Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Boys Today?
Let's not hate but appreciate the burdens and systematic oppression they must endure coupled with emotional and developmental needs.
Power2People!
The good news about boys ... they do eventually grow up
Last week, Will Hutton touched a nerve with many readers when he asked why teenage boys suddenly turn into monsters. But, he learns, there may be cause for optimism
Will Hutton
The Observer,
Sunday June 11 2006
Article history
I could never have predicted the depth and strength of feeling provoked by my column last week on the emotional turmoil of teenage boys. Hundreds of you blogged, emailed and wrote letters, lifting the lid on what is clearly a widespread and disturbing problem for many parents, and one that seems to many of you to be insufficiently acknowledged
Many of the respondents were mothers who despaired at what was happening to their sons. As they became teenagers, their sons became ever more distant, locked-off and impossible to reach. They retreated into aggression, drug abuse or obsession with games, instant messaging and the internet.
One single mother spoke for many. She had narrowly averted a complete nervous breakdown, she wrote, at one time reproaching herself for ever having had a child. Her son had begun smoking cannabis at 14, was regularly hauled in by the police, verbally abused her and got minimal GCSEs. Now, living with his father, he was beginning to get himself together and had started an apprenticeship.
The education system had let him down completely. She recalled a conversation at a parents' evening in which she disagreed with his woman teacher over whether her son would enjoy Tess of the d'Urbervilles. Some of the boys do, she was told, as if her son would be the odd one out for finding the book incomprehensible. Lord of the Flies, maybe, she replied. But Tess, no. The school system, she complained to me, echoing dozens of other emails, too quickly criticises boys for not being able to do what is prescribed, rather than trying to find ways of engaging them.
The other difficulty for boys, she concluded, was that they needed more contact not just with their fathers, but adult men generally. Too much of education was feminised. Now, as an apprentice, he at last had contact with older men who would have no truck with teenage tantrums. This had been the key to his beginning to recover his balance.
A growing number of relatively small pressure groups are now trying to put men's needs on the national agenda. The inability of boys to articulate their feelings and their tendency to hide behind an aggressive front too easily grows into lack of emotional intelligence as an adult, which in turn leads to behavioural problems and poor health.
This week is National Men's Health Week. Men, I learn, are more likely to die from skin cancer than women because they refer themselves too late. Men in general do not take health as seriously as women. The special week is intended to raise the salience of boys' and men's health; it will be interesting to see what kind of hearing the campaigners get.
The questions remain, though: is the 'boy' problem really getting worse? And can it really be said to eclipse problems for girls? Some angry women tore into last week's article - rape and male violence to women remained the number one issue. I am on their side, but with one enormous reservation. Sexual violence is as much rooted in emotional immaturity and vulnerability about masculinity as about aggression and power. I see no way of ever successfully challenging it without getting a better grip on what is going on in boys' and men's heads.
Last week, I argued that teenagers felt massively more disempowered today than 30 years ago; that being continually promised the prospect of choice without the capacity to realise it brought disillusion: someone else always seemed to be in control. This made deferring gratification, which boys seem to find more difficult than girls, even harder. What was the point? Hence the better exam grades for girls and growing teenage disaffection for boys.
The emails that have rained down on me since make me see that all this has touched a nerve. I have also been struck by the medical evidence that men are inherently more fragile and vulnerable than women, which runs counter to the iconic view of masculinity as an expression of autonomy, physical strength and self-reliance. Sebastian Kraemer of the child and family department at London's Tavistock Institute sent me a paper detailing medical and physiological evidence which points to exactly the opposite conclusion. Men may have more muscle bulk, but we should not be fooled into thinking that they are, therefore, more mentally robust.
Men are born with their cognitive facilities less developed than women and, as they grow, are three to four times more likely to suffer from developmental disorders, ranging from hyperactivity and stammering to Tourette's syndrome.
Kraemer argues, along with the Men's Health Forum, that much illness is gender specific. Women are more likely to suffer from depression and connective tissue disorders; men from circulatory disorders, duodenal ulcers and lung cancer. And men do far less to address their disorders than women.
In all societies, apparently, growing boys have a pattern of poor motor and cognitive regulation which leads to misjudgment of risk. This, together with their emotional illiteracy and loneliness, explains why boys more frequently commit suicide. In England and Wales, the death rate in boys under 16 from all causes is 41 per cent higher than girls and is related to social class. The death rate of boys in social class five is twice as high as in social class one.
Boy infants do show greater spatial, navigational and mathematical skills than girls which, together with their greater readiness to take risks, may have enabled them to deploy their greater muscle strength as hunter-gatherers. Since settled agriculture only emerged 14,000 years ago, a blink of an eye in evolutionary terms, men remain equipped with the cognitive skills that made them effective hunters. But now those skills are a source of potential emotional disorder.
In other words, boys' problems are not new; what is different is their growing inability to handle them. Harvard's Professor Robert Kegan is illuminating on this. In two great books - The Evolving Self and In Over Our Heads - he argues that we should see our mental and emotional life growing as our bodies do. Each period of mental development is a period of trying to understand and direct the feelings and emotions of the preceding period, a process which becomes ever more complex as our cognitive skills develop.
Kegan characterises the early teenage years as the 'imperial' stage; teenagers want to master their impulses and perceptions, but their cognitive skills are not yet sufficiently developed for them to understand and manage their emotions. All they are equipped to do at this stage in their emotional life is to express desires and needs that 'imperially' must be met immediately rather than managed.
Kegan's work begins to help us find an explanation for the 'boy' conundrum. It is not that teenage boys are being wilfully difficult. They simply do not have the emotional or cognitive capacity to behave any differently. They are wrestling with trying to align their deepest feelings with a world that disempowers them. The good news is, as Kegan argues, that as their mental faculties catch up with their emotions, they will get to the other side of their journey to adulthood. It is just that the transition is tougher than it used to be and that the risks are far greater of falling out altogether, at worst committing suicide or of carrying life-long wounds.
I am left where I began. The mental life of boys is a problem. Potential solutions are emerging. Boys need mentors. The apprentice system needs massively boosting. But maybe, too, we should relax a bit over how boys fare between 14 and 19; most will come through as long as they are better understood. Schools need to be more supple and society less demanding over its absolute deadlines about what exams have to be passed and when. First and foremost, we have to begin with the recognition of a truth. Boys may look tough, but they are very fragile. Just like men.
