Sections
Raising the Boys: Saving the Difference
In the book How to Raise Boys: The Power of Connection to Build Good Men, Michael Reichert provides advice and testimonials aimed at helping parents and educators raise thriving boys. Reichert’s book is a response to a legitimately recognized crisis involving boys who, he notes, are five times more likely to be diagnosed with a psychological disorder than are girls.[1]
Many of the challenges that maturing boys face Reichert attributes to the loss of close and meaningful relationships with those who ought to be offering care. He recognizes that “too many boys lose their intimate connections and emotional voices early in their lives. Once detached from their relational anchors, boys are vulnerable to the temptations of the times and lose touch with their sense of who they are.”[2] Reichert offers a prescription to empower boys to avoid these pitfalls. What he offers is a plan and rationale for parents, coaches, mentors, and teachers to work to help create a nurturing space for boys to flourish.[3] To this end, he proposes a paradigm shift. He recommends a shift away from a focus on outcomes and toward a focus on the quality of the relationships caregivers maintain with boys, to think more like a gardener than a builder.[4] Reichert’s prescription, while helpful in addressing a number of problems facing boys, particularly the tendency towards becoming isolated and taking excessive risks, ultimately remains inadequate since it fails to acknowledge and address the specific needs of boys precisely as boys.
Recovering a Relational Humanity
Reichert’s approach to raising boys emphasizes the humanity of boys, underlining the common human nature that boys share with girls. According to Reichert, this means first recognizing “boys’ fundamentally relational human natures—the reality that human development happens in relationships with those offering care.”[5] Reichert pulls this insight from his work as an applied and research psychologist. In particular, he draws on international studies on the education of boys that he conducted with the support of the International Boys’ School Coalition. The most prominent insight that Reichert gleans from these studies is the importance of stable foundational relationships, starting with those in the family. He writes, “Boys rooted in strong attachments to supportive parents, teachers, mentors, and coaches are able to be themselves, and their humanity flourishes.”[6] Given this starting point, the primary aim of How to Raise Boys is to provide encouragement and advice to parents and educators in order to help them “to build and maintain strong connections with boys facing challenges in a boyhood that threatens to pull them away from their moorings.”[7] Reichert challenges parents, teachers, coaches, and other adults involved in the education of boys to take responsibility for the quality of their relationships with the boys in their care. “Repair is always the responsibility of the caregiver,”[8] he writes. “It falls to the adult to exercise sufficient self-awareness that disconnections caused by harsh or angry reactions are monitored and repaired.”[9]
Recognizing the relational nature of human beings, boys and girls alike, is commendable and necessary in a book dedicated to helping parents and teachers raise children. It is fair to say that this relational aspect of the nature of every human being, the need for enduring connection to others, has not always been adequately recognized, even in overtly Christian societies. One needs only to look at the history of the notion of “person” in theology and philosophy to see that there has been a tendency, especially in the modern period, to conceive of the person first as an individual substance and only later as capable of relation, perhaps only as an option one may either choose or forgo.[10] This philosophical stance is poetically captured in ideal of masculinity exemplified by Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If,” when he writes, “If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you (…) you’ll be a Man, my son.”[11] It is the ideal of the “lone ranger” which “rests on the assumption that in a state of nature, men would be wild and free.”[12]
In response to a narrowing anthropological vision which emphasizes the individuality and independence of solitary human beings, one which has had drastic consequences for the education of her children, the Church, who rightly calls herself “expert in humanity,”[13] affirmed during the Second Vatican Council that “by his innermost nature man is a social being, and unless he relates himself to others he can neither live nor develop his potential.”[14] Extrapolating from this teaching of the Second Vatican Council, the Compendium of the Social Teaching of the Catholic Church further states, “The relationship between God and man is reflected in the relational and social dimension of human nature.”[15]
Recovering a Relational Masculinity
In the popular press, scholars like Richard Reeves have similarly, though in a secular manner, offered a critique of the notion of masculinity as quintessentially impassible and individualistic. In his essay, “What Men Are For,” Reeves contrasts the “relational masculinity” he witnessed in his father with “the masculine archetype of the Lone Ranger, especially salient in America, in which manhood is defined by fierce independence, even to the point of isolation.”[16] In a similar vein, Reichert sees in inner-city American culture a common ideal of masculinity which eschews connectedness as vulnerability. The ideal of masculinity, Reicher suggests, easily informs what he calls the “boy code,” which, though never defined, explicitly appears to be a sort of little league version of the Lone Star Ranger ideal.
