Boys will be boys
ARE boys in trouble today? Their situation is desperate, according to a coalition of clinical and academic psychologists. The alarming news has been trumpeted in scholarly journals as well as in several bestselling books, most notably William Pollack's Real Boys and Michael Gurian's The Wonder of Boys and A Fine Young Man. Both Pollack, codirector of the Center for Men at McClean Hospital of Harvard Medical School, and Gurian, a Washington-based family therapist, want to persuade us that we are in the midst of a boy crisis of epidemic proportion.According to Pollack and Gurian, boys today are plagued by depression, isolation, despair, and fragile self-esteem. Boys are performing poorly in school compared with their sisters, who are now thriving. Diagnoses of attention-deficit disorder in male children are escalating, as are disciplinary problems, school drop-out rates, psychiatric disorders, and suicide. In the words of Pollack, "Many feel a sadness and disconnection they cannot even name." "Millions of our adolescent boys have experienced a trauma of some kind," asserts Gurian, and they haven't got the emotional resources, or support from others, to cope with the pain. Our boys are "like soldiers traumatized in wartime," and
The evidence, however, does not support these suppositions regarding the relation between sex roles and personal well-being. Parents of aggressive boys may practice their particular style of child rearing, in part, because their sons are temperamentally difficult. Families of aggressive boys employ confrontation instead of negotiation to resolve conflicts. Across time and place, youngsters have triumphed in the face of hardships that are difficult for most of us to imagine today. To the degree that androgynous people are behaviorally well adjusted, this appears to be because of the masculine component of the androgynous profile. Another dip in self-esteem occurs in seventh and eighth grades, when puberty, coupled with a burst of cognitive development, causes young teen-agers to become especially sensitive to how they measure up against their peers and how they are perceived by people generally. Male children are typically less compliant than their sisters, and women have trouble controlling them. Children have lived through war; they have survived abject poverty; they have worked 18 hour days at the age of five or six in the foulest conditions. Parenting styles do influence children in important ways. Men who, as adults, are preoccupied with the pursuit of money, status, or some other real or illusory power, are only trying to fill the empty void inside themselves that is the result of our cruel demands that a little boy should just shape up and "take it like a man. Children do not passively suck up whatever the world has to offer, blindly adopting any behavior that is encouraged by parents or teachers. Carol Gilligan saw sex-role stereotypes as most damaging in adolescence, when girls first came to understand that their "different voice," which emphasized interconnection and harmony instead of individuality and competition, was not appreciated by a male-dominated world. Clearly, we should not throw children out into the cold, cruel world to sink or swim.
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Acceptance Essays
