Episode #22： Raising Cain With Dr. Michael Thompson
Episode Stats
Summary
Boys are falling further and further behind in school, and an alarming number of them are at a high risk for depression, alcohol and drug abuse, violence, and suicide. What s the cause of these problems and what can we do to help boys? Well, our guest today has written a book about this topic, and in addition to writing about the psychology of boys, Dr. Michael Thompson travels the country speaking and educating audiences about the emotional and psychological needs of boys today.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here and welcome to another episode of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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They're falling further and further behind in school.
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And an alarming number of boys are at a high risk for depression, alcohol and drug abuse,
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But what's the cause of these problems and what can we do to help boys?
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Well, our guest today has written a book about this topic.
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His name is Dr. Michael Thompson, and he's the co-author of the book Raising Cain, Protecting
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The book was later turned into a PBS documentary with the same title, which Dr. Thompson wrote
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And Dr. Thompson is a psychologist specializing in children and families.
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He's the clinical consultant at Belmont High School, an all-boys school in Massachusetts.
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And in addition to writing about the psychology of boys, Dr. Thompson travels the country speaking
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and educating audiences about the emotional and psychological needs of boys today.
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Well, Dr. Thompson, what are the emotional problems that boys are facing these days?
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It's the problems of feeling good about yourself as a boy and a man in a society which is super
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focused on the school performance where you can't play outdoors because your parents are
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And so you don't have the kind of practice being a boy that you had when there was neighborhood
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I think that's the biggest challenge to boys today is that they don't get to create their
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And their own definition of boyhood, they often feel penned in by school, but they're pounded
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continuously with the idea that school is so important.
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And finally, there's the problem that boys have always had, which is how to maintain your
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sensitive inner feelings and look strong on the outside and feel strong to yourself.
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And so you mentioned that the way that schools are set up are kind of a detriment to boys.
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Are there any cultural ideas that kind of have a detrimental effect on boys?
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The United States is the most violent society in the industrialized world.
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Our murder and rape rates are 2 to 20 to 60 times higher than Western Europe, even though
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our rates of violence have been going down since 1995 after a tremendous 20-year run-up.
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Even though they've been going down in this country, they're still much higher than anywhere
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I think it makes them not trust boy play, be afraid of boys in school.
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And of course, the boys who are being raised in high-risk neighborhoods are at risk for seeing
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violence and being pulled into violence themselves.
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How can you feel strong in this life without actually ending up violent?
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So what's the solution to these emotional inner problems that boys face today?
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It's having fathers who model self-control, who model studiousness, who model many different
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The problem is that 35% of American boys don't have a biological father at home, and they're
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very dependent on the media to shape what they think of as masculinity.
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I mean, I ask suburban boys with hardworking, busy, preoccupied fathers what their image of
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masculinity is, and they say NFL football players.
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Because these football players aren't absolutely the best models for boys, because so few boys
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Most of us are going to have to make it in the world thinking of ourselves as men in some
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And if it's not an athlete, sometimes it's oftentimes now a celebrity of some sort.
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And you talk in your book a lot about developing the emotional literacy in boys.
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Yeah, it's an ability to identify your feelings and be able to speak about them.
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Many boys, look, I believe boys have the full range of emotional feelings that girls do.
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But in boys' society, when you're supposed to look strong, you don't admit to feelings of
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Or if you admit to it, you admit to it only in a humorous way.
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Think of a fifth grade girl walking into a classroom and saying, oh, I was so upset with
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We fought and fought, and I just went to my room and cried.
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Okay, the girls are going to gather around her and tend her and be sympathetic.
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What if that had happened to a boy who fought with his stepmother and gone to his room and
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Is he going to come into school and be able to say that?
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If he did say that, other boys would back away.
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So that boys often, they'll come in and curse the stepmother or look tough or threaten revenge
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or something else which allows them to think of themselves as manly, but it steers them away
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And it steers them away from a more realistic kind of problem solving.
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They can't identify that they how humiliated and helpless they felt.
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And it's helpful to boys to be able to talk about that, but boys' society doesn't allow it.
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So one part of emotional literacy is recognizing the feelings that a boy might have.
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Why is it that boys have a hard time empathizing with other people?
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The Japanese have, you know, five and six-year-old boys go down and work with two-year-old children
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And they say it's so that the boys can develop omiyade, which is Japanese for empathy.
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They think kids need to look after other children in order to develop these feelings.
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As I say, if you're taking American boys and you're putting them on competitive town soccer
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You're raising them to be ferocious and competitive, but not empathic.
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Dr. Thompson, a lot of people will hear this and think, okay, that's fine.
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We should teach emotional literacy and to boys.
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But it sounds like we're just turning them to little girls.
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I mean, is it possible to teach emotional literacy while encouraging masculine strength in boys?
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You know, I had a friend who was born and raised in Germany and teaches at a Boston university
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half a year and teaches at this old university in Germany.
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And he said many American boys would be stunned by how emotionally open German boys are.
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This is now one of the most pacifistic countries in the world.
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I mean, the Germans after World War II made a huge, huge effort to redefine what was masculine.
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And to raise German boys differently, so they didn't turn out to be so warlike.
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And he said, you know, German boys are so emotionally open that American boys would read them as gay.
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They're sleeping with girls, but they're talking to them a lot.
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And that culture of openness and talking comes from the notions we have of masculinity.
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You know, masculinity varies from culture to culture.
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What we regard as manly changes from culture to culture.
