The Parents' Guide to Boys: Help your son get the most out of school and life

By Abigail James

Raising a boy poses unique challenges. This entertaining and informative user’s manual will help you work with your son to prepare him for school.

Abigail James’s experiences as a teacher, mother of a son, and lifelong learner confirm her belief that parents want to give their children the best preparation for life they possibly can.

If you have a son—or know someone who’s raising a boy—here’s the book you’ve been looking for. Its clear, practical advice will guide you through preparing your child for school and for life. Packed with activities you can implement immediately, humorous examples you’ll remember forever, and wisdom Abigail has acquired in the trenches, The Parents’ Guide to Boys is a book you’ll quote often and go back to again and again.

No matter whether your son is eight months or eighteen years old, Abigail has tips for giving him a great head start, keeping him engaged in the classroom, and creating a happy, self-sufficient young man.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Greenleaf Book Group
• Release date: Nov 28, 2012
• ISBN: 9781936909599

Book preview

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INTRODUCTION

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In May 2011, Mike Rowe, the host of Discovery Channel’s show Dirty Jobs, testified before the United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Technology. Rowe’s remarks centered on the lack of individuals who were being trained to do the dirty jobs featured on his show. He cited several instances where all the people in a particular job were over 50 years old; he also mentioned that some job opportunities went unfilled because there were no people who were trained to do these essential functions. These remarks came during a time with one of the highest unemployment rates in memory. Rowe finished his remarks by urging the committee to encourage the development of training programs because closing the skills gap doesn’t just benefit future tradesmen and the companies desperate to hire them. It benefits people like me, and anyone else who shares my addiction to paved roads, reliable bridges, heating, air-conditioning, and indoor plumbing. The skills gap is a reflection of what we value. To close the gap, we need to change the way the country feels about work.

Most of the individuals who would fill these skilled positions are male. The concern is that boys are being pushed into academic tracks in school both by parents and by a society that views this as the way to a more economically robust future. This trend is based on a belief that trades are not going to provide the upwardly mobile life that society says we all want. No matter that the boy is not interested in academics, that he likes putting things together and taking them apart, and that there is a crying need for skilled workers. He has got to go to college first.

Yes, this book is full of suggestions for parents eager to make sure that their sons do well in school. The assumption is that all parents want their sons to go to college, complete some graduate program, and become a success. My father told me that if you love what you do, it isn’t work. The flip side is that no matter how much money you make, if you don’t like what you do, it is torture. What parents really want is for their sons to be happy and successful in whatever they do. Children are likely to be a bit more successful if they can read, write, and do math well. Those skills are learned early in school. So even if you know your son is likely to be a welder, a plumber, an electrician, a banker, or a lawyer, helping him do well in school at the beginning will help him in the end.

But school is not only about academics. You will find that helping your son succeed in school has more to do with his personal attributes than with the arithmetic he is learning. What he needs for you to teach him is that failure is the first step toward success; that insisting on getting your own way usually makes other people unhappy or mad; and that intrinsic motivation lasts whereas extrinsic motivation, like money, is temporary.

Do not be tempted to be your son’s academic teacher! You are his life teacher. If he can’t do his homework, your job is to help him figure out what he doesn’t know so he can ask his classroom teacher for help the next day. Please, do not do his work for him. This is very difficult, I know. I found myself saying to my son, Let me show you how to do that and taking hold of the pencil. That is the key: keep your hands off of his work. Even if you are giving him directions, he must do the actual work. Yes, it will be messy. That is a matter for his teacher to deal with. You may be surprised to see that his handwriting is not as messy as others in his class and that he is making progress.

You will hear me say this—you are not to do your son’s work for him—over and again, and the reason is because boys are pragmatists. If they can get someone else to do their work, they will. Remember Tom Sawyer? He was pretty skilled at getting other people to paint the fence for him. Also, by doing his work, you send the message to your son that you don’t think he is capable of doing the work. That is not a lesson you want him to get from you.

Another point is that he is to be responsible for getting his work to and from school. The day will come when you find out that he never turned in his work because he left the directions at school, left the completed work at home, or couldn’t find it in his backpack in class. This is not your problem; it is his. You can ask him what you can do to help, but your help should not involve your handling any of the paper involved and it should not involve a dash to school with the forgotten paperwork. You can help him by showing him what you do to be organized and keep track of all that you are responsible for.

