Real Boys

by William Pollack

  Robert talks about how bedtime chats helped his son, Henry, avoid violent behavior. “My son is a ‘softy,’ ” he says, intentionally using a term that we have come to see as derogatory for boys. “And I like it that way.”

  “Henry has always been a sensitive kid,” Robert says. “When an apartment building near here burned down, he put some of the clothes he’d outgrown into a bag and asked us to mail them to the families who lost their things. He’s like a little father to our one-year-old, always telling him stories and cuddling with him in the rocking chair. I always wanted my son to grow up knowing that being male doesn’t mean not having a heart.”

  About a year ago, however, Henry started to change. “It was like a hard shell was building up around him. You could still see the Henry we know inside there, but there was a wall there,” his mother, Andrea, explains. “It took us a while to get it out of him. It turned out there was this older kid in the neighborhood who went after him all the time. We had no idea. We thought he was having fun with a bunch of kids playing outside in the afternoons, but instead he was the butt of a lot of cruel teasing, and sometimes some physical stuff, pushing and shoving, that kind of thing.” The bully was clever enough never to use enough physical force to cause a cut or a noticeable bruise.

  “When Henry started to act differently, I got angry at first,” Robert recalls. “My first reaction was ‘What’s wrong with you? Why are you acting so nasty? I want my little boy back!’ But getting irritated with him only made him close up more. One time I overheard him calling his little brother a ‘stupid crybaby’ in a mean voice—which was totally unlike him—and I lost it.”

  Robert and Andrea talked about the problem, and tried to find books to read that would help them. “Andrea encouraged me to stop blaming Henry,” says Robert, “and to assume that something was happening to him to make him act this way, something that was not his fault. She knew the world isn’t always kind to gentle boys.”

  Eventually, the parents developed a new ritual with Henry. “As often as we could, we’d put the one-year-old to sleep first,” says Robert. “Then we’d both go into Henry’s room to tuck him in. Before lights out, we’d each tell one good thing about our day and one hard thing about our day. I purposely tried to show him even a grown-up man has feelings. I talked about real things that are hard in my life, like dealing with my parents’ aging, and trying to figure out why my secretary seems so unhappy with me all the time.

  “One night, Henry started talking about this neighborhood kid as his example of a hard thing for the day. Once he felt safe talking about it, it became an open topic. Now we’re like a team dealing with it. We try out different options, like playing inside with just the kids he gets along with, or joining the Boy Scouts so he has less time to hang around at home after school, or talking about why this bullying kid might be acting that way.”

  “It seems like we’re getting our ‘softy’ back,” his mother concludes. Meaning, of course, a good kind of soft—not weak, but empathic.

  Often, a boy will find a space to safely express his concerns outside the home. These may be of his own making—in a school group, a sports team, a community organization, a neighbor’s home. Or they may be within programs organized for the purpose. Voices of Love and Freedom is a program developed by Patrick Walker, a professor of education at the University of Massachusetts, and Robert Selman, a psychologist with appointments at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education and Medical School. The intent of the program is to help kids learn how to resolve conflicts without resorting to violence. The program uses storytelling to provoke the participants into discussing the characters and events and making connections to their own lives. The idea is to help kids see actions and situations from the perspectives of the different characters, and to understand that we can all feel vulnerable and threatened, and that we all have a shared humanity. As I said earlier, this kind of perspective-taking makes it more likely that a boy will feel empathy for others’ weaknesses and concerns, and less shame about his own. When a boy feels empathy for another, and diminished personal shame, it is unlikely he can so dehumanize that person as to want to commit violence against him.

  BULLY-PROOFING

  Another program, at the Cherry Creek School District in Englewood, Colorado, seeks to help boys deal with violence through what they call “bully-proofing.” The kids start by identifying what a bully is and how a bully behaves. Victims and potential victims learn what makes them attractive targets for bullies. Not surprisingly, a key attribute of the victim is a lack of self-esteem—rather than characteristics such as race, size, physical appearance, clothing, or eyeglasses. Students then acquire skills in defusing situations in which bullies approach them. Bullies get a sharp talking-to at their first transgression. If that doesn’t work, they face a variety of consequences.