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There's a lot about the American definition of masculinity, which I like.
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The independence, the entrepreneurial kind of do-it-on-your-own attitude.
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There are lots of things which I think are very helpful to American men.
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But the tough, silent definition of masculinity is, of course, for psychologists, worrisome.
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Because it means boys button down and don't express what they're actually feeling.
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And then they get out of touch with their feelings.
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And we're getting a lot of young male depression in late adolescence and early adulthood.
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So I try and teach boys that emotional courage is courage.
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Sharing your feelings requires some guts, you know.
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We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.
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It's funny you mentioned about how German men are emotionally open.
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It seems like there was a time in America that men used to be like this.
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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.
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You look at photos of men and they would have their arms around each other and sit in each other's lap.
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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.
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I mean, what happened where we got away from that until where this manliness and masculinity made kind of this stoic, silent type?
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I think it would take a social historian or a social critic to know.
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But I do think that the definition of masculinity changed from when I'm 62 years old.
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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.
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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.
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The rest were boyish, adolescent, irresponsible, nitwit, or irresponsible fathers.
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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?
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Yeah, well, I don't think either of them is that great, but...
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I mean, there's the ninny, the real father of the boy, and then there's Charlie Sheen, right?
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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?
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You know, why did the media grab hold of this attenuated adolescent father?
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Or, uh, it's an all-a-beer commercial, you know, the women are responsible and the men are nitwits.
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Yeah, it's something I think that's frustrating a lot of men these days.
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And speaking of dads and fathers, what is a father's role in teaching emotional literacy to their sons?
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I think as a father, you say to your son, you know, I was scared in middle school sometimes.
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And I wanted to be stronger, but it didn't turn out that way, you know?
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I turned out to be a writer, an actor, something.
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And many of us found our deepest connections with our friends who are boys, meaningful connections.
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I think fathers should absolutely demonstrate to their sons the power of male friendship,
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the power of male love for women and respect for women.
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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.
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One thing that kind of struck me in your book that I thought was interesting was that, you know,
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one thing you can do to teach your sons about emotional literacy is to show your vulnerability sometimes.
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Right, and you're terrified if your son is weak, you're just terrified that your son will be picked on.
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But it's better to say what you faced and how you met it with a resilience.
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So your son knows that the most important thing is not to be just strong through everything,
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but in fact to be resilient, have some balance.
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So, Dr. Thompson, you work with boys at an all-boys school.
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What are some things that parents or dads can do to help their sons in school?
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Because it just seems like boys are falling further and further behind.
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You can go, every month you read an article or see something on the television about how test scores amongst boys are falling down,
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Well, you know, it's dads who want to send their sons upstairs to do their homework,
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and they sit downstairs watching, you know, basketball or ice hockey.
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We know that fathers who do their homework with their sons have sons who get higher grades.
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We know that fathers who attend school PTA meetings and come to things other than town sports have sons who get higher grades.
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We know that sons whose fathers read to them at night do better academically.
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So I think when you have a little boy, you shouldn't always let the mom read to them.
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You should go up and read to your son so that he knows being a man is being a reader.
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One thing you talked about in your book, too, is how we talked a little bit at the beginning of the interview
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about how schools are not really designed the way they are in most public schools,
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And that's one of the reasons why boys are struggling,
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and teachers struggle with behavioral problems with boys.
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I mean, what can we do to kind of guide our schools in making them more boy-friendly?
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Well, in every school I visit, and that's my work as a school consultant,
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there are schools that are gifted—excuse me, there are teachers that are gifted with boys,
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And I want the secrets of teachers who are good with boys to be advertised, that is, highlighted.
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You know, this is what works with boys in the classroom.
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There's a Philadelphia psychologist named Michael Reichardt who's coming out with a book called
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and it's based on the best kind of lessons of 600 teachers from boys' schools around the world.
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And you can actually teach people what are the best kinds of lessons for boys,
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And that's what I want, because constantly discipline, constantly telling them they're in trouble,
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just makes them pissed off and withdrawn from school.
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Yeah. One idea that I've heard thrown around by people, particularly with regard to boys in schools,
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is actually to enroll boys in a school later than you would girls.
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Well, it's because in language acquisition, boys—the average boy is behind the average girl in language acquisition.
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And the average boy is much more physically restless at age five than the average girl is.
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So the average boy is—he's up against it in school, which involves a lot of sitting down and listening.
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So holding them back would kind of put them, I guess, on an even playing field with girls?
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And Dr. Thompson, as I read your book, I was struck that many adult men have these same emotional problems
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that the teenage boys you write about in your book.
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What can these men do to overcome these problems that they have?
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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.
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I think that young men have to go back to their fathers rather than just stay angry and away from them.
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And go back and ask them the questions you wish you'd had the answers to when you were 14 and 15.
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I've been a member of a men's group for nine years.
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That's the kind of thing a psychologist is likely to do.
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And, you know, men can train themselves to be open.
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I mean, the men in this group were all in their 50s when we started this.
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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.
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And this book, Raising Cain, your book, was written a few years ago.
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Have you seen any progress since the publication of the book?
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I'm on the road talking about the emotional lives of boys.
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Dr. Thompson is the author of the book, Raising Cain, Protecting the Emotional Lives of Boys.
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And you can pick up Dr. Thompson's book at Amazon.com or any other major bookseller.
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Well, that wraps up another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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For more manly tips and advice, make sure to check out the Art of Manliness website at artofmanliness.com.