The_Wonder_of

The Wonder of Boys
An interview with Michael Gurian

Why did you think it was important to write The Wonder of Boys?

I felt that society needed a book out there that gave an over-arching almost global
vision of what has happened to boys culturally. There are wonderful books out there,
like Raising Sons, but I felt we needed a larger Vision .

I also wanted to get all the biological material out to people. I wanted to help people
see what our ancestors always knew, that boys and girls are significantly different. I
felt it necessary to link some of the cultural problems we're having today to the fact
that we have neglected their biological, and therefore their deep spiritual needs. Of
course, any person's spirituality is based in their body, their biology

A lot of my intuitions for working on this book came from working in communities and
with families, both in my private practice and in my teaching around the Country. I
was getting a sense of what people needed.

Did you also get a sense that there was something missing in people's approach?
One thing you seem to say in the book is that because of their biological
differences, boys need to be raised differently from girls.

Absolutely boys and girls should be raised together. Boys and girls have the same
concerns and the same self-esteem needs, but at the same time, there are some
significant differences, Our culture has suffered because we haven't recognized this.
What girls will tend to do, when not raised correctly, is to become depressed or
anorexic. They turn on themselves. Or they'll get pregnant early. These are cultural
manifestations of not raising girls well. Boys don 't tend as much to turn on
themselves. What they will do is turn on others. Our society fails to realize that all
that the gangs and the high crime rate are, are males acting out the fact that they
have not been raised well. We can talk about anything else we want, but the point is
that they're not being raised well and they 're going to act out. If they do that in late
adolescence, then they're in jail. By then it 's too late. They' re going to try to get us
to raise them well.

One of the responses, if we say boy's are different, Is to say, "Well. Boy's will be
boys. That's just the way they are." You seem to be carving out some kind of a
middle course.

I define myself in the book as a "family feminist." My point of view, to use Buddhist
language, is the "Middle Path." My middle path, for the most part,. comes from
anthropological research. When I look at American communities or other communities
I've been in, in Turkey, or India, or the Southern Ute reservation, or Laramie,
Wyoming, I see that the social systems of the communities have always known-and
we tend to forget-that boys must be trained. The big mistake made by this culture is
that we're just not training them. What happened was that we tried to kick out the
patriarchal training, some which was dangerous. But we haven't replaced it so the
boys aren't really getting trained.

The model for the old patriarchal training was correct. You must train boys in age
appropriate ways. Now the content within that frame might not be what we'd like.
We don't have to train every single boy to go out and kill people. But we need to use
the frame. The content within that frame might be some of the training I mentioned
earlier, like training in sexuality, self- discipline, spirituality or morality.

They're not trained on what to do with their sexuality. There's none of the sex
education that elder males used to give to boys. They're not trained in self-discipline
or care of the soul. These were all things that the old patriarchal community did train
boys in. Now we're in a vacuum.

I think that's my middle ground. It's the patriarchal frame, but it's not just patriarchal.
It's two million years old. It's a pre-patriarchal, testosterone-driven frame. We can use
that frame, but change the content to fit the new millennium

I wonder if we can bring this down to the practical level. You talk a lot about
these biological differences in the first part of the book, and in the rest of it you
tell what we should do about these differences.

We're talking about a combination of testosterone and the male brain system, which
has been developing for over two million years. The male brain is spatially-oriented,
and makes males tend to be better at spatial than emotional relationships. Add that
to the influence of testosterone, which causes quick physical release of tension and
higher levels of aggression. The best example is sports. Sports are testosterone
driven. They involve physical aggression. The way we train for that is through
competition. Then, we're also going to see the boy's brain system working. Most of
these sports, like football, involve moving an object-a ball-through space. The male
brain system is going to emphasize spatial relationships and moving objects through
space. Also, everyone's working together to move that ball. They work together as a
team, and they're being tribally nurtured. What the male brain and testosterone need
is a tribe. Unless you have a tribe, especially of elders to guide the boys and peers to
test them, the testosterone is going to get out of hand. it's not contained. Further,
the male brain is not going to have goals to operate towards. What we're going to
have, in psychological terms, is boundary violation. We're going to have boys who use
up far more space than is appropriate in the physical world, and who use up far more
space in the interpersonal world. By this. I mean power. People who are not
containing this, through self-discipline, are overwhelming others. This is, in part,
what women feel. Wherever I go, one of the comments that moms will make is that
their daughter can play in a little physical space. The son need his blocks all over the
living room. If we don't help the boy contain himself within space, either in the living
room, or in a football game, or with his gun on the street, what we're going to get is
out of control boys.