  One of the most intriguing aspects of the program is that it finds ways to redirect all that bully energy into positive activities. “School officials heard that a fifth-grader was terrorizing kindergartners and first-graders,” said a Cherry Creek school psychologist. “A school counselor took the bully aside and told him that someone was picking on the younger kids and asked the bully for help. In short order, the bully became a guardian.” Perhaps he even stumbled upon a future profession—as a professional bodyguard! Teachers and administrators in Cherry Creek say the program has reduced the dominance of bullies, reduced the vulnerability of victims, helped teachers improve their conflict-resolution skills, and made parents feel better about the safety and well-being of their kids.

  You’ll notice, however, that the school does not claim to have solved the bully problem. In fact, research indicates that most teachers and school administrators do not know what to do about bullies. The problems that make a bully a bully are often well outside the authority or expertise of the school system to solve. Moving a bully from one class to another may not be an effective solution. And there is generally no way to remove a bully from school altogether.

  So, what can parents do for children who face a bully at school? First, they can make their child aware that they support him and understand what a difficult problem he is dealing with. They can help him understand the methods of a bully and work with the boy to develop strategies and tactics for counteracting his techniques. Tell him: Never get angry; admit your own imperfections; make a joke of his verbal attacks; and surround yourself with friends. In fact, a child with strong friendships is seldom at risk from bullying behavior.

  If the boy cannot solve the problem himself, some parents feel it necessary to intervene themselves. Child-violence experts SuEllen and Paula Fried describe a mother who—after gaining agreement from her son—decided to confront a bully who was beating up her son on the way home from school. One day she approached the bully and informed him—in a calm and level voice—that there are laws against assault and battery, and that if the problem continued, she would have to discuss the matter with his parents, and then the school, and, if necessary, law enforcement officials. The strategy worked and the beatings stopped.

  The parent should be sure that the school authorities know there is a bully in their midst. Bullies are skilled at hiding their activities from teachers and playground monitors. Finally—and this is a very delicate task, and one that many parents may not want to undertake—the parent can talk about the problem with the bully’s own parents. Like Linda, whose son Jonah was imitating his father’s bullying behavior, the parents may not know—or not yet have admitted—that their child is terrorizing kids at school.

  VIOLENCE IN THE MEDIA

  Most parents I talk with feel daunted in their efforts to keep violence out of their boys’ lives by the seemingly inexhaustible amount of violence that pervades the media, over which they have little or no control. Many homes now receive cable television, which offers dozens of channels of programming. You can’t channel-surf without stumbling onto a violent news story, a violent movie, a violent made-for-TV drama, a violent cartoon, or a viol
ent sports event. Television advertising, although rarely violent, does its share of reinforcing the traditional stereotypes, particularly of the young, cool male. Risk-taking behavior—sky surfing, bungee-jumping, fast driving—is everywhere in TV commercials. Young men in advertising are often depicted as loners or as members of cool all-male groups; rarely are they seen as sons in happy home settings with caring parents.

  Some parents feel a little better when their kids abandon the television to play video or computer games. After all, there are plenty of games that require real skill to play and involve an element of education—building and maintaining cities, word games, and math programs. But so many video and computer games involve little more than shooting an assortment of bad guys with the help of an array of monster weapons and massively armored vehicles and impossibly adroit aircraft. Many of the games celebrate their violence. In Doom, for example, the levels of play are designated as:

  I’m Too Young to Die! (easiest)

  Hey, Not Too Rough

  Hurt Me Plenty

  Ultra Violence

  Nightmare (hardest)

  When it comes time to quit the game, the computer sneers at the player, “You know, the next time you come in here I’m gonna toast you!”