Reeves and Reichert are right to critique this vision of masculinity, which glamorizes impassibility as quintessentially masculine. The inability to suffer—to not be affected by another outside oneself—is certainly not the ideal of masculine perfection, but is rather a caricature of it. Such a caricature of manhood leads to the imprisonment of the ego and to many of the lamentable predicaments of isolation and depression which too often beset young men. Reichert (and Reeves for that matter) are to be commended, then, for seeking to counter this vision of masculinity with one that takes seriously the relational nature of boys and men. Where Reichert falls short, however, is in his inability to articulate a precisely masculine mode of relationality.
Reichert categorically fails to do justice to the distinct differences between boys and girls, and between men and women. While praiseworthy in some of his practical suggestions, Reichert ignores that which sets boys apart from girls—what makes them specifically different and complementary to girls. Reichert’s acknowledgement of a boys’ need for connection leads him to the regrettable conclusion that what boys need is to be treated more the way that girls are typically treated. On this point, Reichert quotes a columnist with whose conclusion he readily agrees, “Boys shouldn’t have to be brave. They shouldn’t have to strive to produce. Boys should be more like . . . well, girls, I guess.”[17] This idea of raising boys in ways that reduce their characteristically masculine ways weaves its way through the whole of the book. He endorses the idea of the well-known feminist Gloria Steinem who has recommended that we “‘raise our sons more like our daughters[.]’”[18]
A Truncated Vision of Masculinity
In dismissing any evidence that boys and girls are inherently different, Reichert fails to identify and acknowledge the specifically masculine virtues which are, albeit human, exemplified in a particular way in the virtuous man. Without naming specific authors or studies, he dismisses the burgeoning scientific evidence that sexual difference is a significant part of human nature. Without explanation, he writes, “claims of biological difference are backed up with pseudoscience.”[19] In reality, there is a burgeoning field of research which is highlighting and giving scientific accounts of the differences between men and women from conception through every developmental period. Louann Brizendine, MD, for instance, has written on both male and female neuroscience in a way that highlights these differences without falling into false stereotypes. With copious evidence to back up her claim, she argues that “the unique brain structures and hormones of boys and men create a male reality that is fundamentally different from the female one and all too frequently oversimplified and misunderstood.”[20]
In light of Reichert’s stark rejection of sexual difference, one might reasonably ask what makes a boy a boy as distinct from a girl. In Reichert’s estimation, it appears that it is primarily, if not exclusively, the social conditioning that accompanies being assigned “male” at birth. Reichert identifies and laments the presence of a ubiquitous “boy code” which he and others claim stifles the development of the full humanity of boys as human beings. He describes this “boy code” as “a Darwinian masculine code that is corrosive for [boys’] human development, their virtue, and their well-being.”[21] The aim of his book is largely to provide tools to circumvent and castrate this flawed masculine code. According to Reichert, “Gender socialization is especially forceful with boys. In all of their relationships–with their peers, parents, and teachers–a system of rewards and punishments operates to suppress feminine qualities and press male children toward masculine ideals.”[22] Reichert assumes that “masculine ideals” are contrary to the nature of boys because he does not acknowledge a meaningful difference between boys and girls. Nowhere in his writing is there an attempt given to salvage an authentic masculinity from a counterfeit stereotype or from a deficient and impoverished ideal. He makes no attempt to distinguish between a hypertrophy and atrophy of masculine traits. He does not illustrate an image of the kind of man he is aiming to foster through his emphasis on the power of connection. While he diagnoses and proposes a cure for one aspect of the maladies disproportionately affecting boys in post-industrial societies, he does not lead his readers to the contemplation of a positive masculinity.
