Further elaboration: Basics on Boys in Balance
Development, Opportunities and High-risk Behaviour
28-02-'08 L.Woltring (When quoting parts of this text please cite source with date of update and if possible, create a link to this text)
1. Pleasure or problem?
2. Policies and politics
3. Boys. A blind spot?
4. Nature, nurture and maturation. The epigenetic perspective.
5. Chromosomes and hormones: the male body-brain.
6. Behaviour under stress.
7. Maturation of the brain.
8. Risks and taking chances.
9. Emotions and getting grip on your own reactions
10. Regression or post-feminism
11. Young men today
12. Men in parenting and education: role models and being sensitive to the way boys learn
13. Media and the advertisement industry
14. Power struggle or balance?
15. Zone of proximal development
We live in fascinating times: exciting, sometimes terrible, but also full of new possibilities and insights. A lot of learning has to be done, a lot is being learned and there are numerous opportunities to learn.
1 Pleasure or problem?
Use it or lose it. This is not only true about the developing brain and all the connections we make (or not) while experiencing life and acting upon it, it also goes for the energy and the qualities of young men. A thirst for action, creativity and exploring boundaries are qualities often associated with boys, as well as taking the initiative, experimenting, searching for solutions, desiring and having a feeling for justice. Every boy is naturally different. Many boys are doing really well, the current generation of young people are learning from the mistakes of previous generations and they are often able to get on with each other and others in a remarkably wise, supple and pleasurable manner. Naturally, creating problems where they don’t exist is nonsense.
However, some boys only manage to achieve part of their potential and there is a group who are really doing badly. In education, politics and the media these boys tend to have a negative image: they are portrayed as restless, troublesome, inaccessible, lazy, rude, aggressive or unreliable. They are either lacking in ambition or overambitious. Although this only applies to some boys, even so … are they really so bad? Or can their behaviour also be regarded as a reaction to what adults have to offer them? The worlds of sport, media and advertising often seem to glorify misbehaviour. The major question is what are these boys channelling their energy into? What do they dream of? Which adults - both men and women - are offering them support to search for something actually worthwhile, where they can develop their talents and direct their energy towards? How they can take up their responsibilities for the world if they do not, and how they can connected with others instead of focussing on their troubled self.
2 Policy and politics
Youth policy and the law are often ambivalent: boys are given a considerable amount of leeway but are also carefully watched and on occasion treated harshly. Boys who don’t project a strong image tend to be neglected, they often have to face problems on their own, while a tough approach for those overstepping the line frequently has the opposite effect. It calls forth new aggression and when everything has once again cooled down it’s a matter of waiting for the next incident. Even youth care professionals and civil servants in youth policy are often at their wits’ end.
In the Netherlands, in education and other areas of policy, special consideration for girls and their problems, questions and difficulties has existed for years. There is naturally nothing wrong with this, however, the same doesn’t apply for boys. Special attention for boys anticipates primarily potential nuisance and often is repressive. Boys can fend for themselves and, if necessary, they will be given a proper dressing down (“That’ll teach them…”). Too much reproach in raising children and education can be detrimental. Feelings of guilt and shame are very strong emotions. If you don’t feel capable of preventing shame or shaking off blame, then this will only reinforce the feeling of inadequacy; with resentment this forms an explosive combination. Without clear prospects, prisons are easy learning grounds for criminality. Humiliating sanctions or unfulfillable orders result in isolation, defensiveness and callous behaviour. Leaving school early is hardly the recipe for a successful future.
There are naturally better ways of dealing with boys. But to develop them requires creativity and an awareness of sexual and cultural differences. Based on many years of experience both in the Netherlands and abroad, I can provide the services you need in this area.
3 Boys – a blind spot?
When the media and policy documents talk about ‘youth’ or ‘young people’ they usually mean ‘young men’ without making this explicit. Take any newspaper article, replace the word ‘young people’ with ‘boys’ or ‘girls’ and see whether the text still makes sense. A blind spot? What are boys really interested in? What brings out their better qualities and what makes them happy? How can they discover these things? What are their strengths and where do they get stuck? In an economic recession, doing nothing is destructive for a person’s self-image and it affects the motivation. If you are unemployed it is also important to consider what you are going to channel your energy into. On average, boys sooner than girls are more likely to be involved in all sorts of risky behaviour, alcohol and drug abuse, hostile behaviour at school, or small or large scale criminality, not only damaging others but also themselves.
4 Nature, Nurture and Maturation. The epigenetic persective.
Of course every child and every boy is different, but upbringing, education and all sorts of interventions can be significantly more effective when people know how to respond to the particular predisposition and maturation process of boys.
