Let Our Boys Be Boys

Heart pounding, crouched low to the floor, I waited. The darkness was complete, all the lights extinguished as I struggled to remain concealed from the mad gunman. I cocked my gun and crouched lower in one last desperate attempt to protect myself.

"Gotcha, Mom!" shrieked my eight year old son, pelting me with foam bullets. "Now you're it!" he taunted as he disappeared into the darkness. My ten year old quickly came to my aid, chasing his little brother down the dark hallway until their father stepped forward and ambushed them both from the hidden cover of the potted palm.

My children play with toy guns. They also run barefoot through the yard, climb trees, play with bugs, and have water balloon fights. My children are boys, and we allow, indeed encourage, them to be so.

It's an admittedly un-politically correct stance for a psychotherapist to take. In the age of the Columbine massacre, the Virginia Tech shootings, and the resulting culture of zero tolerance, allowing children to engage in violent fantasy play is viewed by many in the mental health field as improper at best and dangerous at worst. But in an attempt to assuage our fears, we're creating the very damage we're attempting to avoid.

The act of suppression has never been demonstrated to be an effective means of control. It has, however, been shown to contribute to a host of mental health issues and personality disorders. What confusing messages we give our boys! At the same time that we're admonishing them for playing too roughly, we're telling them to toughen up. We complain that they don't communicate their feelings, yet if those feelings aren't soft and gentle, we refuse to allow them to be heard.

In the wake of the rash of school shootings of the 1990's, mental health experts and armchair psychologists alike scrambled for answers. Why were our boys so devoid of impulse control? Why were they so angry? What's happening to our boys?

The simple answer is that our boys are simply becoming what we've created them to be. We've made them ashamed to be boys. We don't like dirt, or germs, or messes. We recoil at the idea of competitive games or aggressive fantasy play. We shame them for being rowdy or squirmy. We expect them to sit quietly and speak softly. We refuse to allow them to be the way nature designed them to be.

Even our classrooms are designed in such a way as to enhance female patterns of learning, while stifling male patterns of learning. We emasculate our boys, and then we wonder why they have issues.

We erroneously equate assertiveness with violence, competition with brutality. We subconsciously frown upon traits that are innately masculine. By doing so, we rob our boys of any opportunity for honest self-expression. We dissuade them from healthy outlets for energy, creativity, and discovery. And then we wonder why they become non-communicative.

Certainly we must set perimeters around appropriate and inappropriate behaviors. We must teach our boys to be kind and compassionate, to follow rules and respect authority. But we must do so in a way that acknowledges and celebrates their masculinity.

We need to acknowledge that boys and girls learn differently, act differently, and react differently, and we need to celebrate those differences instead of pretending they don't exist. Only by doing this can we save our little boys.