Real Boys, Rescuing our Sons From the Myths of Boyhood.

An Interview with "Real Boys" author, William Pollack, Ph.D.

by Bill Bruzy

We have a crisis in our country, a crisis of boys and young men caught in depression, violence and drug use. The headlines only speak to the extremes of this crisis, but it more quietly penetrates all our neighborhoods, schools and homes.

Speaking to this crisis is William Pollack Ph.D. of Harvard University. He is the author of "Real Boys" and co-director of the Center for Men at McLean Hospital/Harvard Medical School. He is also an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School, and a Fellow of the Society for the Psychological Study of Men and Masculinity of the American Psychological Association.

As the result of his decades of work Dr. Pollack knowledgeably challenges our conventional assumptions about men and boys, and offers much needed and practical advice about how to help raise boys to be happier, more successful men.

His work has struck a chord in our national consciousness and he has been featured on 20/20, Oprah, The Today Show, 48 Hours and in Time, Newsweek and The New York Times. His is one of the most influential books of the year.

Bill Bruzy I'm glad to see some substantive work about men's psychology getting national attention. But on a personal note, what brought this interest into focus for you?

William Pollack I think all of us have to be honest that at the deepest level we study men and boys because we want to understand ourselves.

But academically, in the seventies, I was starting to do research. We knew all about defective, hurtful, abusive and abandoning families, al la Freud. We knew a lot about pathology but we knew nothing about health.

So we decided to do some fairly sophisticated longitudinal studies of so-called normal, or normative, families. I was a co-principle investigator on "The Boston University Pregnancy and Parenthood Project." We recruited a hundred normal families and we were going to study the child from the second trimester of pregnancy, the mother and the father, the siblings, with observations, paper and pencil scores, intensive interviews, and do that over a five year period.

When we started out two questions emerged. One was how much do we study the fathers from the beginning. Some people said fathers are important but they don't do much in the beginning. But I said I wasn't so sure they don't do much, but second of all, if they don't, let's find out.

So we did in fact find out that fathers did a lot from the beginning. Father's personality styles and personality approach has an effect on his sons and his children's mental health, five years later!

But what was most striking was in these normative, traditional, families, most of the mothers and fathers, about 70%, said they thought their own parents had loved them and done the best they could by them.

Then when we asked mother's if they'd like to be like their own mother about 60-70% said yes. When we asked the fathers if they'd like to be like their own father, to a man (remember 60-70% of these said their fathers loved them) to a man, each one said no.

BB That's shocking.

WP I was absolutely struck. That got me going. Eventually I came to recognize that we needed to study boys, not retrospectively by talking with adult men, but prospectively actually talking to boys themselves. So I started the "Listening to Boys Project" at Harvard and that's where "Real Boys" came from.

BB You say that in society we have something like a code, you call it the "Boy Code." What is it, this code that boys have to abide?

WP The Boy Code is a kind of description of the way we inculcate, socialize and bring up boys in America. What it really means is there is one way to become, and to be, a real boy. Boys are taught they have to be stoic, have a stiff upper lip, and particularly that they have to cut Mom's apron strings and be little men, stand on their own two feet.

All their vulnerable, empathic, caring emotions, which by the way they show biologically at birth and continue to do so until we push it out of them, get repressed and pushed down. Instead, this code of stoicism and invulnerability takes its place, it's done by creating a kind-of false façade, a psychological mask.

BB You say in the book that boys turn out to be more emotionally expressive than girls very early in their development. So the quashing of this expressiveness isn't a natural developmental unfolding? This is something we proactively do to boys to get rid of this kind of expressiveness?

WP What happens, especially entering school age, when boys find they can't stand on their own two feet or be stoic, they get teased or shamed. At that early developmental stage it's not really possible for boys to do what we expect of them.

They then become shame hardened, toughened. The mask starts to get a little stronger, and the repression a little stronger. Then the only feeling a boy is allowed to express, and the only way he's allowed to express it, is anger through action.

We wonder why boys are so overactive, so angry all the time. It's not biology alone. There is some biology in it, but primarily it's because we've made them that way. The Boy Code itself is a societally induced phenomenon that's mediated by parents, teachers and caretakers. It just comes naturally to us because this is what was done to us.

BB So as boys we internalize this set of standards but we're not originally or necessarily wired for it. You say it even effects our neurological development.