Be forewarned: To get you to do his work for him, your son may tell you that his teacher doesn’t explain things well, or that the teacher doesn’t like him or doesn’t like boys. Some teachers are good at working with boys and others don’t seem to appreciate their energy and senses of humor. Learning to work for someone whose style doesn’t fit yours is one of the best lessons we all learn in school. Boys find that lesson particularly hard for many reasons. In fact, the point of this book is to give you some insights into why your son approaches life the way he does and what you can do to help him in school and out.

What Follows

At the moment, there’s a dispute among the experts as to whether or not the variations in behavior that we see in boys and girls are due to differences in brain development or to societal expectations of men and women or to a combination of both effects. The first chapter will introduce you to the general points in this nature vs. nurture controversy. True, this debate has been going on for many years, but the information in this chapter will give you a brief background in what we know at the moment and how you can integrate both approaches into dealing with your son.

Chapters 2 through 6 are divided into various age/academic levels: Infants and Toddlers, Preschool and Kindergarten, Elementary School, Middle School, and High School. (After all, this is a book written by a teacher to help parents prepare their sons for school.) Each chapter starts with information about the changes in the brain and the body that are typical for a child of that age.

If your son is very little, you will certainly find the early chapters to be of interest, but the later chapters will help you see why what you are doing now will help you and your son later. If your son is older, reading the earlier chapters will help you understand how your son got to be the way he is and will give you some suggestions on how to mend fences.

Depending on the age/stage, the chapter may then provide some information about skills or activities that are particularly well suited for a child at that level. For example, the chapter on elementary school includes a section on developing independence because it is as grade-schoolers that children first start to pull away from their families. The chapter on middle school will cover thoughts on electronics and virtual entertainment because boys at this age are most interested in these pastimes.

Much of the information in the childhood development area is supported by research, but not biologically based research. It is clear that most age-appropriate behavior is shaped by culture and by environment. That does not mean that gender is not involved—it is, absolutely—but this behavior varies from culture to culture among children of the same age, so you have some influence on change here.

Another section that will appear in each chapter is a description of activities you can engage in with your son that will help him be prepared for what he is going to face in school. For example, the first activity is to read to your son. Your job is not to teach your child to read; your job is to familiarize him with the language around him and to encourage him to enjoy reading. When children who have been read to at home get to school, they are simply better ready for reading instruction. You are going to find out that reading to your child provides many different benefits aside from language development, and it is the single most important thing you can do to help your child succeed in school.

Some of the other activities may surprise you, such as making sure that your child has chores appropriate to his age level and encouraging your son to join in the family discussions at mealtime. You should play games with your child, but those which suit his cognitive development. In this way, you will not be tempted to let him win. As your son grows up, there will be fewer and fewer activities he will be willing to let you do with him, but laying a good foundation early will mean that he will likely come home in high school for an occasional family game night, for example.

Each chapter also includes suggestions from this teacher about ways you can help your child navigate the requirements of education. As your son’s parent, you will want to help him, but you are going to discover that too much help for boys will result in lack of effort on their part.

Because I’ve divided this book according to school levels, it is sometimes hard to see the whole boy and how the various stages of school affect his development. The process of moving out of toddlerhood and into childhood takes time. There will be setbacks, with three steps forward and one step back, until suddenly, it seems, your toddler is off on his own. Chapter 7 is designed to help you see that total process. For example, language development is a major issue for boys, but once they can read, your job isn’t over. He needs for you to talk with him and continually help him understand the art of communication both in writing and talking.

Finally, the last section will list a number of resources and helps you may find useful. I’ve suggested books to help you explore further the nature vs. nurture debate if you wish; authors of books that boys have enjoyed; websites for sources to help you and your son as he begins to make decisions for his adult life; and a host of other information.

What I hope you get out of this book

Whether or not your son intends to go to college, being a good learner in primary and secondary school is an important start in life. This book offers you practical, doable suggestions for what you as a parent can do to help your child become a more effective student at every stage. Brian Jacques, the author of the Redwall series, which is very popular with boys, left school at age 15 and he then worked as a sailor and a truck driver. He didn’t even graduate from high school and yet he wrote wonderful tales for children. Obviously, he learned good language skills early in his schooling.

