The Art of Manliness - Episode #22： Raising Cain With Dr. Michael Thompson

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here and welcome to another episode of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:00:21.220 Now, statistics show that boys are in trouble.

00:00:24.180 They're falling further and further behind in school.

00:00:26.380 And an alarming number of boys are at a high risk for depression, alcohol and drug abuse,

00:00:31.120 violence, and suicide.

00:00:32.820 But what's the cause of these problems and what can we do to help boys?

00:00:36.180 Well, our guest today has written a book about this topic.

00:00:38.780 His name is Dr. Michael Thompson, and he's the co-author of the book Raising Cain, Protecting

00:00:43.820 the Emotional Life of Boys.

00:00:45.760 The book was later turned into a PBS documentary with the same title, which Dr. Thompson wrote

00:00:50.920 and narrated.

00:00:52.040 And Dr. Thompson is a psychologist specializing in children and families.

00:00:55.640 He's the clinical consultant at Belmont High School, an all-boys school in Massachusetts.

00:01:00.760 And in addition to writing about the psychology of boys, Dr. Thompson travels the country speaking

00:01:05.620 and educating audiences about the emotional and psychological needs of boys today.

00:01:10.040 Dr. Thompson, welcome to the show.

00:01:12.500 Thank you very much, Brett.

00:01:13.920 Well, Dr. Thompson, what are the emotional problems that boys are facing these days?

00:01:18.280 It's the problems of growing up.

00:01:19.720 It's the problems of feeling good about yourself as a boy and a man in a society which is super

00:01:26.240 focused on the school performance where you can't play outdoors because your parents are

00:01:31.040 so frightened of pedophiles.

00:01:34.120 And so you don't have the kind of practice being a boy that you had when there was neighborhood

00:01:40.780 play.

00:01:41.520 I think that's the biggest challenge to boys today is that they don't get to create their

00:01:46.900 own society in the neighborhood.

00:01:49.340 And their own definition of boyhood, they often feel penned in by school, but they're pounded

00:01:56.540 continuously with the idea that school is so important.

00:02:00.220 And finally, there's the problem that boys have always had, which is how to maintain your

00:02:07.620 sensitive inner feelings and look strong on the outside and feel strong to yourself.

00:02:15.540 And so you mentioned that the way that schools are set up are kind of a detriment to boys.

00:02:21.400 What about the larger culture?

00:02:23.720 Are there any cultural ideas that kind of have a detrimental effect on boys?

00:02:28.220 Yes.

00:02:28.540 The United States is the most violent society in the industrialized world.

00:02:33.600 Our murder and rape rates are 2 to 20 to 60 times higher than Western Europe, even though

00:02:39.540 our rates of violence have been going down since 1995 after a tremendous 20-year run-up.

00:02:47.600 Even though they've been going down in this country, they're still much higher than anywhere

00:02:50.900 else in the industrialized world.

00:02:52.740 And I think it makes people jumpy about boys.

00:02:55.180 I think it makes them not trust boy play, be afraid of boys in school.

00:03:02.400 And of course, the boys who are being raised in high-risk neighborhoods are at risk for seeing

00:03:08.380 violence and being pulled into violence themselves.

00:03:11.800 So that's real.

00:03:13.520 How can you feel strong in this life without actually ending up violent?

00:03:18.360 So what's the solution to these emotional inner problems that boys face today?

00:03:24.860 Well, I mean, it's simple stuff.

00:03:26.900 It's good parenting.

00:03:28.180 It's having fathers who model self-control, who model studiousness, who model many different

00:03:37.900 ways to be a man.

00:03:39.000 The problem is that 35% of American boys don't have a biological father at home, and they're

00:03:46.580 very dependent on the media to shape what they think of as masculinity.

00:03:53.160 I mean, I ask suburban boys with hardworking, busy, preoccupied fathers what their image of

00:04:01.240 masculinity is, and they say NFL football players.

00:04:04.440 I mean, that's a little weird, isn't it?

00:04:07.100 Because these football players aren't absolutely the best models for boys, because so few boys

00:04:13.580 have that size and that narrow skill.

00:04:16.640 Most of us are going to have to make it in the world thinking of ourselves as men in some

00:04:21.520 other way.

00:04:22.460 And if it's not an athlete, sometimes it's oftentimes now a celebrity of some sort.

00:04:26.260 Yes, that's right.

00:04:27.160 That's right.

00:04:27.960 And you talk in your book a lot about developing the emotional literacy in boys.

00:04:32.560 Can you explain what emotional literacy is?

00:04:35.480 Yeah, it's an ability to identify your feelings and be able to speak about them.

00:04:40.440 Many boys, look, I believe boys have the full range of emotional feelings that girls do.

