Essay: The Myth of Boyhood

Essay: The Myth of Boyhood

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19358334/

July 2-9, 2007 issue - Picture a world where your father walks with
you down a starlit road, pausing to point out Orion. He recites Robert
Frost, knows how a battery works-and all the rules about girls. "The
Dangerous Book for Boys," by brothers Conn and Hal Iggulden, is
peaking on Amazon's best-seller list (No. 5 last week) by recalling
just that world. The compendium of trivia, history and advice is
geared toward preteen boys, but it's found a surprising audience in
men in their 30s and 40s, too. The book's marbled endpapers, archival
illustrations and dry, humorous tone ("excitable bouts of windbreaking
will not endear you to a girl") offers a portal back to a time of
"Sunday afternoons and long summer days."

But did this world ever exist? The book's success suggests we'd like
to think so. First published in Britain last year, it was conceived as
a homage to the popular "Boy's Own" periodicals from the early 1900s.
It's inspired a host of copycats, including "211 Things a Bright Boy
Can Do," by Thomas Cutler, and "The Daring Book for Girls," out in
October, while a reissue of the 1890s volume "The American Boy's Handy
Book," by Daniel Carter Beard, is moving up the charts on Amazon.
Clearly, nostalgia for the halcyon world of our fathers and
grandfathers is strong.

But that nostalgia may tell us more about who we are now than who we
were. Stephanie Coontz, author of "The Way We Never We American
Families and the Nostalgia Trap," says parents worry they're not
spending as much time with their kids as past generations did. In
truth, "people are spending more interactive time and resources on
their kids than ever before," Coontz says. The real problem is they
think they have less to teach them.

"Dangerous" author Conn Iggulden says technology is partially
responsible for this insecurity. "I can't fix a car like my father
used to, because my car has a computer in it," he says. "Once it was
possible to know everything. It gets harder in the modern world."

Such is the nature of nostalgia: "When you have anxieties about the
present you express them by hearkening back to a safer past," says
Coontz. As gender roles become less defined, possession of a discrete
store of traditionally "masculine" knowledge (how to build a go-kart)
gives men a sense of order in a disordered universe. For now,
conservative pundits and bloggers have seized upon "Dangerous" as a
corrective to the "feminization" of the cultu Christina Hoff
Summers writes that it "valorizes risk, adventure and manliness."

The anxiety might also be for our children. Robert Baden Powell,
father of the Boy Scout movement, wrote "Scouting for Boys" in 1908,
out of concern that the young soldiers he had fought with in the Boer
War were physically and morally unfit. "At the height of the British
Empire, the older generation worried about boys' becoming pasty and
soft and useless," says Conn Iggulden. "I see similar concerns today."

But the Boy Scouts of America, with its exclusionary policies toward
gays and atheists, and emphasis on safety over fun, may feel old-
fashioned in a bad way: enrollment has declined steadily for a decade.
"The Dangerous Book for Boys," on the other hand, suggests activities
with a whiff of rebelliousness without advocating anything truly
unsafe. It also gives parents a product, in today's commercial age,
refreshingly free of brands or logos. Of course, they're still falling
for one of the most enduring brands of all: nostalgia.

-Jennie Yabroff

Fred Goodwin, CMA wrote:
Essay: The Myth of Boyhood

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19358334/

Thank you, Fred.

I think Ms. Yabroff is on to something.

Most everyone realizes that boys need to grow up, to become men, during
some period of their lives. Most everyone realizes that in the process,
the boys will take some risks, and in the process will learn a lot about
the world and about other people, and about themselves. And, most
everyone realizes that taking risks involves some actual chance of
getting hurt... What some people don't realize is that by trying to
eliminate the risks, we also limit the learning and growing.

Baden-Powell realized all of those things, and provided a program which
would maximize the learning and growing, while teaching the boys to
minimize and manage the risks. The woods is, after all, really a very
safe place. The risks associated with fire, knives, weather, and bears
are, really, mostly avoided by some easily-understood common sense methods.

In the Guide to Safe Scouting, and the various other "safety" rules, BSA
lawyers have tried to completely eliminate any possibility that the BSA
could be liable for any injury to any boy... But, in doing so, they
have also largely eliminated the sense of risk and excitement that
really helped the boys to learn and grow. Highly supervised,
double-belayed fake-rock climbing, where the kid knows there is no
actual possibility of anything bad happening, is just not the same as
actually climbing up a natural outcrop. And, the excitement and
learning is just not the same, either.

Risk taking is exciting for young people, precisely because it involves
risk. Learning how to do those things, by using skill to reduce and
manage risk, requires accepting some amount of risk. If we try to
completely eliminate the risk, we also eliminate the possibility that
the boys will learn and grow from the experience. And, in the process,
we eliminate the excitement and make the program boring.

I did things as a scout that would simply not be allowed today. I
built pioneering structures from which a fall could have injured. I
went, and took patrols, on overnight trips without adults, or tour
permits, often on the spur of the moment after a few of us got together
on a Saturday morning. I went solo many times... and without an adult
many more times than that. (We almost never had two or more adults.)
All of those involved some amount of risk. I got cut by a knife, burned
by fire, cold, wet, or hungry a few times, and I learned how to
recognize and manage those risks. Later, I did my best to teach the
younger scouts how to do the same, and most of them did pretty well.

Perhaps the key idea is not to try to eliminate the risk. Instead, we
should acknowledge the risk, accept it, teach the boys to acknowledge
and recognize it, and teach them how to manage the risk.

Sure, some boys will get hurt occasionally. That happens. It's part of
growing up, and of being human. But, the vast majority will learn and
grow.

By providing a _relatively_ safe environment, in which boys can learn
and grow, scouting can provide a true service to the nation, and to the
families and the boys. By attempting to provide an _absolutely_ safe
environment, scouting can only make itself boring, drive boys away, and
put itself out of business.

All of the other alternatives that the boys will find will be less
safe... Running with a gang of "friends" on the streets of most cities
is certainly less safe than running with a "patrol" in the woods, given
even a modicum of training about knives, fires, and other scouting
skills, even without the GSS or adult supervision.

The perfect is the enemy of the good.

Perhaps we should set the lawyers to the task of creating a consent
form, in which the parents of each boy acknowledge and consent to the
risks of scouting. And then, just let the volunteer in the local troops
get on with the program. And then, the councils and national
organization can focus on supporting the local volunteers, instead of on
raising money to pay the lawyers.


Steve