Man Inside Drives Boys To The Edge

Sometimes I feel like I am raising a large dog in a small house.

Imagine a St. Bernard in a rowhouse no wider than a broom handle and you have a workable mental picture of what it is like to share living space with an adolescent boy in the summer of his discontent.

He is too old for day camp and too young for a paying job. He is so restless that unspent energy shimmers off his skin like heat off the pavement. He glows like a fuel rod. His hands are always busy and his mouth never stops.

He bumps into stuff. He breaks things. He’s into everything. He’s always starting something. He doesn’t know when to quit. He doesn’t know when to shut up.

And he has a bunch of friends just like him.

They seem to be rushing - heedlessly, clumsily - toward anything physical and anything risky. The mothers of these boys and I grab at their shirt collars as they fly past us, but we catch only a handful of their wake.

I have been confounded this summer by what it takes to direct the energies of my son and his friends.

The only answer is activity. Huge amounts of activity. Long hours. Great open spaces. Hot sun. And healthy portions of male companionship. Each other. Older brothers. His dad. His dad’s friends.

That is the remedy offered by counselor and author Michael Gurian, author of “The Wonder of Boys.”

He believes that boys are hard-wired and testosterone-fueled to be aggressive, competitive, performance-oriented and problem-solvers and risk-takers, and he believes that the adults around them must channel these instincts into something constructive - both short-term (like team sports) and long-term (like a worthy life).

But he also says these boys no longer trust women - which would explain why I am held in such remarkably low regard - so they require the companionship of men for this passage into adulthood.

“Males are wired to take up space and to be aggressive,” Gurian says in an interview. “The community has to wake up and realize that when a boy hits 10, his caregivers better have a program of adult training that will last 10 years or he is in trouble.”

It is while I am chauffeuring my son and his friends through the loop of activity we have arranged for them that I worry most. Not for my carload of bad-smelling boisterousness, but for the boys we see on our way: friends and classmates who live outside the cocoon of the middle class. Boys who are killing time this summer on the street corners of poverty.

These boys are also too old for day camp and too young for jobs. But these boys do not have swim team or baseball or sports camp or art lessons or a list of lawn-mowing clients. Many of these boys do not have fathers who can be counted on to spend the weekend fishing and crabbing or hitting baseballs or golf balls or painting models or seeing blockbuster movies with them and with their friends.

It is these boys, who have the same hormonal jet fuel coursing through them, the same instinct for recklessness, who vibrate with the same energy, about whom I worry most. Who is keeping them on a healthy path?

“Our ancestral cultures had a years-long program of training and initiation of males into adulthood,” says Gurian. “They challenged boys with work and hunting.

“The 14-year-old boy on the street corner isn’t getting that. Pretty soon you will see him smoking or drinking. Then he might decide he doesn’t have the money he needs and he might find somebody to teach him how to get it.

“He isn’t defective or inherently mean. He is just wired to need a lot more training than he is getting.”

For these boys, midnight basketball is not the only answer; though Gurian argues that in our culture, the government will always have a role in social issues like this.

“Elder males are going to have to get back involved,” he says. “And women are going to have to let them.”

Gurian makes the case that fathers are often treated as superfluous by mothers in and out of the welfare system, and that men are often viewed suspiciously by women: at best, insensitive; at worst, predatory.

Just at the age when our little boys outgrow us, we refuse to release them into the company of men. If we leave them to their peers - equally impulsive and uninformed - the risks are compounded.

“Masculinity has to be respected and loved again, because we have destroyed its reputation,” Gurian says. “And other males in the kinship system, in the community, have to step in and be more responsible in raising of sons of single mothers.”

And, as our sons fly out the front door in another burst of going and doing, mothers must realize that they need more attention, more direction, than they will ever let us give them again.