WP Absolutely. In fact we have all this talk about testosterone, that boys have to be violent and aggressive. There is no research to show that biologically boys are more violent or aggressive than girls. There is research to show that testosterone and serotonin make boys more action oriented, rough and tumble, wide ranging in play, and some dominance hierarchy appears, but absolutely nothing to do with violence. Violence is something that society creates in boys. Partially it does that by misinterpreting their activity level as an aggression level.

We now have studies that show, with sophisticated technology like PET scans and MRI's, that if you hold, and hug, and coo, and kiss your little boy, it effects, not only his personality, which we've always argued, but it actually effects the structuring of his brain and his neurotransmitters.

BB You say we push boys to separate prematurely. What is healthy separation. What would it look like?

WP We have learned that girls need to be bonded. We've argued in fact that they learn to be healthy adult women through bonding. But there is one problem when we look at boys and girls. The lions share of early child-care is still done by women. Of course part of this idea of bonding is that they, girls, are identifying with their mothers.

Part of our theory, for years, has been that boys need to separate, particularly because they're brought up by mothers. The only way they can become healthy men is to have a masculine identity. The only way to do that is to separate from Mom emotionally and take on Dad.

There are two problems with that. First of all it's the only place in psychodynamic theory where we confuse what's inside with what's outside. It's not how you look and what your genitals are like that give you a gender identity.

For example, from the years 1940 to 1945 we had a series of single parent families in America. There were mothers whose young husbands went off to war leaving little baby boys at home. These baby boys were brought up, to a large extent, as very healthy masculine men without their daddies being home.

Well how was that possible? It was possible because mothers have the capacity thorough their love and caring to bring up a healthy masculine male, if they have a positive view of masculinity and they convey that view consciously and unconsciously.

The reason that mothers have gotten such a bad rap, or single mothers have gotten a bad rap, isn't that mothers can't make a boy into a healthy man. It's more about what a mother's attitude towards men is. In other words, if a mother is single by choice and cares about boys and men and has good male friends she can hug and love her boy and be close to him, he will turn out to be a healthy, masculine male.

If she hates men because she's been abused and hurt, then she's going to give a very different kind of message. It doesn't matter how many big brothers we bring into the picture. That boy is going to get a very negative and confused view of his masculinity. So it's not just the outer part of it.

That's one piece. The second piece is that it's never been shown that boys don't need as much love or as much bonding as girls do. Although there are biological differences, boys need that kind of love and caring. When it's taken away from them it's actually a trauma.

To get a sense of masculine self you have to have a sense of self. You threaten that sense of self by cutting off the loving connecting ties to maternal caretakers. That, in no way, should put down or denigrate that there should be paternal caretakers as well.

In fact Robert Bly and I had a very interesting debate at APA (The American Psychological Associations annual conference). I invited him and told him my paper was going to be "My Two Robert Blys."

I wanted to know if Robert Bly is the poet Robert Bly who won the Peace Prize; the Robert Bly who gave up his prize in poetry to protest the war in Viet Nam. Or is he the Robert Bly who believes in "Iron John?" Is he the one who believes that boys have to be taken away from their mothers and put in huts and be with the fathers all the time? Which Robert Bly do we have?

He said he believed "Iron John" is a very important story but didn't believe that just going out into the woods and beating drums will solve people's problems.

That can, he said, be part of men's experience but that alone is not what makes for change. It's internal change that makes for change. He'd studied Freud and Jung at Harvard and he knows what this is about. But he asked me, if a boy doesn't have to separate from mother to be a man how can it happen?

I said, get father's involved, or male figures, from the beginning, as nurturant caretakers, and let the boy move back and forth naturally throughout his developmental life cycle between mother and father as he needs more or less of one or the other.

There's no doubt that at age thirteen he might need more of father more of the time. Some of the time though he may need to go to mother and cry on her shoulder. And when that happens father has to support that in a loving way and not tease him and make him feel like a baby or a girl.

And be aware that when little boys engage in action play, or action empathy with their fathers, they do what my colleague at Harvard calls kamikaze play where fathers jazz them up before bedtime and drive the mothers crazy. It turns out the research shows that if you do that, and then you calm the boy down and hold him, hug him, love him, not only are you being positive towards him but you are teaching him the limits of aggression. You're teaching him empathy towards your feelings. You're teaching him how to control his actions and not to have temper tantrums. He will certainly never be a boy who will pick up an AK 47 assault rifle.

So I say to mothers, they have to value the virtues of fathers more rough and tumble play. And I say to fathers, you have to value the nurture of the mother, the caring, the crying when that happens. And in fact maybe the two of you have to learn each others ways, and start to use those ways. You'll never use them completely, in the same amount, but at least you will learn something about them and then maybe in the 21st century we'll all come from one planet, and that planet will be earth.