What you want for your child is to become a confident, capable person. School is a huge part of the journey to get there; at the beginning, your son needs your help in the process. If you do your job right, your help will no longer be needed as he leaves school.

Please remember that the more you do for your son, the less he will do. It is your job to teach him to do his own work, to be responsible for his own belongings, and to pay attention to the effect he has on people around him. He won’t learn those lessons if you do those tasks for him. But he is so little, I hear you say, and he doesn’t do those jobs well. Of course; that is the point. He knows that if he only tries a bit, you will take over and then the job is done to your satisfaction. What you should want is the job done by him, no matter what the outcome is.

I promise, this isn’t that hard, but it does require you to be consistent and to listen to him. If he is doing his work, then you are doing the right thing, no matter what other people tell you. Boys are so much fun, so enjoy your boy. He absolutely needs you to be there for him. The suggestions in the pages that follow will help.

CHAPTER 1

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ARE BOYS DIFFERENT?

Of all the animals, the boy is the most unmanageable.

—Plato

This is not a book about parenting boys. This is a book about how to be the parent of a schoolboy. Plato recognized a long time ago that boys in an educational setting could be difficult, and that does not seem to have changed much in the intervening years. In fact, if you keep up with trends in education, you’ll know that one of the major problems teachers are dealing with at the moment is boys. Specifically, they aren’t doing as well as girls academically and socially and few people seem to know what to do about it. You will find disparate opinions on the subject ranging from those who are convinced the solution is boy-friendly single-gender schools to those who are just as sure that the only difference between boys and girls is socially constructed and so coed education is the answer. Neither extreme seems to meet all needs because children do not fall into two mutually exclusive groups; some girls are more like boys and some boys have the skills and interests of girls. What your boy requires to succeed is unique, and you, as his parent, must be there to support him and everyone else who is trying to help. He needs to trust you to be on his side, but he doesn’t need you to make excuses for him.

Let’s start by taking a look at what we do know about boys and girls before I get into more details about the current debate over the best way to educate boys.

Sex or Gender?

Sex refers to biology and gender refers to the way a person expresses his or her sexual identity. Sex is not a totally dichotomous term, however, as there are individuals who exist whose genes are not either XY (male) or XX (female). Their sex chromosomes might be unconventionally configured as XO (Turner’s Syndrome), XXY (Klinefelter Syndrome), and XYY. Additionally, there are individuals who have conventional genetic configuration but whose physical expression of those genes is clearly ambiguous. These individuals may appear to be one sex when their genes are for the opposite sex and are considered to be intersex. Without a genetic test, therefore, we can’t be sure of someone’s sex.

Gender, on the other hand, refers to how we feel about ourselves, and that can be even more confusing. Most adults will talk about the male and female sides of their personalities, admitting that they can and do have aspects of both. Throughout this book, I will always refer to gender because right from infancy there are so many environmental pressures on a child to behave in certain ways that it becomes difficult to separate out sex from gender.

The expression of gender is a serious issue for boys. The boys’ schools I work with are very sure that part of the problem is that boys may not see a lot of men in their daily life. Girls see their mothers, female teachers, the lunch ladies in the cafeteria, and so forth. Many boys, however, live in houses without an adult male and, in elementary school, are unlikely to see male teachers. What it means to be male is a huge issue for these boys, one which you, as a parent, need to help your son face. Boys know they are male; they are just not always sure what it means to be male.

Are boys and girls different?

Boy or girl? is usually the first question asked when someone learns of a new baby. With the highly technical imaging tests available today, most parents find out the sex of their child before birth. But, what do we mean when we say a child is all boy or typically girl? Your child will probably be like the stereotypical male or female in some respects and not in others. Yes, I am well aware that every child is different, but most children are alike in many areas and that is why stereotypes exist.

The point is that individual children may or may not match the stereotypes. When you look at a lot of children together, you will see patterns of behavior that are considered typical for boys or girls. So when I talk about boy behavior and your son does not act that way, it does not mean I am wrong or your son is not a typical boy. It means your son’s behavior is not stereotypical. A boy who is an early reader or who doesn’t like competitive group sports may need a bit of help finding other children who share his interests, but they are certainly out there.

