Francis Fukuyama, The Great Disruption. Free Press, 1999.

Dr. Fukuyama is part of a Rand Corp study group on the implications for global governance of the Information and Biological Revolutions. The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order grows out of his participation in this study. (See our Links page for a link to the study web site.)

Dr. Fukuyama sees the advent of the Information Age as constituting the "Great Disruption," as significant for society as the transition to industry from agriculture/hunting. With the advent of the Information Age, he argues, the freedom and numbers of choices for individuals has increased dramatically. These new freedoms and the focus on individual choice has resulted in social disturbance -- the erosion of the established social order. The disruption is reflected in lowered fertility rates, increased crime and divorce rates, and the loss of a sense of a moral code in the industrialized societies across the globe.

With his explorations, the author attempts to answer the question that those of us who have lived for a good part of the twentieth century are asking ourselves and each other at the close of that century: namely, what the heck happened?

Although the topic is large and the reading is not easy, we believe this is an important book arising from an important study. "The Reconstruction of Social Order" would seem importantly related, at a fundamental level, to the parenting of our children. Hence the inclusion of a review of The Great Disruption on this page.

Highly recommended. Order it here! and help support this web site. (Note: see May 1999 issue of the Atlantic Monthly for an excellent review of this book.)

top of page

 

 

 

 

 

James Garbarino, PhD, Lost Boys, Free Press, 1999. Click to order.

Two weeks ago on this page we featured Dr. William Pollack's (Harvard) Real Boys. Now another psychologist's book , Lost Boys, attempts to address the questions which the recent adolescent shootings raise for many of us. Taken together, and with last week's featured book, The Great Disruption, added in, the books go a far way toward giving us some of the answers to our questions. When you click on the book cover or order text above, you'll be taken to the amazon.com page devoted to discussion of Garbarino's Lost Boys, where you'll find some excellent reviews of the book, including one by Dr. Garbarino himself (Cornell), who shares with us that he's been sent all over the world to study political violence (Ireland, Yugoslavia, Mozambique, et al.). For the past 25 years, he's devoted himself to study of youth violence here at home. In the course of this study he has interviewed boys in prisons and reform schools. Like Pollack, Garbarino believes that growing up male in the U.S. today is difficult indeed and looks for psychological, sociological, and spiritual elements in the etiology and prevention of youth violence. The author also offers his email address, at the end of his review of his book, for anyone who may wish to communicate with him.

Highly recommended. Click to read reviews at amazon.com and to order Lost Boys.

Marita Golden's Saving Our Sons, Doubleday, 1996. Subtitled,"Raising Black Children in a Turbulent World," Saving Our Sons is a record of one black mother and novelist's struggle to keep her son from the #1 leading cause of death among young black American males: being killed by another young black male.

"Maybe, I thought, if I write long and hard and strongly and bravely enough, I can save and protect my son and somehow bless the others. This moment, when intraracial violence and death undermine any possibility for progress and complicate easy definitions of THE PROBLEM and THE SOLUTION, is a new kind of Middle Passage. What will we look like, how will we sound, once we are spewed forth from the terrible hold of THIS ship?," Ms.Golden writes (p. 9). The author interviews those who have killed and the relatives of those who have been killed. But the most moving parts of her book are her stories about her own life with her son Michael. Beautifully written, haunting, thoughtful. This non-African-American mother loved it. Highly recommended. Click to order.

top of page

Raising Cain : Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys,
by Daniel J. Kindlon, Michael Thompson. April 1999,
Ballantine Books

A Harvard child development specialist and an eminent child psychologist combine their efforts to bring us another book on how we are failing our boys. The message in Cain, Lost Boys, Real Boys is basically the same: there's a "code" for how you have to be, to be accepted as "a real man" in our culture. It doesn't work. It's killing our kids. Is anybody listening? Raising Cain attempts to talk to us about what we can do--about what our boys need (encouragement to experience and claim all of their feelings, preeminently). Get it, if you care about Littleton--or about your sons, nephews, daughters, and nieces.

top of page

 

 

 

 

Pollack, William, Ph.D. Real Boys, New York, Henry Holt, 1998.Click here to order Real Boys.

Dr. William Pollack and others at Harvard Medical School for more than two decades have been conducting a research project called, "Listening to Boys' Voices." Real Boys is Dr. Pollack's report on that research, directed to the American public. And we'd all better be listening.

Dr. Pollack writes of the "Boy Code" that dictates boys' behavior, from the time they are born. It's a Code we all recognize, one we're fond of. It goes like this (quotation from pp. 23-24):

The Boy Code: Four Injunctions

The "sturdy oak." Men should be stoic, stable, and independent. A man never shows weakness. Accordingly, boys are not to share pain or grieve openly. Boys are considered to have broken this guideline, for instance, if they whimper, cry, or complain--or sometimes even if they simply ask for an explanation in a confusing or frightening situation. As one boy in the "Voices" study put it: "If somebody slugs you in the face, probably the best thing you could do is just smile and act like it didn't hurt. . . . "

"Give 'em hell." This is the stance of some of our sports coaches, of roles played by John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, and Bruce Lee, a stance based on a false self, of extreme daring, bravado, and attraction to violence. This injunction stems largely from the myth that "boys will be boys" . . . the misconception that somehow boys are biologically wired to act like macho, high-energy, even violent supermen. This . . . requirement . . . leads many boys to "dare" each other to engage in risky behaviors and that causes some parents to simply shrug their shoulders if their sons injure themselves or others.