Responding to “Masculinity as Mere Socialization”
Reichert, it seems, has embraced an ideology of gender which inhibits him from seeing the richness of the reality-rooted idea of sexual difference within a common humanity. Moreover, he does not once acknowledge a healthy, constructive, and vibrant masculinity of boys and men which would complement the femininity of girls and women. It is the common humanity that he sees, but this seems to be all that he is able to see. He laments that it is not possible to protect boys from “gender role” conformation and that “parents’ best efforts to protect their children notwithstanding, gender norms are unavoidable in all present societies and influence everything from clothing and toys to friendship choices.”[23] Reichert neglects to mention that this would have been true not only in all present societies but in all past societies as well.
Thankfully, antidotes to Reichert’s androgynous boyology abound. Prominent among these are Anthony Esolen’s two books addressing the masculine genius, No Apologies: Why Civilization Depends on the Strength of Men and Defending Boyhood: How Building Forts, Reading Stories, Playing Ball, and Praying to God Can Change the World.Anthony Esolen astutely observes that those who, like Reichert, say that boys act the way they do not because of their nature as boys but merely because they are socialized to do so from infancy make three fatal errors all at once. “First, they posit a dichotomy between nature and society that does violence to the creatures they are observing, since man is by nature a social animal, and the societies he forms without ideological deliberation are but his nature writ large.”[24] According to Reichert, masculinity writ large lacks any redeeming characteristics worth mentioning. What Reichert and others aim to annihilate, whether they are aware of it or not, is boyhood itself as a specification of childhood, and manhood itself as one of two archetypal forms of a common humanity. The second error Esolen identifies is that those who claim boys and girls have no meaningful differences “ignore or deny the biological and physical imperatives, and indeed they show little desire to imagine what it might be like to inhabit a male body, with its vast array of differences[.]”[25] Finally, the third error is that “they betray their own desire to compel boys and girls to act against their natures, to force them, like hothouse plants.”[26]
Raising Boys (and Girls) for the Common Good
While Reichert shares helpful and insightful recommendations for raising human beings, his dismissal of the positive contribution of the specifically masculine is regrettable and short-sighted. Many of his proposals are certainly worth considering and even implementing, but on their own, they do not provide a solid foundation for raising a boy precisely because of the questions which are neither asked nor answered in his writings. Two of the most fundamental questions which need to be asked are, “What are we raising boys to become?” and “What is a boy?” And these two questions are integrally related. The answer to the first provides an important part of the answer to the second. A sufficient answer to these anthropological questions require a turn to philosophy and theology. The fact that biological differences exist is well attested by the scientific evidence available today. A plethora of studies and articles on the subject is found at the end of Brizendine’s book on the male brain. However, neither Reichert nor Brizendine explicitly ask nor answer the questions which we have just raised.
Esolen provides an insightful contribution for our thinking about the education of boys and girls. He counsels us to educate our boys “both apart from and toward the girls.”[27] The masculine, which the boy literally embodies, is for the feminine. And the same can be said in reverse. The sexual difference between male and female is given, from the beginning, for the sake of a full and fruitful relational humanity. A man’s strength is meant to give, serve, and protect vulnerable life. As Esolen puts it:
The actions of virtuous and even half-decent men are for all the people, and most centrally for the women and the children. The women and the children are primary in the order of ends, and he is secondary and ancillary. They are indispensable, and he is indispensably dispensable: it is his great virtue and honor to pour out his sweat and his blood for their sake.[28]
The integration of what is feminine and masculine can only come about through the cultivation of a mature and authentic masculinity which is prepared to and ordered toward a mature and authentic femininity.
