By Steve Biddulph
A couple of months ago, I received some amazing news. The sales of my book Raising Boys in its Chinese translation had just passed a million copies in just one year!
This brought my worldwide book total to six million, making me the top selling parenting author – so far – in the 21st Century.
For a shy psychologist living in country Tasmania, this was rather hard to take in.
The last century’s star performer of parenting books was of course Benjamin Spock, who put me well in the shade with 50 million copies of his book Baby and Child Care sold in his lifetime.
Spock is my hero – he was the first writer to really respect parents, telling us that we should trust our own instincts first.
And he went in to bat for a generation reared with his books, by opposing the Vietnam War and the nuclear arms race, arguing that as a paediatrician he had to care for the lives of all children everywhere.
I’m a natural worrier, and so my first worry was whether the ideas in Raising Boys would help in a Chinese setting.
But back at the time of the translation, I had already been talking to many Chinese parents here in Australia who knew the culture back home, and I was much reassured – not only was the message appropriate, but it was very much needed.
What are the key messages of Raising Boys?
Well the first has to be that boys need to be around their dads a lot, to receive affection from them, and really know them in a deep way as they grow up, so they see that men have feelings too, and can be vulnerable and loving.
Single mums can raise boys very well, and they have done for thousands of years, but in my work I talked to thousands of single mums over the years, and found that part of their secret was in making sure their son met good men along the way, to role model what healthy masculinity was like.
It might be a school teacher, grandad, the gay man next door, or a guitar or karate teacher – as long as they were safe good men who a boy could get to know well and imitate and learn from.
Because of their often greater muscle strength, and the poisonous messages sent by porn culture and the long history of sexism in our world, boys need to see respect shown to women – especially their mother by their father.
And as they get a little older, to be explicitly taught never to hurt, exploit or sexually or otherwise misuse girls or women.
The book also broke new ground in sharing research that boys’s brains were slower growing.
So they might not be ready for school at the same age as girls, especially if they were born later in the year.
We began to discover that males in fact are the weaker sex, that their delayed development made them more socially awkward, more prone to separation anxiety, and perhaps because of this, suicide and prison rates were many times higher than for girls.
But this could be prevented – affection, not rushing them into school, helping them with reading and talking, and allowing their energy to be expressed in lots of activity rather than calling them naughty for just being physical.
One astonishing much quoted piece of research was the hormonal change at age 4, when their testicles begin to lay down testosterone making “Leydig” cells, and they often become super active and drive their quiet loving parents quite crazy.
Mums and dads were so relieved that their boys were not naughty, but like having a large dog – you just had to run them around a lot.
The great discovery of this century of course is that no two boys are alike, and they are on a testosterone spectrum, some boofy and a bit slow to learn language, and some sensitive and more gentle, that there a many different ways to be a boy.
Understanding what you have got is your first job – you can read lots of stories and have lots of quiet chats alongside your boofy boy, while helping your quiet boy to know how to stick his chin out and sound loud when necessary, but otherwise know that he is just a much a boy as any other!
The final message which was so taken on around the world was the boys must learn housework – that by age nine they should be making at least one meal a week for the family – cleaning their room, helping around the house – brought smiles, and hopefully a generation of far more likeable men in families of the future.
Less men in jail, more men happy in their relationships and in their own skin. I couldn’t be happier that this might be the case in China as well!
