the scent of a rose, the touch of a hand on a cheek...”
― Michael Gurian, The Wonder of Boys: What Parents, Mentors and Educators Can Do to Shape Boys into Exceptional Men

“We are, in large part, a culture that expects its boys to initiate themselves into manhood. But holistic or even minimal initiation into manhood through relatively unguided self-experimentation is rare. Boys cannot become whole men without men and women making them into men. ”
― Michael Gurian, The Wonder of Boys: What Parents, Mentors and Educators Can Do to Shape Boys into Exceptional Men

“Boys, dominated by testosterone, often feel compelled to gain independence earlier than girls, but only when they feel safe and confident that they are not losing a parent’s love. If a parent misunderstands this equation—holds onto the boy longer than he wants to be emotionally controlled; or disrupts his sense of safety through a circumstance like divorce—his natural and very testosterone-controlled urge to separate and force himself into the world is disrupted.”
― Michael Gurian, The Wonder of Boys: What Parents, Mentors and Educators Can Do...

“we must come to realize that once we have kids, individualism is impractical and self-defeating.”
― Michael Gurian, The Wonder of Boys: What Parents, Mentors and Educators Can Do...