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Helping Boys Overcome IDD
The following essay first appeared as an article in Alvaro de Vicente’s Substack publication, Men in the Making. For more articles like this one, you can visit his page here. Subscribe to the publication to stay up-to-date on Alvaro’s writing.
Mark Twain once said that to get the full value of joy you must have someone with whom you can divide it. Sadly, many men today have few such friends with whom to share their joys and bear their sorrows. While many decry the challenges of ADD for boys, perhaps an equally important issue is what I call IDD—intimacy deficit disorder.
IDD plagues men who, on average, have fewer close friends than do women. Studies indicate that the percentage of males who report having at least six close friends has been cut in half since the 1990s. Indeed, some social scientists have hypothesized that this lack of intimacy among males is a potential cause of another statistic: widows live longer after the death of their spouse than do widowers, as women tend to have more friends who fill their lives with purpose and joy even after the death of their husband.
While there is no easy panacea for this problem, as with most things, one’s education can have a profound impact on how a boy learns—or does not learn—to relate to others. If men are going to sustain real friendships when they are adults, they must learn how to have them when they are boys.
So, how do you help a boy become the kind of man that will be a true friend? How do you help him overcome—or better yet avoid in the first place—IDD?
The bad news is that there is no single, guaranteed algorithm that ensures your son has deep friendships. Helping boys develop friendships is not a mathematical problem to be solved by formula, but rather an art that requires patience and prudence—a knowledge of particular individuals and not only abstract ideas. Real friendships, by their very nature, cannot be forced. Any attempts to manufacture them are likely to feel unnatural and will therefore be counterproductive. The good news, however, is that your son is made for friendship. He is a social animal and, as such, he is born with the desire to find good friends. He just needs to be offered the right coaching and to be given the right opportunities.
Here are three ideas to ponder, as you coach your sons in the manly art of friendship:
- Boredom, oh blessed boredom;
- Parents are welcome;
- Virtue is king.
Boredom, Oh Blessed Boredom
Many people, especially in the D.C. metropolitan area where I live, suffer from over-programming. Parenting easily becomes a kind of activity management. Parents become like directors of a cruise ship, setting up their home life in such a way that their son is never without adequate entertainment and activities. It is as if being starved of diversions were akin to being starved of food. The result of such over-programming is a frenetic pace of life.
The causes of such over-programming are various. Fear of failure—a worry that one may appear unaccomplished—is certainly one of them. At the root of our modern freneticism may also be a tacit fear of boredom. Likely, every parent has heard his son complain of being bored, and in the moment felt the urge to solve the problem for him.
Boredom, however, is not evil per se. It very often can be a good starting point. Rather than seeking to satisfy their son’s growing need for more distractions from boredom, parents should teach their sons that it is okay to be bored. They should communicate to him a sense that he can face a few hours of having “nothing” to do and survive. In fact, time at home with nothing in particular to do is healthy for a boy’s development, especially the development of certain dispositions needed for genuine friendship.
The ability to embrace boredom may even be a precursor to deep friendship. To be a friend requires the ability to be present to another without needing to gain anything apparently useful from it. As Aristotle reminds us, real friends are useless. By this, he does not mean to say they are meaningless or purposeless, but rather that a true friend is someone with whom you can linger—someone with whom you can waste time well. Of course, spending time with a friend is not truly a waste of time; it is perhaps one of the best uses of time. But the point is that spending time with real friends is good for its own sake. Many fruits may come from it, but it is not sought merely for the sake of the benefits that may result. A friend can simply say to a friend, as Peter said to his Friend, “it is good that we are here.”
Being present in this way requires a certain contemplative disposition. Embracing boredom fosters this disposition by encouraging a healthy introspection, something which for many boys can be quite uncomfortable. It is much easier for a boy to rush from one entertainment to the next than to remain still. Down time leads a young man to become more observant of others and himself. Parents should not rob their son of this opportunity so as to alleviate themselves of the annoyance of their son’s complaints.
As a boy learns to slow down, to sit without being in a hurry, he will discover that whatever is around him is actually quite fascinating. He will come to see that Chesterton was right when he said, “There are no uninteresting things, only uninterested people.” Most of all, other people will become infinitely interesting to him. This attention to other people will be the starting point for deep friendship, and the ability to sit with them in an unhurried manner will be the catalyst.