00:04:46.020 But in boys' society, when you're supposed to look strong, you don't admit to feelings of

00:04:53.020 shame or inadequacy.

00:04:54.980 Or if you admit to it, you admit to it only in a humorous way.

00:04:57.800 But boys' society is different.

00:05:01.840 It shapes a boy's emotional reactions.

00:05:04.280 Think of a fifth grade girl walking into a classroom and saying, oh, I was so upset with

00:05:09.820 my stepmother last night.

00:05:11.080 We fought and fought, and I just went to my room and cried.

00:05:13.720 Okay, the girls are going to gather around her and tend her and be sympathetic. 0.99

00:05:20.260 What if that had happened to a boy who fought with his stepmother and gone to his room and

00:05:24.720 cried?

00:05:25.040 Is he going to come into school and be able to say that?

00:05:27.900 If he did say that, other boys would back away. 0.98

00:05:31.060 Oh, you know, he's a weakling.

00:05:34.320 I can't, I don't want to catch that.

00:05:37.780 So that boys often, they'll come in and curse the stepmother or look tough or threaten revenge

00:05:44.660 or something else which allows them to think of themselves as manly, but it steers them away

00:05:51.940 from the depth of bad feeling that they had.

00:05:56.480 And it steers them away from a more realistic kind of problem solving.

00:06:00.880 They can't identify that they how humiliated and helpless they felt.

00:06:07.200 And it's helpful to boys to be able to talk about that, but boys' society doesn't allow it.

00:06:13.180 So one part of emotional literacy is recognizing the feelings that a boy might have.

00:06:19.500 You also talk about empathy a lot in the book.

00:06:22.280 Why is it that boys have a hard time empathizing with other people?

00:06:28.500 I don't think we give them practice.

00:06:30.560 I think they want to.

00:06:32.360 The Japanese have, you know, five and six-year-old boys go down and work with two-year-old children 1.00

00:06:39.620 every day in the school.

00:06:41.700 And they say it's so that the boys can develop omiyade, which is Japanese for empathy.

00:06:51.920 They think kids need to look after other children in order to develop these feelings.

00:06:57.320 As I say, if you're taking American boys and you're putting them on competitive town soccer 0.53

00:07:04.840 teams at five and six, they never have it.

00:07:08.820 You're raising them to be ferocious and competitive, but not empathic.

00:07:14.000 Dr. Thompson, a lot of people will hear this and think, okay, that's fine.

00:07:16.820 And, you know, it's great.

00:07:17.680 We should teach emotional literacy and to boys.

00:07:20.380 But it sounds like we're just turning them to little girls.

00:07:23.120 How would you respond to that?

00:07:24.140 I mean, is it possible to teach emotional literacy while encouraging masculine strength in boys?

00:07:28.540 Kind of their innate boyish characteristics?

00:07:30.660 You know, I had a friend who was born and raised in Germany and teaches at a Boston university

00:07:39.000 half a year and teaches at this old university in Germany.

00:07:42.560 And he said many American boys would be stunned by how emotionally open German boys are.

00:07:48.340 This is now one of the most pacifistic countries in the world.

00:07:52.620 I mean, the Germans after World War II made a huge, huge effort to redefine what was masculine.

00:07:59.680 And to raise German boys differently, so they didn't turn out to be so warlike. 0.94

00:08:05.980 And he said, you know, German boys are so emotionally open that American boys would read them as gay.

00:08:13.660 They're not gay. 0.76

00:08:16.660 They're sleeping with girls, but they're talking to them a lot.

00:08:19.820 And that culture of openness and talking comes from the notions we have of masculinity.

00:08:31.700 You know, masculinity varies from culture to culture.

00:08:36.080 What we regard as manly changes from culture to culture.

00:08:40.780 There's a lot about the American definition of masculinity, which I like.

00:08:46.320 The independence, the entrepreneurial kind of do-it-on-your-own attitude.

00:08:51.940 There are lots of things which I think are very helpful to American men.

00:08:55.420 But the tough, silent definition of masculinity is, of course, for psychologists, worrisome.

00:09:03.500 Because it means boys button down and don't express what they're actually feeling.

00:09:09.580 And then they get out of touch with their feelings.

00:09:12.560 And we're getting a lot of young male depression in late adolescence and early adulthood.

00:09:18.580 And that's worrisome to me.

00:09:20.580 So I try and teach boys that emotional courage is courage.

00:09:24.980 Sharing your feelings requires some guts, you know.

00:09:28.480 We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.

00:09:31.840 And now back to the show.

00:09:34.020 It's funny you mentioned about how German men are emotionally open.

00:09:38.300 It seems like there was a time in America that men used to be like this.

