A new book on raising boys to be happy, confident adults urges parents to change their expectations for the sake of their sons, writes Louise Holden
Girls are the new boys, according to author Jenni Murray, or at least that's how she interprets current commentaries on the difficulty of raising male children. In her new book That's My Boy - a modern parent's guide to raising a happy and confident son, Murray muses on our relentless criticism of little boys and men and wonders if we may be inviting difficult behaviour by expecting it.
Murray, a journalist and broadcaster, is part of what appears to be the ultimate progressive family model. Her husband, David, stayed at home to raise their two sons while she focused on her career. She is not putting herself forward as an ideal - she regrets lost hours with her sons and wishes that she had taken on fewer work responsibilities when her sons were small.
In the course of her journalistic research, however, and through her own family's experience, she has collected a useful toolkit of pointers for parents of boys. Murray's treatise is informed by two principles. The first is an attempt to challenge the prevailing notion of boys as trouble with a capital T.
"This book was born out of anger at the demonisation of boys that's become common currency in the past decade or so," Murray explains. She cites the parenting columnist Alison Pearson, who wrote in 1999 that "girls are hot, girls are desirable, girls are the future". Pearson told how, in antenatal classes and maternity wards across the country, the days of parents taking pride in a son and heir were over, and claimed to detect an almost "panicky craving for girls."
It's an odd parent who doesn't feel pride in the birth of a child of either gender - Pearson's assertion is a bit dramatic - but boys have been getting it in the neck recently. Little girls are purportedly better behaved, eager to please, higher academic achievers and more loyal to their parents as adults.
Murray believes that this kind of talk bedevils parent-son relations and causes parents to treat their sons differently, indulging destructive behaviour and assuming that they are pathologically incapable of learning certain skills. This leads Murray to the second premise of her book - that a parent who fails to pass on basic skills such as domestic responsibility and physical restraint, is "raising a man who will be a rod for some poor woman's back."
This book is a sometimes confusing blend of advocacy and condemnation - in the process of defending the basic character of boys, she metes out a fair measure of condemnation to their fathers, whom she holds responsible for many of the traits that give male children a bad name. She claims, for example, that boys avoid pursuits like reading because they never see their fathers with a book in hand and so write it off as a feminine pursuit. She judges that a father who never lifts an iron or a vacuum cleaner is damning his son's future wife to a life of drudgery.
"Boys will be boys" is the adage most likely to send Murray into apoplexy. She feels that children's natural work-shyness, slovenliness and aggression is stamped out in girls and indulged in boys. We don't like the fact that our sons mess up their rooms or throw each other down the stairs, but if boys will be boys then what's the point in trying to change them?
Murray argues that if we don't get over this mental block we are storing up serious problems for the next generation. The seeds of relationship breakdowns, she contends, are sown in childhood. Boys who are raised without the basic skills of running a home or some idea of what it means to be a parent will very likely end up in dysfunctional settings as adults. "If we don't manage to instil this in our sons, we will simply create another generation where relationships are stretched to breaking point on the rack of mismatched expectations."
Happy and confident sons need more than instructions on how to use the washing machine. Murray longs for an education system that fosters broader responsibility and that gives young men a realistic picture of their place in the world. Sex education in schools, for example, is far too narrow for Murray and labours biology and censure without any context.
Her call for the introduction of gender studies to the post-primary curriculum is worth consideration, even if it is impractical in the Republic of Ireland where the secondary syllabus is overcrowded already.
She envisions a module that covers the history of relations between men and women, that explores the changing roles of men and women and changing societal attitudes to rape, homosexuality and abortion. Murray feels that if boys were given a realistic picture of what the law requires of them, they might make more responsible choices when it comes to sex, crime and violence.
"The fact that five minutes' unprotected knee trembling behind the bike shed might cost £400 per month in maintenance payments might act as a much more powerful contraceptive than a moral lecture which serves only to annoy and embarrass," Murray writes.
The messages that come to boys about sex are absurdly confusing. While schools and parents push abstention, lads mags and television celebrate sexual license. Some middle ground is required if boys are to gain any insight into their own rights and responsibilities.
There has been plenty of discussion recently about the fact that boys and young men are impossible to talk to. Funny really, everybody's talking over their heads about their inability to engage in meaningful conversation. Meanwhile, they're out hotwiring cars.
Murray may have been blessed with the last two articulate boys in England, but she reckons that any parent can keep the lines of communication open with a bit of effort. She recommends the car as a good forum for the kind of conversation that boys like - no cringy eye contact, plenty scope for diversion and engine noise to soak up awkward silences.
Boys will come under pressure to be boys at school, on the street, in work and at play, so it's important that they feel home is a place to be themselves. Murray's sound, if not revolutionary advice is to keep an open mind where male behaviour is concerned and not impose the kind of expectations that make boys afraid of displaying weakness or emotion. Let them cry, fail and feel, she says, and don't consider any conversation topic unmanly.
Parents are rightly terrified of facing with their children issues that they can barely countenance with each other. Murray advocates plenty of talk - the discursive, non-confrontational kind that gives parents a chance to measure their sons' attitudes and gives sons the language and context to make decisions and prompt further discussions with their friends. Pornography, date rape, street violence - all of these topics belong in family conversations as long as they continue to play a role in our lives, Murray contends.
That's My Boy is by no means a handbook for raising boys, if such a thing were possible. It largely ignores the subjects of homosexuality, mental health or substance use and while a certain amount of current research is mined, the author's theories are mostly based on anecdote and experience. Murray is keen to remind readers that boys are as different from each other as they are from girls and cannot be analysed as a group. In writing this book she has, to a degree, undermined her own thesis.