Parents Are Welcome
In advising parents to let their sons be bored, I do not mean to advocate that parents should not play an important role in their son’s social lives. Parents should be involved in their son’s social life just as they are involved in other things that matter in their child’s life. And growing in the capacity to form deep friendships is certainly important—even more important, I would say, than grades or athletic success.
Though the matter and manner will differ greatly, boys need their parents’ help just as much in high school as they did when they were infants. Because the needs of an older boy are less apparent and tangible than those of a baby, parents need to be more intentional about how they tend to them. Your job in his social life is two-fold:
- Find the right theater;
- Remain your son’s acting coach.
You do not have control over who the other actors are, nor what plays are put on, but you can choose what theater you send your son to. If you find the theater that seems to show the right plays and attract the right actors, then you do not need to worry. Practically speaking, this means finding the right families, schools, teams, camps, and so on.
Though you cannot dictate what your son says or does—you are not the director of his life—you can and should remain his acting coach. Help him to discover his role and to play it well. Of course, a coach is most powerful and effective when the player seeks his advice. A coach that has to barrel his way into the player’s mind has already lost the battle. To become the kind of coach your son seeks for advice, a parent should strive to be interested, collaborative, and respectful.
Parents can show interest in their son’s social life by asking questions in a way that is not too judgmental. If you constantly judge your son’s choice of friends, he may begin to resist opening up to you about them. The overall tone of your questions should be one of genuine curiosity in his life. You do, of course, need to help your son develop a knack for choosing friends wisely and this inevitably involves making judgments, but you should seek to make judgments lovingly—that is, accurately and with mercy.
Flowing from your interest in his social life, you should seek to be collaborative by facilitating, to the extent that you can, his social life. Collaboration will look different depending on your circumstances, but the message you want to transmit to your son is that you are happy when he is with friends.
A way to show interest and a desire to collaborate with your son is by listening more than you talk when conversing with him about his social life. Very often parents have an idea of what their son should do before he even starts talking. After his first sentence, they are ready to share their opinion. Instead of immediately offering how you would handle a situation, ask questions that get him to think about what he should do. Get him to explain the difficulties of his social life. Get him to seek solutions. By attentively listening to him you are not only letting him grow in prudence, you are teaching him by example how to be interested in the life of others.
Finally, you should be respectful of your son’s decisions. It is his social life, not yours. Some things you may warn him of, if they are immoral; but there are many things that are a matter of preference. And you should be respectful of his friends, even defending them. If a friend slips up, help your son to judge him charitably by clarifying the difference between the person and the action. No one is all bad; we should seek to see the good in everyone. At the same time, you should help your son realize that to be a loyal friend means being dedicated to his friend’s real good—not just protecting him from being caught. Sometimes being loyal to a friend may mean defending him from himself, who can be his own worst enemy.
Virtue Is King
The best preparation for being a good friend is helping your son pursue a life of virtue. Help him seek friends who are also trying to live a life of virtue. I have observed that the young man who strives to live such a life, even if imperfectly, proves to be best kind of friend. Such a young man not only helps others live well, he also helps his friends really enjoy life. A virtuous friend is better both as a guide to heaven and a companion on earth.
A concrete way to help your son think about pursuing a life of virtue with his friends is to encourage him to consider how he can live the spiritual works of mercy in his friendships:
- Instruct the ignorant
- Counsel the doubtful
- Admonish the sinner
- Comfort the sorrowful
- Forgive injuries
- Bear wrongs patiently
- Pray for the living and the dead
A final thought to ponder: Cicero said of friendship that, aside from wisdom, there exists perhaps no greater gift given to man from the immortal gods. Although there may be no fool-proof formula that guarantees your son will find deep, lasting friendships, by helping him develop the capacity for intimacy—helping him avoid or overcome IDD—you are preparing him to receive one of the pearls of this life. And what is more, you are preparing him to receive that even greater pearl of the next life, eternal friendship with God.
About the Author
Alvaro de Vicente
In addition to his responsibilities as headmaster of The Heights, Alvaro acts as a mentor to high schoolers, and teaches senior Apologetics.