Sexual difference, ontologically rooted in our mode of being human and biologically expressed at every level, from the marking of chromosomes and DNA to bone and brain structure, must be the foundation for a unique approach to the education of boys that will differ in significant ways from the education of girls. As Esolen observes, “Boys who are friends with one another lean against the side of a truck, facing the same direction, taking on the world. The boy who likes a girl looks toward her, precisely because he and she are not the same.”[30]
An adequate approach to the education of boys must take a “both/and” approach characteristic of Catholic thought. Men and women both share a common human nature, and men and women each embody and live out this human nature in two distinct and complementary modes of being human. Any adequate approach to boys’ education must acknowledge the weight and significance of sexual difference. This acknowledgment will lead to a unique and yet complementary approach to the education of boys and girls.
The Catholic approach to femininity and masculinity recognizes that there are aspects of human nature that are best exemplified either through the specifically masculine or the specifically feminine. There is perhaps no better compendium of Catholic teaching on the value and goal of sexual difference than the 2004 “Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and in the World” promulgated by the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, headed at the time by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. Here, Joseph Ratzinger, the primary architect and author of the text, tells us:
The second creation account (Gn 2:4-25) confirms in a definitive way [that] the importance and the meaning of sexual difference, as a reality deeply inscribed in man and woman, needs to be noted. ‘Sexuality characterizes man and woman not only on the physical level, but also on the psychological and spiritual, making its mark on each of their expressions’. It cannot be reduced to a pure and insignificant biological fact, but rather ‘as a fundamental component of personality, one of its modes of being, of manifestation, of communicating with others, of feeling, of expressing and of living human love’. This capacity to love – reflection and image of God who is Love – is disclosed in the spousal character of the body, in which the masculinity or femininity of the person is expressed.[31]
The Church helps to illumine the way forward by showing us that there is no contradiction between acknowledging the common humanity of men and women while at the same time acknowledging the significance, gift, and task presented within sexual difference which goes to the deepest level of the human person affecting both the whole person, body and soul.
When the Church proposes the recognition of a “feminine genius,” she proposed this idea not merely for women but for humanity as a whole. The answer to a warped or disjointed masculinity is not femininity, but masculinity properly conceived. This is what Reichert fails to imagine. As Ratzigner teaches, the “feminine values” articulated in the document are “above all human values[.]” He continues:
[T]he human condition of man and woman created in the image of God is one and indivisible. It is only because women are more immediately attuned to these values that they are the reminder and the privileged sign of such values. But, in the final analysis, every human being, man or woman, is destined to be “for the other”. In this perspective, that which is called “femininity” is more than simply an attribute of the female sex. The word designates indeed the fundamental human capacity to live for the other and because of the other.[32]
Through a careful reception of the full teaching of the Catholic Church on the collaboration of men and women, the shortcomings of Reichert’s approach can be overcome through an anthropology which saves both the similarity and the difference between boys and girls, as well as men and women.
[1] Reichert, Michael. How To Raise A Boy: The Power of Connection to Build Good Men (p. 10). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
[2] Reichert, Michael. How To Raise A Boy: The Power of Connection to Build Good Men (p. 3). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
[3] Reichert, Michael. How To Raise A Boy: The Power of Connection to Build Good Men (p. 25). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
[4] Cf. Reichert, Michael. How To Raise A Boy: The Power of Connection to Build Good Men (p. 25). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
[5] Reichert, Michael. How To Raise A Boy: The Power of Connection to Build Good Men (p. 3). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
[6] Reichert, Michael. How To Raise A Boy: The Power of Connection to Build Good Men (p. 29). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
[7] Reichert, Michael. How To Raise A Boy: The Power of Connection to Build Good Men (p. 29). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
[8] Reichert, Michael. How To Raise A Boy: The Power of Connection to Build Good Men (p. 43). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
[9] Reichert, Michael. How To Raise A Boy: The Power of Connection to Build Good Men (p. 43). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
[10] Cf. Ratzinger, Joseph Cardinal. “Concerning the Notion of Person in Theology,” in Communio Vol. 17.3, 439-454.
