He'll Be OK: Growing Gorgeous Boys Into Good Men 10th Anniversary

By Celia Lashlie

At last, a straight-talking book that takes parents into the mysterious world of boys.
How do you raise boys to men in a world where trouble beckons at every turn? How do you make sure they learn the right lessons, stay out of danger, find a path to follow? How do you ensure they'll be OK? Author Celia Lashlie has some of the answers. After years working in the prison service, she knows what can happen when boys make the wrong choices. She also knows what it's like to be a parent - she raised a son on her own and feared for his survival. As a crucial part of the NZ Good Man Project, she talked to 180 classes of boys throughout the country. Her insights into what boys need - and what parents can do to help them - are ground-breaking. In this honest, no-nonsense and best-selling book, Celia Lashlie reveals what goes on inside the world of boys, and that it is an entirely different world from that of girls. With clarity and insight, she offers parents - especially mothers - practical and reassuring advice on raising their boys to become good, loving, articulate men. 'At last, a mother's guide on the best way to raise sons.' - Courier Mail 'Lashlie writes with a refreshing candour and honesty.' - Courier Mail '... anyone who is involved in boys' education or has male children will benefit from reading this.' Good Reading

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Jan 31, 2010
• ISBN: 9780730400424

Celia Lashlie

Bestselling author of The Journey to Prison and He’ll Be OK, Celia has been a prison officer and prison manager, and has a degree in anthropology and Maori. Mother, Nana, sought-after speaker and social commentator, she now works in a freelance capacity and lives in Wellington.www.celialashlie.co.nz

Book preview

A researcher and social commentator, Celia Lashlie worked for 15 years within the prison service, starting in December 1985 as the first woman to work as a prison officer in a male prison in New Zealand. Her final role within the service was as manager of Christchurch Women’s Prison, a position she left in September 1999.

Celia, who had a degree in anthropology and Māori, went on to work on a number of projects, all of which were linked to improving the lives of at-risk children and empowering families to find their own solutions to the challenges they were facing.

In September 2004, she completed the Good Man Project. The project, which facilitated discussion within and between 25 boys’ schools throughout New Zealand, aimed to create a working definition of what makes a good man in the 21st century.

What arose from the project was a significant insight into the minds of teenage boys, and what they are feeling at this period in their lives. There are also some challenging suggestions for parents, as well as a call for women in particular to rethink the way they interact with the men in their lives — their sons and their husbands — if they want to see their sons become the good men they want them to be.

Celia Lashlie is the author of the bestselling books The Journey to Prison: Who Goes and Why, He’ll Be OK: Growing Gorgeous Boys into Good Men and The Power of Mothers: Releasing Our Children.

Celia had begun working on a revised edition of He’ll Be OK before her death in February 2015.

Dedication

For the many good men I met on the journey:

know how special you are.

For the many gorgeous boys I met on the journey:

know that magic lies within you.

For Bek and Gene

and all who continue to walk with me

on the journey of life:

know it is you who give my life meaning.

Contents

Dedication

Foreword by Michael Thompson

Introduction by Gene Hyde

Chapter 1

The Beginning of the Journey

Chapter 2

What Was the Good Man Project?

Chapter 3

The Wonderful World of Boys’ Schools

Chapter 4

About a Boy: Inside Their Heads

Chapter 5

The Bridge of Adolescence: Years 9 to 13

Chapter 6

External Forces: Alcohol, Drugs, Sport — and Girls

Chapter 7

Adolescent Pragmatism: Why They Do What They Do

Chapter 8

Intuition and Wisdom: The Hidden Gifts

Chapter 9

Stop Making His Lunch: What Mothers Should Do

Chapter 10

When His Father Isn’t There: The Single Mother’s Journey

Chapter 11

Men’s Business: Letting It Happen

Chapter 12

Growing a Good Man: What It Takes

Appendix

Working with Celia by Amanda Millar

Dear Celia . . .