00:09:42.540 I mean, if you go back to the 19th century, even before World War II, you would read men, you know, they were very affectionate with each other.

00:09:50.120 You look at photos of men and they would have their arms around each other and sit in each other's lap.

00:09:53.840 Yes, that's right.

00:09:54.880 You know, I was reading TR's diary and he writes, you know, you can tell he was very in touch with his inner self and kind of the emotions.

00:10:04.080 What changed?

00:10:04.820 I mean, what happened where we got away from that until where this manliness and masculinity made kind of this stoic, silent type?

00:10:12.100 Was it World War II that caused this?

00:10:14.420 I'm afraid I don't know.

00:10:16.080 I don't know the answer to that.

00:10:17.560 I think it would take a social historian or a social critic to know.

00:10:23.000 But I do think that the definition of masculinity changed from when I'm 62 years old.

00:10:29.400 When I was a child, there were TV shows with, you know, warm-hearted fathers, and including a show called, which I used to watch regularly, called Father Knows Best.

00:10:41.580 And somebody did a study of TV sitcoms some years ago and found that of 112 fathers on TV shows, there were only about seven of them who were competent. 0.95

00:10:55.840 The rest were boyish, adolescent, irresponsible, nitwit, or irresponsible fathers.

00:11:06.540 I mean, which father, if you were a boy and you were watching Two and a Half Men, which of those two men is a man you can admire as a father figure? 0.97

00:11:16.620 Yeah, well, I don't think either of them is that great, but...

00:11:20.780 Right?

00:11:21.120 I mean, there's the ninny, the real father of the boy, and then there's Charlie Sheen, right? 0.60

00:11:27.340 Excuse me. 0.72

00:11:28.420 Yeah.

00:11:28.720 You know, he's a permanent 17 for life. 0.95

00:11:31.600 And why do you think, I mean, just going on that tangent there, I mean, why do you think we put fatherhood out that it's kind of, you know, being a dad means kind of being the dumb, overgrown child and just another kid in the family? 0.89

00:11:45.500 Why do we love that so much in our society?

00:11:49.240 I don't know.

00:11:50.040 It's very painful to me.

00:11:51.460 Yeah.

00:11:51.720 I mean, why do we?

00:11:53.340 You know, why did the media grab hold of this attenuated adolescent father? 0.97

00:11:59.660 Or, uh, it's an all-a-beer commercial, you know, the women are responsible and the men are nitwits. 0.93

00:12:06.580 Yeah, it's something I think that's frustrating a lot of men these days.

00:12:10.040 And speaking of dads and fathers, what is a father's role in teaching emotional literacy to their sons?

00:12:18.460 I mean, what can dads do?

00:12:19.500 I think as a father, you say to your son, you know, I was scared in middle school sometimes.

00:12:25.580 I was worried about bullies.

00:12:26.880 And I wanted to be stronger, but it didn't turn out that way, you know?

00:12:35.140 I turned out to be a writer, an actor, something.

00:12:41.240 We didn't all turn out to be football players.

00:12:42.980 And many of us found our deepest connections with our friends who are boys, meaningful connections.

00:12:54.300 I think fathers should absolutely demonstrate to their sons the power of male friendship,

00:13:01.220 the power of male love for women and respect for women.

00:13:04.460 I mean, they're just, you have to show a boy what a real man is, not the two-dimensional kinds of characters you see in sports.

00:13:15.520 One thing that kind of struck me in your book that I thought was interesting was that, you know,

00:13:20.340 one thing you can do to teach your sons about emotional literacy is to show your vulnerability sometimes.

00:13:27.180 Right, and you're terrified if your son is weak, you're just terrified that your son will be picked on.

00:13:34.660 But it's better to say what you faced and how you met it with a resilience.

00:13:42.740 So your son knows that the most important thing is not to be just strong through everything,

00:13:48.260 but in fact to be resilient, have some balance.

00:13:50.900 So, Dr. Thompson, you work with boys at an all-boys school. 0.72

00:13:56.220 What are some things that parents or dads can do to help their sons in school?

00:14:00.880 Because it just seems like boys are falling further and further behind.

00:14:05.420 You can go, every month you read an article or see something on the television about how test scores amongst boys are falling down,

00:14:10.740 graduation rates are going down for boys.

00:14:12.520 Right.

00:14:13.140 Well, you know, it's dads who want to send their sons upstairs to do their homework,

00:14:18.080 and they sit downstairs watching, you know, basketball or ice hockey.

00:14:21.900 That won't work.

00:14:23.160 We know that fathers who do their homework with their sons have sons who get higher grades.

00:14:29.220 We know that fathers who attend school PTA meetings and come to things other than town sports have sons who get higher grades.