But a tribal system, or a three-family system as I talk about in my book, contains this.
We can't raise boys well unless they have a strong first family, the nuclear family it
could be a single mom, or two gay parents. It doesn't need to be the blood mom and
dad. The second family is the extended family. This could include day-care providers
and god-parents. It doesn't have to be blood kin. The third family is the tribal family.
This includes the educational system, communities, peer-groups and the media. The
media has become a part of the boy's third family. If we don't make sure that all three
of those families are working together to create a wonderful tribe for our boys, then
we're not respecting their testosterone and their brain system. We're not giving them
the three concentric circles of sacred containers in which to develop themselves. The
boy is going to spill out of the container of space and go out and do things like abuse
and objectification of women, or destruction of other men.

In general, boys create aggressive social systems. In a good society, these social
systems are contained. The elders say that this aggression is fine in this container. It
allows them to express shadow, work off energy, practice skills. But the opportunity
has to be used to say to the boy that this has to be kept within that container.

One of the most important wisdom lessons that the male has to learn is to
differentiate between the world in which he can express his negative shadow and be
tested by his peers, and the world where, if he expresses this shadow he will cause
harm. That's something that a female culture doesn't understand as well as it needs to
about boys. Boys are always at the edge of causing harm to themselves or others
because they're such physical risk-takers. They need containers in which to do that
safely.

One of the things that male culture has forgotten is that males need to say, "Look,
you're allowed to do that within the container, and we'll step into that container and
get messy with you. But once you step outside that container it's finished." Males
have to learn that, and they have to start learning that when they're really young.
They need to learn how to contain their energy so that it can develop and then
explode in healthy, appropriate ways.

I've hear some women say that it's not good for boys to be raised by men, because
men will just teach them all those testosterone driven things. One point in your
book, that I've seen expressed elsewhere as well, is that the opposite may be
true. A male in the house would counter the media image of a "man" as,, someone
like Rambo, by reminding him, "that's not how people act in the real world."

What we're talking about, I think, is critical judgment, critical faculties. The mom is
good at giving that to the boy early on. He is mainly in her world in the first decade of
life. But when he starts getting into the second decade of his life, that critical
faculty, the difference between TV shows and a social community, especially has to
come from the males.

We can say that there and a lot of troubled males out there, but they've only a small
minority. Most men are in pretty darn good shape. Even if we look at domestic
violence statistics, over 90 percent of American men have never hit their spouse.
Most males are doing a good job of being males. They're struggling, like everyone else,
to find out who they are. Most males are going to be good for the boy, in helping him
develop his critical faculties helping them distinguish fantasy from reality, and the
like.

It's the middle path again. The mom is absolutely essential in helping the boy develop
his critical faculties, and the dad is absolutely essential. Of course, if there isn't a
mom and a dad, the feminine and the masculine are still both absolutely essential. I
wouldn't say one's better than the other. It's a matter of timing. The mom is more
essential in the first decade of life, and the dad in the second.

One other area that came up in your book is differences in schools. Girls are
behind in math and science, and there's been a push for programs to remedy that.
But boys are much farther behind in reading. That might have to do with how we
teach boys reading. For example, you point out that it 's typical for boys to look
quickly and look away. This comes from millions of years of scanning the horizon.