When We Walk to the Edge of All the Light

About the Author

Copyright

Foreword

by Michael Thompson

I met Celia Lashlie only once. We were far away from our respective homes, at a conference in Cape Town, South Africa, where we were both scheduled to speak to the 200 educators gathered in the theatre of the Wynberg Boys’ High School. Wynberg is a single-sex state school that serves all boys — black, white and of mixed descent — who will be the future men of South Africa, a country which is struggling with some of the highest rates of murder and rape in the world.

As in many countries, South Africans worry about their boys. The system of apartheid destroyed black and mixedrace men’s sense of themselves; it also destroyed traditional tribal cultures and traditions which maintained male self-respect and self-control. Apartheid left behind it a legacy of violence and exploitation of women. Parents, teachers and principals are now faced with the challenge of raising boys who witness violence all around them. How can they raise these boys to be law-abiding men, loving fathers capable of raising moral sons and daughters?

Celia Lashlie and I came to Cape Town to offer our help. The conference we were speaking at was sponsored by the International Boys’ Schools Coalition, an association representing English-language boys’ schools from around the world. Many of us in the audience, myself included, work in protected, even privileged, school environments. As a psychologist in boys’ schools in the United States, the problems I regularly see are to do with mental health issues like anxiety and depression, family break-ups and routine disciplinary infractions. They’re not criminal matters, certainly not violence.

Celia brought a different set of experiences to bear on the issue of understanding and educating boys than the majority of people in the room. They were educators; she had worked for years as an officer in male prisons in New Zealand, which she wrote about in her insightful book The Journey to Prison. Knowing how different her experiences had been to my own, I was anxious to hear her speak.

When she took the stage, we were all immediately under her spell. I make my living as an author and speaker, and I am ruthlessly critical of my less-than-inspiring conference keynote colleagues. I have rarely heard a more relaxed, funny, expansive and challenging speaker than Celia. She didn’t remain behind the podium, not for a second; she took the microphone in her hands and paced side to side, backwards and forwards; with her big voice and gestures, Celia swept us up into her conversation about boys. She began to talk about ‘gorgeous boys’, not ‘disadvantaged boys’, or ‘troubled boys’, or ‘angry boys’ or even ‘misunderstood boys’. Such phrases are the stock in trade for those of us who are trying to get people worked up and anxious about boys (and ready to buy our books). I confess I have used such descriptors. Not Celia.

No, Celia spoke repeatedly and with obvious emphasis about ‘gorgeous boys’, even those gorgeous boys who had landed in prison in reckless pursuit of their own manhood. You could tell that she loved boys and she was requiring us to acknowledge that we loved them too. Her choice of that adjective was a demand: do not be wishy-washy about boys; do not stand back and force boys to prove themselves. She urged us to embrace their energy, their physicality, their dreams, their intelligence, their sexuality, their impulsivity, their practicality and their potential — the whole package. Boys’ schools have faculties that are mostly 70–80% male, and the conference audience reflected this gender split. This self-professed ‘radical feminist’ was giving a group of mostly male educators (boys’ schools have faculties that are 70–80 per cent men) an important lesson: don’t hold back from boys and expect them to trust you. Meet boys where they are, learn from them and trust in their development.

That’s exactly what Celia does in her book He’ll Be OK: Growing Gorgeous Boys into Good Men. Invited to visit a small number of boys’ schools in New Zealand as part of the Good Man Project in 2002, she ended up having detailed conversations with boys in 25 boys’ schools. She talked with them about everything: homework, girls, risk-taking and risk-avoidance, sex, procrastination, their futures, their relationships with their mothers, and whether they wanted to grow up to be like their dads. She takes conversations that might make another person conclude that boys are superficial — one boy said he didn’t want to grow up to be like his father because his dad was ‘bald’ — and she finds the practical wisdom in their responses. Time and time again, she makes sense of boy psychology in situations where many adults are confused. She sees adolescent boys as vulnerable, often more psychologically vulnerable than girls of the same age. She sees them as dependent on their peers for a sense of direction. She also sees them as highly practical, intuitive and wise, and she persuades us to see them the same way.