BB Yes, well you know Robert has always represented to men one side of the men's movement. But there is the psychological work.

WP Robert said he's not a psychologist. He's a story-teller. He said anyone who thinks they should get their psychology from him should go see a psychologist. (laughter)

BB You mentioned the "Timed Silence Syndrome." I think it's something most men can relate to, like when someone confronts us about an emotional issue and we feel like we were just dropped into a vat of liquid nitrogen and frozen solid.

WP Well Johnny comes home and he's got a black eye and a gash across his head and he skulks across the side of the room making a beeline for his door. Before mom can say "Johnny" the door slams shut. We know what happens if mom goes after him. He goes under the bed.

Moms wonder what can they do? A lot of moms say he's just like Johnny senior, his father, he can't talk about his feelings. That's the way men are.

My argument is that that's not quite the way men are. Because of the way we've brought them up, with the Boy Code, there is a lot of shame about vulnerable feelings and hurt. So boys need some timed space to deal with that shame.

This is not just John Gray's cave. It's not just dropping down a hole and staying there. This is a short period of time in which they pull themselves together. Then they will come out from their room, or the their shame free place, and there will be a moment when they ask mom or dad for help, for a response.

They won't say, let's have a heart-to-heart mutual interpersonal talk mom, like they say at the Wellsley Center. They'll say something like "is dinner ready?"

A good example of how to work with this is, one mother I talked with said she took her son for a ride at that point. Instead of sitting down to dinner she was going to buy him ice cream. He slowly opened up in that shame free environment of the car. It was private and he didn't have to look straight at her. No one could see.

She comforted him, and talked about what he could do. How he could respond to the teasing problem at school that was hurting him. He felt it was a reasonable plan and then in a typical boy-like way once they got to the ice cream store he pulled himself back together. You never would have known he would have been crying, and he got ice cream.

The mother said she knew she didn't always have to get him ice cream or get in the car. It could be playing basketball, checkers, but she found a way to bond with him, a way to talk with him she hadn't known before and they had a different kind of relationship. She said now "he feels closer to me and I feel closer to him."

BB The crisis with boys, and with men, is a crisis that manifests itself in depression, suicide, and violence. It seems like we didn't pay much attention, until recently.

WP Boys pain has remained invisible until the last two or three years when we've seen these tragedies and we've seen research that says adolescent boys are four times more likely to kill themselves than girls are.

Although boys engage in violence and they are three times more likely to be the perpetrator of violent crime they are three to four times more likely to be the victim of violent crime. But boys show their depression and sadness in a way that's different from girls.

We've been taught that depression is weepyness, asking for help, maybe some cutting (self-mutilation), maybe crying out with pain.

BB So these are criteria appropriate to women but not boys?

WP Right, in fact we have a female-based diagnostic criteria. Not because women have fought for it, but because that's how it's developed. So we under diagnose depression in boys and we under diagnose it in men.

So with boys the signs they show for depression are increased withdrawal. Now teenagers are always going to withdraw from parents but this is complete withdrawal, into their room, away from their friends, they become isolated.

They show more acts of bravado and impulsive behavior. They drive fast when they didn't do so before. They jump off a very high cliff diving, something they weren't doing before, as though life weren't worth living. Sometimes they'll talk about how life doesn't have much meaning.

They may also show signs they are being hurt, by being teased, but are holding it in. They may act bizarre or do odd things like the so-called trench coat mafia for example.

Often what we do is say well, boys will be boys. This is just the way boys are. Or we say they're bad and we punish them when in fact they're sad, depressed, potentially suicidal and on their way to hurting themselves or someone else.

BB So given all the work you've done, in your estimation what are the main things, the most important things, we need to know about boys?

WP There are two things. From childhood on, you can't love a boy too much. You can't give too much affection, mother or father. It won't turn him into a wimp or a sissy. It will turn him into a strong healthy man. Boys need love as much as girls do.

The second thing is, boys pain is palpable. We have a national crisis of boyhood in America but boy's pain has been invisible to us and we need an empathic lens through which to see it. Once we see it we must reach out and help boys before it's too late. If this crisis continues at this rate we will lose touch with a whole generation of boys and young men.

Bill Bruzy is a writer and owner/director of the Austin Men's Center and can be reached at (512) 477-9595 or via NewTexas@onr.com.