The educational system has done a great job in the last few years of understanding
girls, but it has pretty much neglected boys. But we're starting to wake up, and I
hope my book will contribute to this. Some stuff is hard-wired. For many, many, many
generations the probability is that males will continue to tend, on average, to do
slightly better at math because their brains are more spatial, and that females would
do better at reading. There are differences set up in the brain systems. Little girls
tend to get their verbal and reading skills earlier than boys. Society needs to decide
what to do about this. Society has decided that we need to make girls better at
math. We're putting huge amounts of money into that. We have to put equal amounts
of funding into making boys better at reading. One of the fallouts we're seeing with
boys in education, as I lay out in my book, is that the educational system is better for
girls than for boys. We have more boys dropping out. We have more young women in
college than young men. We have more young women in grad school. By the time the
boys become adolescents, the girls actually have an advantage over the boys. What I
hope we're trying for is a culture where both are equal. There are many ways to do
this. Certain boys need separate education just as some girls do. For many boys and
girls, this isn't a necessity. For those boys and girls, what we need is different ways of
teaching. Dade County, Florida is working on ways of teaching boys. They learned
that boys are learning by memorizing. This isn't good. So they're experimenting with
more individualized work with boys.

What are the biological causes for differences in reading, and what are the kinds
of approaches we need in reading, to reflect those biological differences?

The boy's brain is set up to do spatial relationships better, and to be a much more
visual brain. So it looks for images. The corpus callosum is not as big, so there's less
cross-talk between the right and left hemispheres. Compared to a girl 's brain, fewer
parts of a boy's brain light up when he reads. What this means is that not as much of
the boy's brain is brought to the are experience. So what does this mean for reading?
Boys tend to memorize more because they're having more difficulty. They're not
taking in as much data, and not as much of the brain is lighting up. So in Dade County
they're saying, "Let's do more one-on-one teaching." If the boys get more time and
attention in reading, that in itself will help them. Let's take them out of competing
with girls, who are faster at it early on. Then let's look at how they're processing the
individual words when they sound them out. What works better? Well, phonetics
works pretty well with them, so we'll do more of that and less rote reading.

How do these biological differences affect a boy in the second decade of his life?

One of the biggest differences is that in adolescence he's getting six or seven surges
of testosterone a day. He's sexually affected, of course. He's having trouble because
his physical body is changing at such a fast rate. He's unclear on what his energy is
doing. He needs massive amounts of male attention. He needs men to be take him to
the workplace a lot. He needs men to take him hunting, or whatever the family
equivalent of that is. Testosterone is very necessary for hunting. If the family
doesn't hunt, they need to come up with an equivalent to that like backpacking and
searching out what's in the natural world.

One thing for parents, mentors and educators of adolescents to think about is the
archetype of the Hunter. That s what the boy is becoming, a hunter. So how are they
going to help him hunt? Again, I'm being somewhat metaphorical. I don't necessarily
mean hunting in the woods with a gun.

So what does hunting require? It requires a huge amount or self-discipline. How are
we going to help him develop that? Martial arts is a good way. Sports is a good way.
Studies show that boys who participate in sports are less likely to turn to crime and
substance abuse.

Hunting is also a very spiritual experience. The hunter is alone quite a bit in the
natural world, with a sense of inner peace. So how are we going to get these boys to
engage themselves and their concept of the Divine? They need a lot of elder males
teaching this, and modeling it in their own lives. Certainly females, too. But
adolescents need a lot of males showing them what it is to be in connection with the
Divine and what the sacred and mystical world is like. All of this is what a hunter
would experience.

Hunting implies a sacred role. The boy is hunting for the food to feed his community.
So in those adolescent years we have to be giving him a sacred role. In Chapter 10 of
my book I lay out what I think the sacred role for boys ought to be. I call it the
husbandry role. But whatever parents decide, they must consciously give the boy a
sacred role. The hunter has a sacred role. But the 14-year-old boy who is rebelling
against his mom and dad and on drugs has no sacred role. That's part of his problem

We also have to be teaching him what is food, and what is not food. That's going to
help him clarify his values incredibly well. To extend the metaphor into real life, is
taking these drugs food? We're talking about food for the soul, and for the
community. Is his drinking providing food? Or is it, in fact, going to starve the
community or create a drought in the community? The community here also means
the archetypal community outside the self and the social community. If we just keep
this hunting metaphor going we can see what we need to do for adolescents.