At several points in He’ll Be OK, Celia makes me want to cheer. She observes that 80 per cent — and in high-stakes situations 90 per cent — of a boy’s communication is non-verbal and she is OK with that. She urges mothers to stop making their sons’ lunches (Yes!) and allow them to get to know who their dads are or were (Yes!). She declines as a woman to tell men how they should raise their sons (Yes! Yes!). She just reminds dads that their sons want a father who will walk beside them and help them open pathways to other men. But, most of all, she understands you cannot hope to change the life of boys with mistrust, over-supervision and punishment. Boys know whether or not you respect them, and if you don’t . . . well, they won’t work with you. They worked with Celia because they knew she had a deep respect for their lives.

How did I come into possession of my copy of He’ll Be OK? Celia gave it to me that day in Cape Town. After I listened to her presentation and she had heard mine, she walked up to me, book in hand, and threw her arms around me. I will never forget her generous-hearted embrace. She proposed that we work together, perhaps doing a tour of boys’ schools in Australia. The director of the International Boys’ Schools Coalition was standing nearby and he immediately endorsed the plan. I left Africa feeling like I had made a new friend and looked forward to travelling and presenting with her. I was deeply saddened to hear less than a year later that she had died an untimely death from pancreatic cancer. What a loss for boys, for those of us who advocate for boys, and for me personally. I am so sorry that I never got to know Celia better, but her heart is on display in He’ll Be OK and I feel lucky to have read it.

Michael Thompson, PhD

Co-author of Raising Cain:

Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys

April 2015

Introduction

by Gene Hyde

When the idea of writing an introduction for this book was first put to me, I pretty much laughed out loud. Even though my mother was a fantastic wordsmith and great communicator, writing is not at the top of my skill set. But the more I let the thought drift around in my head, the more I came to the conclusion that it was a great idea and Mum would have loved it.

It would also be rather fitting, on the tenth anniversary of this great piece of work, into which my mother put so much of her time and effort, that someone who she also put a lot of time and effort into might say a few words about being the lucky recipient of that.

As all of you who knew her will attest, and even those who only knew of her will probably agree, Celia was a great woman. But before most people had even heard of Celia Lashlie, I knew of her as a great mum.

Through my childhood and into my teenage years I was lucky enough to be exposed to a wide range of experiences, cultures, people and opportunities, which had a profound effect on my development. Because Mum raised me on her own, she realised very early on that I needed male role models in my life and took steps that contributed a lot to who I became. Strong male role models are so important to a developing male and spending time with them had a very positive effect on me.

I think by the time Mum became concerned about me I was at a stage in life where, while it wasn’t too late for her to influence my actions and decisions, it had become much harder for her to get through to me. I can only imagine how difficult it was for her to watch her baby boy turn into a know it all who thought he could do whatever he wanted. Maybe I’ll get to experience a bit of that myself some day. Although Mum was worried about decisions I might or might not make, from my point of view (and especially in hindsight) I already had many of the tools I needed to think consciously about my actions and their consequences.

Although some of the situations I put myself in might not have been ideal, I always had boundaries and made decisions based on them. These internal boundaries and tools had been created and reinforced over the years by my mother and the people she encouraged me to spend time with throughout my childhood and early adolescence. I’m sure I thought I was omnipotent at that age, but the reality was that from early on – whether Mum thought so or not – I was fairly mature when it came to making decisions about certain situations I encountered or found myself in. You could say that in some ways I am very like her, but I believe a great deal of that maturity was due to her reinforcement of morals, behaviours and respect for others, and myself.

You can’t just let your boys wander off into the horizon and hope for a call sometime, but trusting them and the love and care you have put into them, while giving them space to make their own decisions, will go a long way. Support for their decision making is more important than making those decisions for them.

When this book first came out I told people – and myself – that it nothing to do with me, that it was all about all the work Mum had done with the Good Man Project, and that she had just used me as an example every now and again since I had provided her with a few ripper examples over my teenage years. I still think a lot of that is true, but recently I’ve realised I might have had a little more to do with it than I once thought. A first-hand experience case study, if you like.