The "big wheel." This is the imperative men and boys feel to achieve status, dominance, and power. Or, understood another way, the "big wheel" refers to the way in which boys and men are taught to avoid shame at all costs, to wear the mask of coolness, to act as though everything is going all right, as though everything is under control, even if it isn't. . . .

"No sissy stuff." Perhaps the most traumatizing and dangerous injunction thrust on boys and men is the literal gender straitjacket that prohibits boys from expressing feelings or urges seen (mistakenly) as "feminine"--dependence, warmth, empathy. According to the ideal of "no sissy stuff," such feelings and behaviors are taboo. Rather than being allowed to explore these emotional states and activities, boys are prematurely forced to shut them out, to become self-reliant. And when boys start to break under the strain, when nonetheless they display "feminine" feelings or behaviors, they are usually greeted not with empathy but with ridicule, with taunts and threats that shame them for their failure to act and feel in stereotypically "masculine" ways. And so boys become determined never to act that way again--they bury those feelings.

It needs to be emphasized that Dr. Pollack and his colleagues did not just "make up" the "Boy Code." The elements of the Code are there, often very explicitly, in the statements of the boys they've been listening to for twenty years.

Real Boys talks to us about what we need to do, as a society, to better prepare our boys for the manhood we all hope they will grow into. And the "us" he is talking to includes parents, teachers, coaches, and other mentors of boys. The first thing we have to do is to realize that:

we adults are of two minds about how men should be, and therefore, we give double messages to our boys, and this is a very serious matter.

In his chapter on adolescence, Pollack emphasizes a boy's need for connection with his family; he calls an adolescent's wish "to separate from us" a myth. We agree with Pollack when he writes:

However, Dr. Pollack doesn't give enough help to parents in learning how to respect and foster the need for independence, while still "being there" to meet the legitimate dependency needs. This is the main theme of the advice we try to give to parents on this page (see autonomy/independence in the Archives, and Statement of Beliefs by Karen Martin).

As Haim Ginott writes,

"Teenagers resent unsolicited attention and advice. They strive to appear grownup, independent, and self-sufficient. They need to feel capable of finding their way without parental direction. They are like a person needing a loan but wishing he were financially independent."(p. 9 ) "Autonomy, though feared, is valued above all. Anyone interfering with it is the enemy."(page 10) "Even if he does not acknowledge it, a teenager needs our help. Our help must be subtle and sophisticated. "(page 28)

With this single caveat, Real Boys is highly recommended. Click here to order Real Boys.

top of page 

 

 

 

 

Sereny, Gitta. Cries Unheard, Why Children Kill: The Story of Mary Bell, Metropolitan Books (Henry Holt & Co), New York, 1998. Hardcover.

I have to be honest: I just bought this book today (June 13) and have read only the first 75 pages. Yet its quiet tone, outstanding lucidity, and complete lack, thus far, of any attempt to "sell" a point of view or to sensationalize or play to the crowd, along with the author's serious and intelligent posing of the questions that that inspired this close study of the case of an English schoolchild of 11 who kills two toddlers in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, have won me to it immediately, and I can't wait to get back to it after I finish this posting to our site visitors. My cursory review of the reviews featured on the amazon.com page serve to confirm my first impressions. This is an outstanding contribution to the series of books we have been featuring at this site for the weeks since Littleton--this one focused on girls, for a change, instead of boys--and on children in Europe instead of in the United States. I recommend you click here and order it at once--you're in for an excellent, lucid, quiet and serious read that is deeply arousing and deeply satisfying. Highly recommended.

 

top of page 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Under Dead Man's Skin: Discovering the Meaning of Children's Violent Play, by Jane Katch, Beacon Press, January 2001.

This small book is a delight to read and constitutes a real contribution to helping us think about the fascination young children often show for violence in their play themes. In addition, it is, so far as I am concerned, a model for creating a humanitarian teaching environment in which children's spirits and minds are encouraged to explore the meanings in their own imaginings and to monitor the effects of their behaviors on others. I want my new little grandson to be taught by Jane Katch (or a teacher like her--are there any?). From the startling first sentence: "The five- and six-year-olds in my class have invented a new game called Suicide," right through to the end, you'll be spellbound by the personality of the teacher and the minds of the (very normal, typical) children she is teaching. Jane Katch shows how you set limits so kids don't get too scared, while at the same time allowing maximal opportunity for self- and group-exploration. She is gifted with a strong intelligence and observational capacity--she observes not only the children, but her own reactions and responses to their play and verbalizations. Trained by Bruno Bettelheim (where I also worked for a time as an undergraduate at the U of Chicago), Jane is ready to tackle the darker side of her own memories in order to help her to understand the children's play. Eminently worthwhile! Highly recommended. Get it at a 20% discount at amazon.com and benefit this site.
[P.S. Ms. Katch has volunteered to answer questions from readers -- forward any you may have to me for transmission to the author.]