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Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood, by William Pollack
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Based on William Pollack's groundbreaking research at Harvard Medical School over two decades, Real Boys explores this generation's "silent crisis": why many boys are sad, lonely, and confused although they may appear tough, cheerful, and confident. Pollack challenges conventional expectations about manhood and masculinity that encourage parents to treat boys as little men, raising them through a toughening process that drives their true emotions underground. Only when we understand what boys are really like, says Pollack, can we help them develop more self-confidence and the emotional savvy they need to deal with issues such as depression, love and sexuality, drugs and alcohol, divorce, and violence.
“Just as Reviving Ophelia opened our eyes to the challenges faced by adolescent girls, Real Boys helps us hear and respond to the needs of growing boys.” ―Judith Jordan, Ph.D., Harvard Medical School
Featuring a new preface by the author on how parents can make a difference.
- Sales Rank: #53514 in Books
- Brand: Owl Books
- Published on: 1999-04
- Released on: 1999-05-10
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.27" h x 1.29" w x 5.51" l, .94 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 480 pages
Features
Amazon.com Review
Listening to the author William Pollack read Real Boys, it doesn't take long to find out that being a boy these days isn't all fun and games. As codirector of the Center for Men at McLean Hospital/Harvard Medical Center, Pollack has seen behind the stoic masks of troubled, modern boys as they struggle to cope with the mixed messages, conflicting expectations, and increasingly complex demands they receive from our evolving society. "New research shows that boys are faring less well ... that many boys have remarkably fragile self-esteem, and that the rates of both depression and suicide in boys are frighteningly on the rise."
What are parents to do? They could start by listening to the author's thoughts on contemporary child-rearing techniques, analysis of the root causes of many male behavior problems, and recommendations for avoiding all-too-common pitfalls. In Real Boys, Pollack draws upon nearly two decades of research to support his theories and makes an impressive assault on the popular myths surrounding the conventional definition of masculinity.
While listening to Real Boys, it is important to remember that Pollack is a psychologist, not a professional narrator. His enunciation is less than perfect and his reading sometimes strikes a clinical tone, but his intelligent writing and the obvious concern he holds for this important subject help carry a passionate message and compensate for any vocal shortcomings. (Running time: three hours, two cassettes) --George Laney
From Publishers Weekly
In a lucidly written primer for parents, Harvard Medical School psychiatry professor Pollack dismantles what he terms "the Boy Code"?society's image of boys as tough, cool, rambunctious and obsessed with sports, cars and sex. These stereotypes, he argues, thwart creativity and originality in boys. Linking clinical insights to practical suggestions, Pollack advises caregivers how to help boys repair their fragile self-esteem, develop empathy and explore their sensitive sides. Drawing on his clinical experience as well as an ongoing Harvard research project, he offers advice on "attention deficit disorder"? which, he maintains, is often a misdiagnosis for normal high-energy behavior? recognizing signs of depression, discouraging violence and helping boys cope with their parents' divorce. In discussing homosexuality, he notes that many of the assumptions of the psychiatric profession have been shown to be incorrect, such as that homosexuality was abnormal, a psychological disorder. Pollack's glorification of sports as an arena for self-transformation and emotional openness is counterbalanced by his recognition that athletics often encourages brutal competitiveness. His proposal that schools adopt curricula "on traditionally 'male' and 'female' topics" to spark separately the interests of boys and girls seems at odds with his own imperative to break through gender stereotypes. On balance, though, his manual is enlightening and stimulating. Author tour.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From The New England Journal of Medicine
It was probably inevitable, but is nonetheless welcome, that the troubled American conversation about the sexes would one day open up into a thoughtful consideration of what boys are fundamentally like and how they might best thrive. Until just past the midpoint of this century, the health and educational establishments drew their analyses from and directed their prescriptions to children generally. Sex-related peculiarities and differences were implicitly held to be less compelling than the universality of childhood experience. Thus, classic guides to child development from Benjamin Spock to Erik Erikson discuss childhood more or less generically. And although Erikson might point out "inclusive" and "intrusive" patterns of spatial organization and play on the part of girls and boys, both were seen as complementary expressions of a "phallic stage" of development believed to arrive on the same timetable, for the same reasons, and with the same urgency for boys and girls alike.
It makes for a fascinating exercise to reread Erikson in the light of today's sensitivities, for without question he assumes male experience as normative for both sexes. His observations of childhood are focused primarily on boys, to the extent that when he analyzes the difficulties of, say, culturally assimilating Dakota Indian children, he points out the disjunction between a pattern of nurturance that once prepared young bison hunters and the contemporary mandate to ready Dakota children for American public schools. In other words, the problem is a boy problem. Not surprisingly, Erikson's often luminous studies of historically transformative figures -- Luther, Gandhi, Gorky, Hitler -- all focus on males.
For the past quarter-century, there has been a virtual tidal wave of correction to the tendency to see boyhood as emblematic of childhood. Bolstered by widely held feminist assumptions, an altogether revised popular view of sex and sex roles has come to prominence in nursery and school room. The society of children is now seen as a battleground where, if ideological vigilance is relaxed, the little heirs of the patriarchy will establish a misogynist, violent regime in which the privileges and prizes will be hoarded by the boys.
Underlying this fear is the unstated assumption that males, and especially males banded together, are inherently toxic. As such they should be watched, disarmed, and diluted with feminine influence. Such notions have been given voice by distinguished college presidents, who, untroubled by any objective data, have declared to the press the peculiar formula "girls' schools are best for girls; coed schools are best for boys" -- which raises, among other objections, the monstrous prospect of sacrificing what is best for girls in order to ameliorate the badness of boys.
