a harsh lesson.
Whenever you are treated badly by youngsters – jostled in the street by a skateboarder, treated rudely by a young salesperson, or have your house burgled – you are dealing with youngsters who have not been helped to fit in and be useful.
Teenagers are naturally prone to be somewhat self-absorbed, to fit their morality to their own self-interest, and to be thoughtless of others. Our job as parents is to engage them in vigorous discussions about their obligations to others, fairness, and plain right and wrong. We must reinforce some basics – ‘Be responsible. Think things through. Consider others. Think of consequences’. Just loving your kids isn’t enough, some toughness is necessary. Mothers begin this, fathers reinforce it, and elders add their weight if it still hasn’t sunk in.
One good strategy is to have boys involved in service to others – the elderly, disabled people, or young children whom they help or teach. They learn the satisfaction of service, and they grow in self-worth at the same time.
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IN A NUTSHELL
In the years between birth and six, boys need lots of affection so they can ‘learn to love’. Talking and teaching one-to-one helps them connect to the world. The mother is usually the best person to provide this, although a father can take this part.
At about the age of six, boys show a strong interest in maleness, and the father becomes the primary parent. His interest and time become critical. The mother’s part remains important, however: she shouldn’t ‘back off’ from her son just because he is older.
From about fourteen years of age, boys need mentors – other adults who care about them personally and who help them move gradually into the larger world. Old societies provided initiation to mark this stage, and mentors were much more available.
Single mothers can raise boys well, but must search carefully for good, safe, male role models and must devote some time to self-care (since they are doing the work of two).
Chapter 3
Janine is pregnant – seven weeks pregnant – and very excited. She doesn’t know it yet, but her baby is going to be a boy. We say ‘going to be’ because a foetus doesn’t start that way.1 It may surprise you to know that all young creatures start life being female. Boys are mutated girls! The Y chromosome that makes a baby into a boy is an ‘add-on’ chromosome which starts to act in the womb – to give a boy the extra bits he needs to be a boy and to stop other bits growing. A male is a female with optional extras. That’s why everyone has nipples, though not everyone needs them.
Boys and Hormones
In Janine’s baby’s tiny body, at around the eighth week of pregnancy, the Y chromosomes stir in the cells and testosterone starts being made. As a result of this new chemical presence, the baby starts to become more of a boy, growing testicles and a penis and making other more subtle changes in his brain and body. Once the testicles are formed (by the fifteenth week), they start to make testosterone too, so he becomes progressively more and more masculine.
If Janine is very stressed, her body may suppress the testosterone in baby Jamie’s body and he may not fully develop his penis and testicles, so he will be incompletely developed at birth. He will catch up, however, in the first year.
Right after birth, young Jamie will have as much testosterone in his bloodstream as a twelve-year-old boy! He has needed all this testosterone to stimulate his body to develop male qualities in time to be born. This ‘testosterone hangover’ will result in him having little erections from time to time as a newborn.
By three months of age, the testosterone level will drop off to about a fifth of the birth level, and throughout toddlerhood the level will stay pretty low. Boy and girl toddlers (I’m sure you’d agree) behave pretty much the same.
But the effects will now have set in motion a very different trajectory of brain development that will affect Jamie until his mid-twenties at least.2 The biggest change will be a slowing of his brain growth, relative to his sisters at the same age. It will make him more vulnerable in certain ways that as parents we need to know about.
In 2017, a researcher called Alan Schore released a wide-ranging review of what we know about boys’ neurological and emotional development.3 Schore is held in awe by most of the child development world. He literally wrote the book on how we develop emotional wellbeing and how the brain and environment interact on a detailed, neurological level to create good mental health. His two massive tomes on the subject were the inspiration behind popular works such as Sue Gerhardt’s ground-breaking Why Love Matters.4 And his new message is that we need to worry about boys much more. The testosterone effects in the womb and the first year of life slow their brain development (especially in the right hemisphere) so much that they are far more vulnerable than girls to anything that goes wrong. It sets boys up for mental health and behaviour problems much later if we don’t maximise calm, responsive, and stress-free environments for them. He included the risk of endocrine disruptors5 such as BPA in our water and food supply in pregnancy, a real concern about the use of daycare in the under-ones and the risks when parents are suffering violence, stress, mental illness, addictions or financial insecurity.
Schore points out that boys are so far behind girls in their brain development that ‘the frontal cortex, caudate, and temporal lobes (the thoughtful and analytical parts of the brain) are faster growing in girls by as much as 20 months’. And ‘at ages seven to 12 boys lag behind girls by as much as two years in social sensitivity’.6 That’s a heck of a delay, and means we really have to work on boys’ abilities to think through their actions, understand their feelings and those of others, and be soothed and calmed by loving affection when they are upset. And we have to not blame or shame them for not being on the same trajectory as the girls they grow up alongside. The idea of boys as rough, tough and unemotional is completely wrong. They are full of feelings, they care deeply, and they need our help to get along with others. It’s rather scary, but also hopeful – if we get this right, then the shut-down, messed-up men of today might one day be a thing of the past.
The Full-On Fours
Boys don’t just develop at a different rate to girls. They also have unique developmental stages, triggered by hormonal shifts, which are only just being understood. The full-on fours is the first of these.
At around this age, millions of parents around the world notice their boys becoming more energetic, boisterous, and hard to keep quiet. It’s not every boy, and some girls do this too, but it’s a very common and a rather challenging thing. For centuries the answer to this abundance of boy energy was a pretty terrible one. Parents would yell at boys or hit them to make them quieten down. In schools canings and other cruelties were visited on generations of youngsters (including some girls) who could just not bear to be stuck