  An intriguing aspect of the video/computer-game phenomenon, however, is the way boys play the games when together. I have seen groups of boys as young as five and as old as twelve gather around the screen to watch as one player does battle with the alien or monster or Nazi criminal of the day. They don’t talk much; they stare at the screen as if entranced, occasionally calling out “Yes!” when the boy player makes a good hit, or moaning when he is blown prematurely to smithereens. The odd contrast is that these boys—while they watch macho-man mayhem unfolding before them—often seem very connected to each other, supportive of the player, and nonjudgmental about his performance. In other words, they are behaving very differently than the big boys portrayed in the game.

  If a parent prevails on the boy to turn off the TV, shut down the computer, and read a good book, he may still gravitate toward stories that involve risk-taking, murder, mystery, and violence—from the Hardy Boys to Goosebumps to Jon Krakauer conquering Mount Everest. The question is not whether we live in a society awash with violent images. We do. The question is, what effect does exposure to all that violence have on boys? And, if we think it’s harmful, what can we do to manage and mitigate the effect?

  Some kids, of course, are more affected than others by what they see on TV, and it may disturb them in clearly defined ways. Eleven-year-old Ray, for example, had had trouble sleeping for about six months. Ray is an expressive boy, and readily shared what precipitated his problem. “My parents don’t let me watch much TV, and definitely not any violent TV shows,” he said. “One time when they were out, this baby-sitter let us watch whatever we wanted. Me and my brother watched this show where this robber came and tied up the whole family and then killed everybody except the little kid. I started getting these nightmares after that, and then I started not wanting to sleep at all. I keep thinking that a robber might come. I hear all these sounds and I get really scared.”

  Nothing has helped Ray sleep since then. His grandmother came for an extended visit and shared a room with him for a while, and that provided a temporary respite. But since then his sleeplessness has returned, and his parents are at their wit’s end. “We tell him over and over that things like that almost never happen, but he won’t believe us,” Ray’s mother says. “That scene is etched in his mind, and it just won’t go away. His pediatrician has recommended we see a psychologist for a few sessions.”

  There has been a great deal of research into this subject, and many of the findings are inconclusive or contradictory. A National Institute of Mental Health study found that children who see kindness on television tend to imitate it. Just through casual observation, it is obvious that boys, as they play, will assume the roles of characters they see on TV or in the movies. They become James Bond, or the Terminator, or Beavis, or Darth Vader, or Freddie Kruger. They may also use language and threats, often as part of the bullying vocabulary, that come from the violent media.

  Eight-year-old Evan, for example, is a third-grader at an urban elementary school. Students there often watch hours of television a day, battle one another in elaborate video games at home or at the local arcade, and sometimes accompany older siblings or their parents to films that require an adult for admittance. I asked him what kids call one another on the playground. “All kinds of things,” Evan told me. “I heard a kid calling somebody ‘condom’ today. That same kid called me ‘cocksucker’ once. Another kid got real mad yesterday and said he was going to put this kid in cement and drop him in the river.” Where did the idea about the cement come from? “Everybody heard on TV about this fourth-grader who got murdered that way,” Evan explained.

  And there are more chilling examples of violent crimes being committed by young men who, when caught, confessed that they were inspired by a specific television program or movie. The fourteen-year old North Carolina killer of three classmates claimed that he was influenced by The Basketball Diaries. In that movie, the star, Leonardo DiCaprio, opens fire on his classmates while in a drug-induced dream. In Kentucky, a group of six young men and women who murdered three people say they admired the action in Natural Born Killers. John Hinckley, the man who tried to assassinate President Reagan to prove his love for the actress Jodie Foster, said he was inspired by Martin Scorsese’s movie Taxi Driver. Even with such examples, it is not possible to make a general, direct link between exposure to media violence and inclination to personal violence. Exposure to media violence sometimes has the effect of satiating a natural appetite for violence. Or witnessing extreme violence may frighten and even sicken or repel a boy, and turn him away from it.

