Cultivating Kindness Our Culture Sends Boys Mixed Messages About Appropriate Behavior
In a current television commercial, model Cindy Crawford and two sexy sidekicks gawk at newborns in a hospital nursery.
“I love you,” Crawford mouths seductively to an infant boy. He winks, smiles and smacks his lips, like a testosterone-laden frat boy on ladies night.
It’s harmless fun. Or is it? What if the tables were turned and three hunky guys were flirting with an infant girl? The imagined scene is almost perverse. So, why is the baby boy any different?
Double standards, says Spokane clinical psychologist Lawrence Weathers. American boys are bombarded with conflicting messages: Be gentle, but aggressive. Assert yourself, but don’t get angry. As boys grow, the conflicts escalate: Be tough at work, tender with your children. Control your emotions, share your feelings with your spouse.
The messages are so subtle, so pervasive, Weathers says, it’s nearly impossible to offset them. “We can’t prescribe a step-by-step solution, say, ‘Here parents, try this’ because it’s not perpetrated by an individual. It’s an entire culture.”
Ed and Carolyn Holmes, parents of three grown sons, are all too familiar with the messages. To challenge the cultural norm, they stretched their sons’ self-concepts and world-view through community service and overseas missions.
Meals On Wheels, handing out McDonald’s gift certificates to panhandlers and adopting seniors in a nursing home mingled with family vacations in foreign countries to build houses, paint orphanages and live in what many would label substandard conditions.
The payoff: three young men, ages 22 to 26, who consistently see beyond themselves, show compassion to others and don’t buy into the trappings of American culture. All three are in the helping professions.
“We weren’t perfect parents,” says Carolyn Holmes. “More than anything else, we had a desire to give them the best we knew and we wanted it to be authentic.”
Cultural anthropologist Jennifer James took double messages to task in a recent column. American boys, she wrote, are “punished severely for slips in the balancing of tough and sensitive. Yet television and film offer heroes who resolve slights with mayhem, who link pride to domination. Schools encourage combat sports with cheering sections yelling ‘kill’ while demanding restrictions on sexual harassment and offering sensitivity training.”
The punishment is real and lasting. One 37-year-old Spokane father, who asked for anonymity, recalls his experience growing up outside perceived male boundaries. “I’m sports-impaired,” he confesses, his strengths falling along the more “feminine” line of music. Boys with athletic ability eased effortlessly into the coveted inner circle, he says. He was left on the outside, the target of name-calling and ridicule.
He can laugh now, but traces of anxiety linger. Especially when he thinks of his young son. “I watch other fathers with their sons and I wonder, ‘Do they know every rule?’ I think most men learn about sports from their fathers. If I don’t have the knowledge, will I fail my son?”
Jane Rinehart, a sociology professor at Gonzaga University, says research shows boys are pushed most often into stereotyped roles by their fathers. In America, she says, qualities of toughness, leadership, rationality and control of emotions are not only considered masculine, but better.
“Fathers are more likely to show discomfort when their children step outside the grid,” she says. For some reason, it is more socially acceptable for girls to drift over the line. Tomboys are commonplace, says Rinehart, yet “males who aren’t moving in a masculine direction are ostracized.”
What children need, says Rinehart, are more fathers who say “it’s all right” to follow your inclinations instead of “it’s really important for you to play out an acceptable role.”
Venica Tschoepe of Deer Park, mother to 19-month-old Brayten and 6-year-old Tanae, tries to follow her children’s lead. Yet, she’s startled by the stereotypes reinforced by others.
If Brayten is running amok, people smile and say “He’s all boy.” But, if her daughter acts up, people tell her to “settle down, act like a lady.”
“It’s unfair,” says Tschoepe. One child is pushed to perfection. The other to aggression.
Children need alternatives, says Rinehart. They need to hear counter-messages consistently and clearly.
“The messages are powerful,” she adds. “But we don’t need to surrender to them.”
MEMO: Susan Blakely is a freelance writer living in Spokane.