5 Chromosomes and hormones: the male body-brain
The X chromosome is older in the evolution. The nowadays female variant is in a way closer to that original form. If not influenced by the Y-chromosome every baby would be female. The Y-chromosome has - among other factors by means of provoking testosterone production - the effect that the foetus via a series of complex processes is 'converted' or 'further developed into the male variant' (it is just how you put it...).
The Y-chromosome in the boy makes that the mother produces a lot of testosterone in the womb; just before birth the little boy is 'marinated' in testosterone... In this complex conversion process things can go wrong. There are more complications during pregnancy and around the birth. The first ten years boys are the weaker sex. Later they become stronger.
Boys tend to be more boisterous than girls: adrenaline and testosterone at work. On average, they mature more slowly. Their immune system is initially weaker: they have more childhood illnesses, but once they get over these, their immune system grows stronger. The physical growth as well as their emotional, verbal and cognitive development is often more irregular in boys, making it appear more incoherent. Balancing seems the nuclear developmental task for boys more than for girls.
Their fine motor skills - for example, writing - usually develop later and their vocabulary is initially smaller. Tension stimulates performance, but being under too much stress means the higher cerebral functions are hardly given a chance and the necessary connections (i.e. learning) are made less easily.
6 Behaviour under Stress
Stress means that the primary reactions - fight, flight or fright - are more likely to dominate and the frontal neocortex is practically disconnected, unless boys have learned a good motoric memory of managing their breathing (relaxation!) and learn to use reflective capacities.
7 Maturation of the Brain
Certainly in early years, some functions - especially those facilitating higher order skills - seem to be less integrated withy primary processes deep in the brain in boys than in girls. In boys, some brain functions seem to be more clearly connected to the left and right hemispheres ('more lateralized'); research is going on and replaces some myths with more hard data.
In brief, those parts in the brain that are associated with the intelligence of body and movement, felt emotions, space, music, creativity and intuition, are in boys in childhood and early adolescence less integrated with those parts that play a big role in logic, language and analysis. In many ways a question of maturation. The prefrontal lobes - with their important functions of inhibition, anticipation and planning - take more time to mature and integrate than in girls. In a process of making new connections (synaptognese) and dying away of unused connections ('pruning') the connections do grow and balance in the course of time, amongst other things through experience, and often through the correct challenges, attention, exercise and stimulus. It is thus a matter of challenging boys and helping them to integrate in due time (see, for example, on this website: cooperation, www.rockandwaterprogram.com.
Boys often have more of an eye for taking advantage of opportunities rather than for risks and safety. Tension and danger can be an attractive means of proving themselves, 'it stimulates their nerve ends to make new connections', so it is learning - but the 'buzz' of risky behaviour also numbs feelings of doubt, shame or not coming up to the mark. Boys certainly do not have any less emotions than girls, but it is often more difficult for them to express themselves. This makes them vulnerable for emotional pressure. Putting their own behaviour or feelings into words, to then be corrected or laughed at, easily leads them to bluffing or avoid expressing themselves in words: After all, everything you say can be used against you. This is unfortunate: it is precisely by being able to express yourself that you automatically give structure to your thoughts and feelings (conscious emotions) making reflection and communication easier.
A feeling for space, impulsive and intuitive movement and also the visual brain are often particularly strongly developed in boys. More than girls, boys chiefly learn through trial and error. This can sometimes be difficult for their surroundings, but it is their natural way. Reacting positively to this results in a bond of confidence, which is necessary in more complicated situations. Developing communicative skills helps them and their daily environment, especially if we also pay attention to their physical communication, which they are often good at. Social and more verbal and reflexive skills can be learned more easily through physical balance and resistance programmes. During puberty, not only the existing connections in the brain are reorganised, as it were, but further specialisation also takes place and unused areas die off or become isolated. The ability to learn is at its peak.
Amidst all these biological data it makes sense to differentiate between regressive interpretations about masculinity and femininity (backlash to pre-feminist times, using biological data to legitimate male behaviours and dominance or female role taking and indirect dominance) and what I would call the post-feminist view: serving boys and girls right in what they need to grow into balanced and many-sided adults. Boys and girls have the same value, but they are not the same. Same treatment may breed larger differences. To reiterate: sex and gender are not all-determining, we are concerned here with the average differences between boys and girls, with considerable overlapping. Predisposition may strengthen certain opportunities or risks, but this is frequently only realised through influences from the environment. You cannot reduce boys and girls to one aspect of their personality, namely their sex and gender. What we can do is closely observe them with a feeling for sexual differences to see how schools, society and the media act upon them and try to find suitable solutions with them.