Growing up in Upper Hutt, I was always very proud of my mother because my friends loved coming around to our house and staying over. They enjoyed the way Celia interacted with them, always welcoming, fun, fair and non-judgemental. There were times when Mum might have had misgivings about a certain person, or have known their history, but she would never show it, and only judged them for the way they behaved around her and in her house. My friends often commented on this to me. I think this was a big part of what made my mother such a beautiful person. She was always able to look past the rough exteriors to see the beauty and magic inside those she came in contact with.

I am an extremely privileged person to have been created, nurtured and loved by such an amazing woman and I will be eternally grateful for that. I am also so thankful Celia was able to touch so many other people in this world, because qualities like hers need to be shared.

Forever Celia’s gorgeous boy,

Gene

2015

This book refers to the education system in New Zealand, which covers five years and runs from Years 9 to 13. The chart below shows the approximate equivalence for Australian school students.

Chapter 1

The Beginning of the Journey

A few months ago, while I was still considering whether there was any real merit in writing a book about what I’d learnt as a result of my participation in the Good Man Project, I sat in a café and watched the interaction between a man and his three young sons, aged between four and eight. As I unashamedly eavesdropped on their conversation, it became apparent that the boys’ mother had passed responsibility to Dad for the morning.

What drew my attention was the very calm approach of the father as he dealt with three extremely energetic boys. He allowed them time to clamber up onto the seats they’d selected and spoke clearly and slowly to them about what they might like to eat and drink. He gave them plenty of time to make their choices and didn’t appear to get at all agitated when, more than once, they became distracted by something else in the busy café. When the youngest boy got down off his chair to investigate something he’d seen on the floor, his father just quietly asked him to sit down again, which the child did in his own time; no harm was done in the meantime.

When the food arrived, the father helped where necessary, but generally left the boys to manage it themselves and didn’t become upset when, as was inevitable, things got a bit messy. He let them wander from the table once they’d finished eating, never rushing to stop them doing whatever they were focused on, but always keeping an eye on them and pulling them back within his reach whenever he deemed it necessary. The boys seemed to relax into their father’s calmness, knowing intuitively how far they could go before he would call them back. His voice was their boundary: he knew it and so did the boys. As I watched, I couldn’t help but wonder just how different things might have been if the boys had been in the company of their mother or another woman.

A week or two later I boarded a plane and found myself sitting across the aisle from a man and his son, a boy of about ten. The boy’s mother and the younger brother, aged about four, were seated behind me.

The father and son were talking in low tones about the plane and what was happening outside on the tarmac, and as we prepared to take off, I noticed the father reach for his son’s hand and cradle it within his, presumably to reassure him. Once the plane was in the air, a commentary from the seat behind me began as the mother checked continually on the wellbeing of her elder son. At least every two or three minutes, or so it seemed, she asked the father whether the boy was ‘all right’, while at the same time working to keep an energetic four-year-old under control.

Perhaps I’m being a bit hard on the woman, but she appeared to be undermining the father’s attempts to relate positively and reassuringly to his son. Having made several enquiries and comments about the boy’s welfare, she then went on to contradict her husband. When he asked the flight attendant for coffee, from across the aisle (and one seat back!), she said, ‘But wouldn’t you prefer tea?’ She seemed to have decided that she needed to be involved in everything that was happening with both her sons, while at the same time trying to manage what their father was choosing to drink.

In a way, the comparison between these two incidents has pushed me to write this book. I consider myself a feminist: I see feminism as the right of women to pursue whatever path they choose without in any way being restricted by their gender. My chosen direction in life has been strongly influenced by a desire to be free, while working to ensure that same freedom for everyone with whom I come in contact. I consider it extremely important that my freedom not come at the cost of anyone else’s. Unfortunately, my experience within the Good Man Project has left me with the impression that women’s quest for freedom has perhaps taken its toll on our perception of men and manhood.

‘I lost my jacket in the pavilion yesterday. If anyone picked it up I’d be grateful to have it back. Of course my wife says it isn’t lost until she’s had a look for it.’

In August 2002 I published The Journey to Prison: Who Goes and