  We can, however, draw a few conclusions about the relationship of media violence to real-life violence. Boys who see a great deal of violence in the media tend to become desensitized to it. Violence seems to be a “normal” part of life. This may heighten the possibility that they will tolerate violence on the part of their friends or in themselves. Boys, in fact, may come to think that the world is actually a more violent place than it really is. A steady diet of murders, plane crashes, car wrecks, robberies, shootouts, hostage takings, emergency-room crises, football injuries, and alien abductions can lead a young male mind to imagine that the TV landscape accurately mirrors the real landscape. That may lead a boy, especially an angry boy, to expect violence, prepare for it, and react with violence more quickly than is warranted.

  But I do not believe that a boy who feels truly connected and loved and who has safe settings where he can express his emotions will be motivated to violence by exposure to violent acts in the media. He may imitate those acts in play, he may revere his action heroes, he may spend more hours in front of the television than a parent would wish, but it is unlikely he will cross over the line into rage and violence. Even so, parents continue to worry about the negative effects of media violence—desensitization, glorification of hurting others, and the sheer amount of time and energy wasted on watching violence that could be applied to far more positive and productive pursuits.

  There are a number of strategies that parents can employ to better deal with this chronic problem of violence in the media, particularly television.

  • Discuss the issue. Your kids should know why you think the viewing of media violence is a problem, and why you don’t want them to rack up three hours a day in front of the set, watching “real men” shoot big guns. Just getting angry or just shutting off the television does not help them understand the serious issue involved.

  • Restrict and monitor. Some parents limit the amount of time their kids can watch television each day or each week. Others limit the types of programs they are allowed to watch, by channel or by rating. At the very least, parents should monitor what the kids are looking at. Know what’s on, what it’s about, how long the kids have watched.<
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  • Watch together. Many parents don’t really know the content of the shows and movies their kids like to watch. They’ve “heard about” that movie or they saw two minutes of one episode of that show. You can’t make an informed decision about what you will allow your boys (and girls) to watch if you don’t know what it’s really about.

  • Talk about what you’ve seen. When you watch together, then you can talk together. Review the show together. Ask questions. Was it good? Was it realistic? Why did the characters act as they did? Would you ever act that way? What do you think will be the consequences of the violence we just saw?

  • Make better selections. When it’s mom and dad’s turn to pick the television show, video, movie, or book, choose something you think is good and does not glamorize violence. There are movies and books out there that have exciting action that don’t promote violent or excessive risk-taking behavior, and that show boys as connected and caring people. Iron Will is one of them. Home Alone 3 is not.

  I can hear some parents chuckling or shaking their heads in resignation as they read the above. Some parents have simply thrown up their hands and given up trying to wrestle with the TV dragon. I encourage you to keep thinking about the problem and talking about it with your kids. At the very least, it’s important that they know how strongly you feel. The potency of parental connection is a vital force in combating the negative images of violence in the media. Its power should not be underestimated.

  HARNESSING ANGER AND AGGRESSIVE ENERGY

  Another important kind of antiviolence intervention is what I call “harnessing.” By teaching boys how to harness their anger and aggressive energy and redirect them into healthy outlets, we can help them to avoid hurting others or themselves. Harnessing, in my opinion, can take at least two important forms. First, boys can be taught to release their anger and pent-up aggression through what’s traditionally known as catharsis. This simply involves giving your boy permission—in an appropriate private space—to vent his feelings openly and without inhibition. In your presence you can invite him to shout, scream, cry, or voice whatever he needs to—and as loudly and vigorously as he needs to—so that he can purge himself of the painful feelings that plague him. If noise is a concern, he can use a pillow to muffle the sound. If he feels the need to punch something, he can punch away at a pile of pillows and cushions. What’s most important, of course, is that he feel free to “let it all out,” to express his angst, anger, and aggression in your warm, loving presence. This kind of closely supervised catharsis is a normal healthy process that can help defuse much of the painful rage that may be inside your son.