Some of the honest confusion visited on child rearing and schooling over the past three decades is the result of an ill-considered tendency to impose valid concerns about sexual inequity in various arenas of adult life, especially the workplace, onto developing children. As a result, boys and boyhood have begun to be reconstructed, with the result that it has become increasingly difficult for a boy to find himself in playground, schoolroom, and story. Perhaps more darkly, it appears that we might be medicating and mending not just sick and deficient boys, but boyhood itself.
Out of this unhelpful climate, some hopeful and healing voices are being raised, including that of William Pollack, author of Real Boys. Pollack, a clinical psychologist who also codirects the Harvard-McLean Hospital Center for Men, has been thinking hard about the contemporary masculine condition for over a decade.
Coauthor, with R. William Betcher, of In a Time of Fallen Heroes: The Recreation of Masculinity (New York: Atheneum, 1993) and an editor of A New Psychology of Men (New York: Basic Books, 1995), Pollack has looked closely at infant boys' earliest parental relationships and found what he calls a normative trauma, "normative" in that every boy faces sex-specific challenges in coming to terms with his mother and his differences from his mother. There are both healing resolutions and pathologic arrests in response to the male trauma, and much of what Pollack has to say regarding boys is about how parents and educators can promote the former. Here, perhaps, Pollack is at his very best. He maintains that the saving development in a boy's experience is empathy -- but empathy understood in a somewhat enlarged way. Pollack faults previous studies for defining empathic transactions so narrowly as to exclude more robust, more playful behavior. Or simply, we have tended to limit our understanding of empathy to its traditionally feminine expressions. Starved of empathy (rightly conceived), boys defensively inflate themselves in unattractive, antisocial posturings; nurtured empathically -- with men doing their part -- boys evolve into strong, multidimensional, empathic men themselves.
Real Boys is composed of summarized research findings, clinical observations, and straightforward advice on how to advance boys along their developmental trajectory. Pollack steers a sensible middle course through the potentially divisive issues. For instance, he alerts readers to the easy tendency to misread ordinary male development as attention-deficit disorder or attention-deficit-hyperactivity disorder, yet he reminds us that in some instances, medical and remedial intervention is good practice.
Pollack is in solid scientific control of current research, and he provides a lucid, objective guide to such sensitive issues as the origin of homosexual orientation and how to respond humanely to emerging homosexual boys. In conversational, nontechnical terms Pollack points the way through our most serious worries about contemporary masculinity: irrational preoccupation with arms and mayhem, a rising tendency to self-destruction, substantially poorer scholastic performance than that of girls, a worrying tendency toward risky and delinquent behavior.
Both individual care givers and institutions will find much to ponder in Real Boys. And again, the best news may be that we can consider what is good for boys without unnecessary ideological guilt. For it is perhaps no overstatement to suggest that the contemporary American view of childhood has been clouded. The undisputedly right assumption of the equal worth of every child has been mistranslated as a mandate for treating boys and girls the same. In consequence, we discover dubious gaps and deficits and entitlements where we once found distinctive masculine and feminine behavior. Or worse, we attempt to medicate or reshape one sex into the contours of the other -- or those of a putatively "normal" child.
Real Boys is a thoughtful step in clearing the ideological air. Perhaps with an equally acute and generous Real Girls, we might set about addressing the needs of children from an appropriately respectful and loving perspective.
Reviewed by Richard A. Hawley, Ph.D.
Most helpful customer reviews
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Insight into my boys and myself and they're mother, and their society.
By D. Knapp
Every parent should read this, just to get some fresh perspective. Boys are more marginalized now than I ever saw in girls in my boomer youth. And nobody is noticing except the boys. They suffer. How about that, not just girls can suffer. For some reason, sexism has been found to be bad for one gender, but ok for the other because, heck, "sins of our fathers" and all that. It's basically backlash. Should children really be pawns in that war? Come on. If we're all truly equal, then let's act that way. Same goes for racism, bigotry, choose your malice. We all need to grow up, evolve, get on with life, without making one labeled-group suffer.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Awesome Text
By E. B. Khan
When I worked in counseling, I recommended this book to many people (along with the accompanying work-book). All to often, people write off the emotions in boys, and forget that they do have them.
Learn about the boy code, as defined by Dr. Pollack. He is brilliant with his views. If you read Real Boys: Voices, you will find that kids really do believe what this guy talks about.
I do call this a text book though. You do not need to read this cover to cover to benefit from its message. Open to the chapter that is most relevant to your situation, and read it. I have recommended this book to a lot of people to include: a friend who was dating a woman with a teen boy, and didnt know how to handle that, also to parents (dads and moms) when they were struggling with communicating with their teen sons, and also therapists.
Anyone who works with boys of all ages should read this. You will be profoundly educated as to what society has done to create hardship for boys who want to show their emotions; a healthy display of emotions is a human condition, not just a girl condition.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
For any parent or teacher of young men
By Colleen E. Cunningham
There is lots in the media about young women, but seldom do we look at the trials of our young men. This book clearly explains the pressures and cultures our society is putting on young boys to "be a man." This is a thoughtful, well-research book with practical suggestions for both teachers and parents. As a mother of three men, as well as a teacher of hundreds, I know that they are suffering and lonely. Pollack explains why and how to change the conversation, both with the boys as well as with society. A must read for anyone that has to help young men come to maturity in our less than advantageous society.
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