Improving the way boys are brought up and dealt with starts with a quest. What does it mean to be a young man at the start of the 21st century? Girls are changing, tasks and roles are being redistributed, aspirations are high and everything seems to be permanently moving. This creates new opportunities for boys, but not automatically. A risk-society demands special competencies. Excessive individualization means interrelations must once again be sought, with each other and with the natural environment.
In their youth, it is as important for girls as it is for boys that, in addition to women, they also associate with men. Boys need close role-models to measure up to, to mirror themselves upon and associate with. As children, they are mainly raised by women, admittedly often very well, but fathers and other men are still frequently far too distant. Happily there are increasing numbers of fathers who make time for their children, but in family law the position of fatherhood in all its current forms is actually weakly regulated.
In which roles do boys associate with men? In childcare and primary education, a primarily protective and 'verbal-emotional' climate does little justice to the more physical and experimental manner which characterizes many boys’ lives. Structure and protection are necessary, but an excess of order, neatness and protection, and too great an emphasis on the fine motor functions and linguistic skills, however, are perceived by boys to be constraints and hinder their curiosity, mobility and incentive to experiment.
In primary education male teachers are disappearing at an increasing rate, while boys and girls need both men and women. This development is in danger of escalating. At teacher training colleges for primary education, it is as if 'a hidden female curriculum' has come to exist and male students are increasingly rare, amongst other things because they feel less attracted to the contents of the lessons and the predominantly verbal-cognitive and verbal-emotional atmosphere, namely the strong relational aspect. And yet it is precisely male primary teachers who often have more feeling for the behaviour of boys and who are often able to discipline them using fewer words. For boys from an ethnic minority - who may not be used to the authority of women outside the home once they have outgrown their childhood - flexible and respectful cooperation with male and female teachers can provide them with excellent examples.
When starting secondary education, for many boys the accent has already fallen on unmanageability and hostile behaviour in schools. They are content with achieving a six out of ten for their schoolwork and life outside school holds far more attraction. At large schools there can be a lack of contact and their circle of friends or peer group predominates.
Given birth to by a women and for the most part closely surrounded by women role-models, there is the possibility that boys will primarily develop as 'non-girls'; they will be dismissive of girls or women, and mirror themselves on caricature images of men in the media. The individuality of every boy is overshadowed by the demands of the labour market and idealised images in the media which cannot be fulfilled. They are almost forced into bluffing. Advertising agencies tap into boy’s dreams and fantasies, embellish and associate them with all sorts of products which are then marketed back to them. It is precisely those intense emotions such as fear or happiness, the power of attraction or jealousy, greed or dismissive behaviour that advertising and the media strongly appeal to in order to distract consumers from consciously considering and weighing up the possibilities, to provide amusement or to sell products, as if what you possess or wear is who you are.
Boys want to have a grip on their lives and are faced with the special task of trying to find a balance in this. Faked self-confidence and challenging each other while at play can anticipate real self-confidence, but it also means that they can continually be brought down by others. Some boys shut themselves off, loneliness sets in, and a vicious circle begins. Anger and resentment mask emotional clumsiness or low self-esteem and block the development towards balanced adulthood. Energy spins out in all directions and in large anonymous groups boys can become violent. The kicks induced by risky behaviour drown out common sense: primary emotions such as fight, flight or fright take over, agility is the only thing which counts and the higher brain functions (neocortex) are almost literally disconnected.
Troublesome behaviour can also be seen as a signal: boys want to give meaning to their lives and look for boundaries. They like to test adults’ integrity but still have difficulty in recognising authority and sometimes stagnate in resentment, a sad combination of sadness and anger. Discipline is sometimes desperately needed, but the current call for detention centres or Borstal schools, primarily for boys who can no longer be handled, is a regrettable conclusion and an indication of failing efforts on the part of parents, supervisors and policy. Paying attention to boys and their developmental tasks and needs at an earlier stage can work preventively.
16 Zone of proximal development
The concept of the zone of proximal development (by the Russian educational psychologist Vygotski) can enlighten us in our work. Just as cells continually divide and an organism grows, so children have a strong instinct to grow, experience something and develop themselves. Their world is constantly growing, they are broadening and advancing their prospects and an increasing amount of active connections are being made in their brains. Boys go through a lot and, if things go well, they want to take on an increasing level of responsibility. They may experience somewhat of a freakish passage through life: success, setback and sometimes relapse. Learning is often a matter of trial and error.
In this way, fathers can have more fun with their sons, and professionals and volunteers will also enjoy their work with boys more.
