Title:
Interview: Michael Thompson on the connection between peace and how boys are raised in the US
Authors:SUSAN STAMBERG
Source:Morning Edition (NPR); 12/17/2002
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Interview: Michael Thompson on the connection between peace and how boys are raised in the US
10:00-11:00 AM , As Christmas nears, Christians focus on a child they call the Prince of Peace. This Christmas season, parents pray for peace in the world and peace in the home. On Tuesdays this month, I've been exploring the topic of peace with various experts and observers. Today it's family psychologist Michael Thompson, co-author of the book "Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys."
This is part of a series of conversations about peace, and we're looking at it, talking about it, from various angles, and we've invited you to talk with us about raising boys. What's the connection that you see between the theme of peace and the rearing of male children?
Dr. MICHAEL THOMPSON (Family Psychologist; Co-author, "Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys"): The connection is obvious. Most of our violence comes from young men who were just recently boys. I mean, 95 percent of murders are committed by young men. And last year in this country, we had 15,800 murders. If we're going to stop that, we have to look ourselves in the eye and acknowledge that we have a culture of violence for our young men. We can't say, `Oh, it's TV or it's video games,' because the boys in Japan and Great Britain and Australia have all of those same video games and much of the same TV, and they're not killing each other the way we are. So if we want peace, we have to raise our boys differently.
STAMBERG: You say that the culture sets boys up to be violent.
Dr. THOMPSON: Mm-hmm.
STAMBERG: How? In what ways?
Dr. THOMPSON: It's the definition of masculinity. What does it mean to be a man? It means to be strong and deal with every affront physically and with aggression. There was a fascinating study done in McDonald's restaurants in France and the United States by Tiffany Field, and she looked at preschoolers in those playgrounds in McDonald's restaurants. French children meeting one another as strangers have a hundred percent more physically affectionate gestures with one another than do US kids, and US kids have 50 percent more aggressive gestures. Now these are children up to the age of five and mainly boys. So our kids are more aggressive from the beginning.
STAMBERG: How do they get that way? I mean, do we not permit them certain feelings that would be softer?
Dr. THOMPSON: I had a woman who was a camp counselor, and she told me when she put the sixth-grade girls to bed, she used to sit on the edge of their beds and give them a little back rub and talk to them about their day. And with the boys, she'd say, `Good night, guys. Just don't make much noise.' And she read my book, and she said, `I went back in and began to give the boys back rubs and talk to them about their day.' They have the same need to talk about their day that a sixth-grade girl does, but it's our vision of what boys need. We don't imagine that they have the full set of feelings that a girl does. In fact, we apologize for a boy by saying, `He's sensitive.' I've had so many mothers apologize to me--`I have a sensitive boy, Dr. Thompson'--as if that's the exception rather than the rule for a human being.
STAMBERG: And so what happens to these children if they're not allowed to express their sensitivity or, say, their grief or their sadness? If they have to keep pushing that away, then when push comes to shove, what tools do they have to deal with it?
Dr. THOMPSON: They say, `It's not that I feel sad. It's that you pissed me off,' you know? `And I'll get you. You've made me feel afraid. I'm not supposed to feel afraid; therefore, I'll go after you.' And it's all on the dimension of strength and weakness, not on the dimension of the full range of human emotion.
STAMBERG: And yet we're always so guilty of stereotyping in this world, and I feel we're doing it again. There are plenty of girls in trouble, plenty of girls who don't express themselves that way. I mean, girls have their problems, too.
Dr. THOMPSON: They do, and aggression among girls in the United States is on the rise. And there's some researchers who believe that because there are now movies with action stars who are women who shoot up the place and kill people, that that's encouraging aggression in girls; that they're being pulled into the culture of aggression, which boys have lived in for some time.
STAMBERG: But is this biological or cultural? I mean, what about all that male testosterone?
Dr. THOMPSON: It is not testosterone. Testosterone does not have a direct relationship with aggression in human beings. It's the idea of masculinity, and that's why we have to show boys that there are many ways to be a man. There are too many boys who don't have contact with an adult man who embodies care and caretaking. You know, only 16 percent of the teachers in this country are men, and it's mainly at the high school level. And I go to elementary schools where there's not one man on the staff, and, you know, the kids in the school are crazy about the janitor 'cause he's the only man in the place and he has a ring of keys, you know, and he does something useful. And the boys love him. But there's such a hunger in boys to know what it means to be a man. If they don't have somebody who embodies masculinity in their life, then they're thrown back on the media images.
STAMBERG: So solutions include putting more men in the classrooms as teachers, giving them better male role models in popular culture. What else? What about just making some language available to very little boys that will help them solve disputes and express their emotions?
Dr. THOMPSON: Absolutely, and I think teachers work on that. But the culture's more powerful. You know, by kindergarten, a girl is six times more likely to use the word `love' in the course of a school day than is a boy.
STAMBERG: Wow.
Dr. THOMPSON: Isn't that amazing? So that boys...
STAMBERG: You mean like, `I love that dress. I love your hair. I love those...'
Dr. THOMPSON: Yeah. Just any use of it. And I've talked to thousands of kids about their friendships, and girls sometimes say--they often say that they love a friend, but boys--that makes them uncomfortable. Boys are not allowed to love. But of course they do love inside.
STAMBERG: Dr. Thompson, you're telling us that boys who grow into men can grow into warmakers, but we've got plenty of male peacemakers as well. So how do you explain that?
Dr. THOMPSON: They had loving parents and a sense of mission and connection. You know, I've worked with many Quaker schools around this country, and children pay attention when you talk to them about tolerance and about peace and inclusiveness. And if your message is that and not just about winning and getting high grades and getting into college and beating other people and, you know, `It's a dog-eat-dog world'--when you talk to kids about these ideas and you give them a chance to practice service to others, it changes them, it broadens them, it makes them different. And they are proud of themselves for different things, not just for being winners, but for being a meaningful contributor to the community.
STAMBERG: Michael Thompson is a family and child therapist. With Dan Kindlon, it's author of the book "Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys."
Next Tuesday, this series of conversations continues with a retired Army major general. He talks about waging peace and waging war.
The time is 29 minutes past the hour.
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