00:14:37.400 We know that sons whose fathers read to them at night do better academically.

00:14:44.360 So I think when you have a little boy, you shouldn't always let the mom read to them.

00:14:48.520 You should go up and read to your son so that he knows being a man is being a reader.

00:14:54.180 One thing you talked about in your book, too, is how we talked a little bit at the beginning of the interview

00:14:58.160 about how schools are not really designed the way they are in most public schools,

00:15:03.360 aren't designed with boys in mind.

00:15:05.380 And that's one of the reasons why boys are struggling,

00:15:08.220 and teachers struggle with behavioral problems with boys.

00:15:10.700 I mean, what can we do to kind of guide our schools in making them more boy-friendly?

00:15:18.620 Well, in every school I visit, and that's my work as a school consultant,

00:15:25.140 there are schools that are gifted—excuse me, there are teachers that are gifted with boys,

00:15:29.340 and their teachers are not so good with boys.

00:15:31.640 And I want the secrets of teachers who are good with boys to be advertised, that is, highlighted.

00:15:42.000 You know, this is what works with boys in the classroom.

00:15:45.300 There's a Philadelphia psychologist named Michael Reichardt who's coming out with a book called

00:15:50.760 Reaching Boys, Teaching Boys, 0.87

00:15:52.980 and it's based on the best kind of lessons of 600 teachers from boys' schools around the world.

00:15:59.560 And you can actually teach people what are the best kinds of lessons for boys,

00:16:04.240 what really works for them.

00:16:06.420 And that's what I want, because constantly discipline, constantly telling them they're in trouble,

00:16:12.500 just makes them pissed off and withdrawn from school.

00:16:15.160 Yeah. One idea that I've heard thrown around by people, particularly with regard to boys in schools,

00:16:22.120 is actually to enroll boys in a school later than you would girls.

00:16:26.900 Is there any truth to that?

00:16:27.840 Well, it's because in language acquisition, boys—the average boy is behind the average girl in language acquisition.

00:16:35.000 And the average boy is much more physically restless at age five than the average girl is. 0.92

00:16:42.220 So the average boy is—he's up against it in school, which involves a lot of sitting down and listening.

00:16:49.940 So holding them back would kind of put them, I guess, on an even playing field with girls? 0.58

00:16:56.860 Yeah.

00:16:57.400 And Dr. Thompson, as I read your book, I was struck that many adult men have these same emotional problems

00:17:05.180 that the teenage boys you write about in your book.

00:17:08.180 What can these men do to overcome these problems that they have?

00:17:13.440 Yes.

00:17:14.480 Well, you know, many men find that they get a course in their emotional life by falling in love with a young woman in their 20s.

00:17:24.760 And that's great.

00:17:26.980 I think that young men have to go back to their fathers rather than just stay angry and away from them.

00:17:33.160 And go back and ask them the questions you wish you'd had the answers to when you were 14 and 15.

00:17:40.340 I think men have to talk with each other. 0.53

00:17:43.300 I've been a member of a men's group for nine years.

00:17:48.300 That's the kind of thing a psychologist is likely to do.

00:17:51.920 But it's not all mental health professions.

00:17:53.800 It's mostly educators, actually.

00:17:54.980 And, you know, men can train themselves to be open.

00:18:00.780 I mean, the men in this group were all in their 50s when we started this.

00:18:04.860 And we weren't—a lot of these are very strong and proud men, but we trained each other to be open to each other.

00:18:12.220 And that's what I'd like to see.

00:18:14.420 And this book, Raising Cain, your book, was written a few years ago.

00:18:18.680 Have you seen any progress since the publication of the book?

00:18:21.660 Well, I have to believe it.

00:18:26.680 I'm on the road talking about the emotional lives of boys.

00:18:30.680 I have to hope that it's having an impact.

00:18:37.220 But I sure don't see it in the media.

00:18:39.960 Well, Dr. Thompson, thank you for your time.

00:18:41.860 It's been a pleasure.

00:18:43.460 Nice talking with you, Brett.

00:18:44.860 Thanks.

00:18:45.800 Our guest today was Dr. Michael Thompson.

00:18:47.800 Dr. Thompson is the author of the book, Raising Cain, Protecting the Emotional Lives of Boys.

00:18:53.400 And you can pick up Dr. Thompson's book at Amazon.com or any other major bookseller.

00:19:03.040 Well, that wraps up another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:19:07.440 For more manly tips and advice, make sure to check out the Art of Manliness website at artofmanliness.com.

00:19:13.040 And until next time, stay manly.

00:19:17.800 Thank you.

The Art of Manliness - April 03, 2014

Episode #22： Raising Cain With Dr. Michael Thompson

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