Children who don’t fit the appropriate sexual stereotype can have trouble, but not necessarily. Girls who are tomboys usually have far fewer difficulties in life than do boys who are a bit feminine. What your son needs is your support in his interests. A boy who would rather take tap dancing at age six instead of playing in a soccer league will develop many of the same skills. Yes, he may get a bit of grief from his friends as they grow up because dancing is for girls, but once those boys discover girls and find out that girls think a boy who can dance is really cool, they may come to the dancer for a few lessons. What your son needs is for you to support him in his interests, not to coerce him into doing things you think he should be interested in. A lot of my boy students admitted that they played sports because their fathers wanted them to play, not because they were interested in playing the game. Find out what your son wants to do and cheer him on, no matter what the activity.

Kevin Clash, the muppeteer who makes Elmo come alive, was interested in puppetry when he was very little. He made his first puppet out of the lining of his father’s raincoat. His mother’s remark was that, in the future, before he cut up family clothes, he should ask for permission, but she didn’t get mad. In fact, she encouraged him to present puppet shows to the neighborhood children. His parents have been totally supportive of him even though his interest was unusual, especially in the working-class section of Baltimore where he grew up. His parents’ support was a huge factor in his career and he originally named Elmo’s parents for his own.

Nature or Nurture?

The discussion of whether genetics or environment play a larger part in the development of our personality is a thorny one. No one actually knows which factor has the greater influence although most of us hold strong opinions on the subject. Some believe that children come into the world as blank slates and are the sum of all of their environmental influences. Others believe that children bring with them certain temperaments and abilities which are obvious early and influence how they respond to environmental factors. Most believe that there is a balance between both genetics and environment and that is the approach that I will use. Consequently, I will start with a discussion of what is known about biology and then introduce what we know about how upbringing shapes us all. You may find the explanation of the relative effects of genetics and environment somewhat extensive, but this subject is complex, and I want you to understand this: neither side can be sure that what they say is completely right. Yes, that includes me, and for this reason I will often say most or many rather than all children.

WHAT MAKES BOYS AND GIRLS DIFFERENT?

The real answer to the question what makes boys and girls different? is that we don’t actually know. And to further complicate the matter, it is hard to measure whether they really are different. Yes, I know that your son is different from girls of the same age, but part of that is because you have raised him to be a boy. When he was a baby, he got trucks and balls for presents and he was dressed in blue jeans and baseball caps. He got a stuffed bear to cuddle, not a doll. We don’t know if he likes trucks because boys like wheeled toys or because he got lots of them as presents. Some research shows that children prefer gender-specific toys and certainly the toy manufacturers believe that to be true. Color alone will alert you to the different types of toys available for girls and those for boys.

It is nearly impossible to raise a child in a gender-neutral environment, although a few families have tried. The number of such children is small, however, and their experiences cannot be guaranteed to be free of gendered influences. Consequently, scientists are limited in their use of information from those families to figure out which behaviors associated with boys are due to biology and which are due to the way the boys are raised. You may have seen a discussion of this issue in the press, with some experts confident that children exhibit gender-specific behavior strictly as a result of the way they are raised and others just as sure that it is all due to biology.

Part of the problem in trying to raise gender-neutral children is that the parents may inadvertently give their children the impression that gender-typical behavior is not correct. In these situations, the children will exhibit gender-neutral behavior because they want to please their parents, not because that is how they would like to react. I think the gendered behavior we see in children is due both to biology and environment. I know with certainty no one taught my son to make motor noises when he was playing with toy cars, but he did. On the other hand, he was very happy to wear a coat and tie when he dressed up because his father and all of the big boys at the school where I taught did so. He had learned that was gender appropriate attire for men.

Most of the research available on neuroscience and gender comes from scientists who look only at one portion of the brain or one set of behaviors. That makes it hard to know with any certainty if a particular part of the brain is responsible for a specific behavior or not. Another complication is that the technology involved in brain imaging is changing so fast the data from a brain study might not still be correct in a year or two. So why bother at all? Because much of the information validating gender differences is reasonably sure, and a growing body of research in education indicates that gender-specific educational approaches help both boys and girls.

I believe that boys and girls are different, but I’m also aware that a lot of what we see is based on differences in developmental rates and processes. For example, in late elementary school, due to the differences of the onset of puberty, most of the girls are taller than most of the boys. However, by the time they get to be 18-year-olds, most of the boys will be taller than the girls. Society says that boys should be taller than girls, and thus for little boys, it can be confusing to be the shortest kid in the class. The last child in a class to enter puberty is likely