Building Better Boys and Repairing Broken Men

 

            In this powerful New York Times Op-Ed article, Charles Blow cites some statistics from a recent study conducted by Child Trends:

• The percentage of fathers who hugged or showed physical affection to their pre-adolescent children every day in the past month:

-    White – 76%

-    Hispanic – 73%

-    Black – 56%

• The percentage of fathers who told their children that they love them every day in the past month:

-    White – 65%

-    Hispanic – 63%

-    Black – 45%

“I don’t scold these fathers,” says Blow, who is African American; “I weep for them and with them. I understand, on a most personal level, that conditioning. Sometimes men don’t see that masculinity is as much about tenderness as about toughness. Sometimes they don’t know how to manage emotions. Sometimes the world has so beaten them and so hardened them that expressing any vulnerability feels like providing an opening for an enemy… The issues facing many of these men are so complicated and layered with pain that they are incredibly daunting. There is a deficit of hope and a surplus of hurdles – familial, cultural, behavioral, and structural.”

            Blow recalls his own emotions from a fatherless childhood: “I was forced to experience him as a distant form in a heavy fog, forced to nurse a longing that he was neither equipped nor inclined to satisfy… When there is an empty space where a father should be, sorrow often grows. The void creates in a child an injury that the child is often unable to articulate or even recognize. And what children miss at home, they will often seek in the street, to ill effect. Many boys with that empty space lash out and act up, trying to be seen, searching, as people do, for love and affirmation, wanting desperately to be validated. And too many of us, in turn, see them as menaces rather than as boys struggling – often without sufficient instruction and against a tide of systemic inequity – to simply become men… We, as a society, must change our perspective when considering these boys and men, and more fully engage our empathy.”

            How can we do that? Through programs like Youth Guidance’s Becoming a Man, says Blow, helping boys develop impulse control, emotional self-regulation, the ability to read social cues and interpret others’ intentions, raising their aspirations, and developing their sense of personal responsibility and integrity. This program was highlighted by President Obama in a White House ceremony last week launching the public/private My Brother’s Keeper initiative. The task is daunting, concludes Blow, but “We can and must break these cycles of pain, building better boys and repairing broken men.”

 

“Fathers’ Sons and Brothers’ Keepers” by Charles Blow in The New York Times, Mar. 1, 2014 (p. A19), http://nyti.ms/1hFvcNw