[11] Kipling, Rudyard. “If.” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46473/if—
[12] Reeves, Richard V. “What Men Are For,” in Comment, 31 August 2023, https://comment.org/what-men-are-for/#.
[13] Compendium of the Social Teaching of the Catholic Church, n. 61.
[14] Gaudium et Spes, n. 12.
[15] Compendium of the Social Teaching of the Catholic Church, n. 110.
[16] Reeves, Richard V. “What Men Are For,” in Comment, 31 August 2023, https://comment.org/what-men-are-for/#.
[17] Reichert, Michael. How To Raise A Boy: The Power of Connection to Build Good Men (p. 5). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
[18] Reichert, Michael . How To Raise A Boy: The Power of Connection to Build Good Men (p. 271). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
[19] Reichert, Michael . How To Raise A Boy: The Power of Connection to Build Good Men (p. 31). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
[20] Brizendine, Louann. The Male Brain: A Breakthrough Understanding of How Men and Boys Think (p. 15). Harmony/Rodale/Convergent. Kindle Edition.
[21] Reichert, Michael. How To Raise A Boy: The Power of Connection to Build Good Men (p. 3). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
[22] Reichert, Michael. How To Raise A Boy: The Power of Connection to Build Good Men (p. 31). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
[23] Reichert, Michael. How To Raise A Boy: The Power of Connection to Build Good Men (p. 117). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
[24] Esolen, Anthony. No Apologies: Why Civilization Depends on the Strength of Men (p. 11). Skyhorse Publishing. Kindle Edition.
[25] Esolen, Anthony. No Apologies: Why Civilization Depends on the Strength of Men (p. 11). Skyhorse Publishing. Kindle Edition.
[26] Esolen, Anthony. No Apologies: Why Civilization Depends on the Strength of Men (p. 11). Skyhorse Publishing. Kindle Edition.
[27] Esolen, Anthony. “A Boy’s Life: 5 Ways to Shield Our Sons from the Anti-Culture and Set Them Towards Healthy Manhood.” Salvo. #43. Winter 2017. https://salvomag.com/article/salvo43/a-boys-life
[28] Esolen, Anthony. No Apologies: Why Civilization Depends on the Strength of Men (p. 82). Skyhorse Publishing. Kindle Edition.
[29] John Paul II, Mulieris Dignitatem, n. 7 quoted in Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, “Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and in the World.” 31 July 2004. https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20040731_collaboration_en.html
[30] Esolen, Anthony. “A Boy’s Life: 5 Ways to Shield Our Sons from the Anti-Culture and Set Them Towards Healthy Manhood.” Salvo. #43. Winter 2017. https://salvomag.com/article/salvo43/a-boys-life
[31] Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, “Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and in the World.” (31 July 2004), n. 6. https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20040731_collaboration_en.html. Cf. Congregation for Catholic Education, Educational Guidance in Human Love (1 November 1983), 4. https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/ccatheduc/documents/rc_con_ccatheduc_doc_19831101_sexual-education_en.html
[32] Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, “Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and in the World.” 31 July 2004, n. 6. https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20040731_collaboration_en.html
About the Author
Joseph Lanzilotti
Dr. Joseph Lanzilotti joined The Heights School faculty in 2022. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Biology with a second major in Philosophy from DeSales University, a Master of Arts degree in Theology from Ave Maria University, and a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) degree in Theology from the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family. Having grown up in rural New Jersey, Dr. Lanzilotti developed a great love for the natural world. He is a beekeeper and gardener. He enjoys trail running, swimming, and skiing. Joseph and his wife, Caeli, have a two-year-old son. They reside in Reston, VA.