Is It More Than Boys Being Boys?

Until Kip Kinkel opened fire on his schoolmates in Springfield, Ore., in May, everyone thought he was just a regular kid. A little angry, maybe, with a gruesome sense of humor. Mostly, just a boy. But even before the frantic second-guessing over the tragedy began came two books to suggest that boys being boys--or what the world tries to make of boys--may have been a big part of the problem.

Michael Gurian, a Spokane, Wash., therapist and author of A Fine Young Man, and Harvard psychiatry professor William Pollack, author of Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood, argue that boys are in crisis from emotional undernourishment. Though our culture views them as testosterone-driven demons, boys are much more fragile than many adults realize. And that's about all they agree on; where they clash is on the origin of the difficulties and how to avert them.

Both grapple with a universal truth: boys have complicated relationships with their mothers. Pollack, who is alarmed by what he calls the "silent crisis" of "normal" boys, says we live in a confused society in which mothers are afraid to cling to their sons. On the one hand, we ask 1990s boys to be sensitive and expressive, and on the other, we saddle them with the culture's outdated notions of masculinity. The result is what Pollack calls the ever present "boy code"--a stoic, uncommunicative, invulnerable stance that does not allow boys to be the warm, empathic human beings they are. The "gender straitjacketing" starts, Pollack says, during the early years, when boys suffer their first and most momentous trauma: premature separation from their well-meaning mothers. Fearful that maintaining a close connection will result in the shaming of their sons (name calling from peers, disapproval from adults), mothers disconnect, usually by the time their boys are five or six. When boys feel ashamed of their dependence on Mom, when they are discouraged from emotional expression, they withdraw, creatively and psychically. They become lost.

Not exactly, insists the anthropologically oriented Gurian, who focuses on adolescent boys. Boys--who are just being who they are--are making a natural, and critical, separation. And by the way, moms cling too much. Boys are more independent than girls at ages 5 and 6. To suggest something is wrong with this is to "pathologize" boys. Indignant about society's ignorance of male biology, Gurian says we're basing our expectations on female models.

One of the biggest problems for boys in our culture, says Gurian, is that adults, especially female ones, need to be educated about "what a boy is." Evolved from hunter-gatherer primates whose main purpose was survival, boys' uniquely fragile brains are not equipped to handle emotive data in the same way girls' are. So boys are by their nature emotionally insecure. At the same time, their several daily surges of testosterone "hardwire" them to be dominant and physically aggressive and to solve problems quickly. It is the job of parents--in particular, fathers or male mentors--to help them resolve this contradiction and channel their natural attributes productively.