If we train boys to be sacred males, which takes nurturing of the Hunter, we end up
with males that are going to feed our women physically and spiritually. They will know
how to be intimate. They're going to take care of their kids rather than abandoning
them through overwork, addiction, or divorce. The female culture is going to
respect them more because they will know who they are and making women more
willing to raise families with them. This will happen more easily if we allow the male
to be the male. For the adolescent male this means a lot of the Hunter. The King also
has to start developing.

That's what four or five years of initiation will do. In my book I lay out six kinds of
initiation that are occurring in our society. But we're not conscious of it. We don't
organize it for the boys so they don't notice. I don't think huge things are needed.
The first thing that's needed is vision-to see the initiations that are occurring. We
need to point those out to the boy and say "Oh look! Did you notice what just
happened?" Then the boy develops a road map The map is a wonderful concept for
the Hunter. The Hunter always had to have an internal map. Males wander a lot and
need a map. Metaphorically the boys need an internal map of what's going on for
them in the second decade of life. Initiation will do that.

I see a lot of similarity between the themes in your book and those in Robert Bly's
new book The Sibling Society. How do you see these two books fitting together?

I think Robert's book is wonderful. We' re saving many of the same things. One thing I
tried to do in my book. As in all my other books is to be practical. I see his book as
laying out a larger world of ideas and my book helping to make many of these ideas
practical for people

Can you give us an example?

Let's look at discipline. The first practical piece of advice is that from the start,
discipline has to be systematic not, piece meal. The parents have to have agreed on a
discipline system when the child is in the womb. The parents have to stick with it.
They will find that they will continually need to dialogue about it and sometimes
modify it but they can never undercut each other. Family unity is essential in
creating self-discipline in boys.

There are practical pieces of that. For example boys are experientially oriented and
don't spend as much of their energy inside their brain figuring things out. They are
more physical and take up more physical space, it's really important, then, for
parents, mentors and educators to give boys physical space. We have to have louder
voices and sterner tones with boys than with girls. In my book I list twelve
techniques for healthy discipline.

I also talk in my book about teaching values. There, I lay out the stages of a boy's
moral development and tell people to be very clear that they understand these
stages. A lot of people are trying to build moral structures in kids that the kids are
not able to construct yet. They're trying to teach abstract reasoning to a six-year-old.
The six-year-old has no clue, and the kid gets frustrated.

Another very practical thing is the media. The media is an important part of the boy's
third family. Whether we like it or not, the kid is bonding with people in the media.
We have to cut down our boy's intake of media. And we have to be a part of what
they take in from the media. We have to help them interpret what they're taking in.

None of what we've said is going to create the men we want unless boys have a
sacred role. In my book I lay out ten principles behind a sacred role. Practically
speaking, every family must decide what role it wants its boys to develop into. It can
be a very flexible role, but the boys must know it from very early on. For example,
when the boy drops a plate to the ground, the parent shouldn't pick it up. The boy
should pick it up. The boy has to start learning very early on how to be responsible,
how to participate in the community; how to express himself emotionally but within
sacred containers.

Where would you like to have this book take us? What's your vision for a more
perfect world?

My book is written as a gift to families, educators and mentors, to bring them
together and have them see they are unified. I think The Wonder of Boys builds the
web. It shows what people are doing and how this can all be put together. Even if
you don't have kids of your own, you're actually part of raising kids. If we all work
together, in new ways that fit our society today, we will end up developing boys who
are wonderful. That's where the title The Wonder of Boys, comes from. I feel very
positive about what people are already doing. In all the communities I work in, I see
people working themselves to the bone to do their best.

Ultimately, if you raise good men, you raise a good society. If you don't raise men up
to be good, healthy men, society destroys itself. The grand vision is that we're going
to be raising boys into men who are spiritually alive and emotionally vital, who feel
that they belong in the spiritual and the social realm. With the help of the women
around them, they will lead our society into the new millennium.

Michael Gurian is a social philosopher, family therapist, educator, and