Title: Bringing Up Boys
Author: James Dobson
Date: 2001
Publisher: Tyndale House
ISBN: 0-8423-5266-X
Length: 257 pages of text, 11 pages of references
Quote: “Boys, when compared to girls, are six times more likely to have learning disabilities, three times more likely to be registered drug addicts, and four times more likely to be diagnosed as emotionally disturbed. They are at greater risk for schizophrenia, autism, sexual addiction, alcoholism, bed wetting, and all forms of antisocial and criminal behavior. They are twelve times more likely to murder someone, and their rate of death in car accidents is greater by 50 percent...There is more.”
What was I doing even reading this book? I bought it, of course, for resale. I don’t have sons. I do, however, have nephews. Their father wasn’t man enough to live with four young children at one time, so they obviously have some genetic issues to cope with...and so I can tell you that Dr. Dobson’s motive, in overstating the problems boys have (and cause), is at least partly to assure readers that the boys we’re trying to raise or teach aren’t all that bad. Most kids don’t actually have any of the problems on the list just quoted. I like my nephews.
A funny sort of synchronicity occurred in between the time I spent writing a review of another of Dobson’s books and the time I sat down to write this one. I was near the phone, not actually hovering over the phone, but sort of waiting for updates on two elders in two hospitals—one not expected to live, one expected to go home for the night. The phone rang. Thinking, “That wouldn’t be about Jane, it’s still visiting hours and her children would still be at the hospital, so it has to be Joe calling from home,” I picked up the phone and heard, “This is James Dobson reminding you to vote on Tuesday...”
It was not, of course, Dr. Dobson himself. If it had been, I’m sure he would at least have been polite enough to absorb the information that I always vote. Most people in Gate City who are eligible to vote are peer-pressured to do so, because most of the old families are related to each other in some way, which means that few of us could get away with failing to vote for any Kilgore who is on the ballot. Regarding other candidates we might get away with saying, “They’ll win without my help; they always do,” but when a Kilgore is on the ballot we’d get, “You mean you think you’re too busy to vote for your own third cousin twice removed? Now that’s just ridiculous. You can’t be too sick to go in and vote. If you’re too sick to drive I’ll come out and take you.” So we vote. I don’t really need to be prodded, even by James Dobson in person, much less by some geek who’s wired a recording of his TV voice into a computer somewhere.
The annoyance of getting a “robot call” is enough to influence my vote—anyone a phone pest wants me to vote for, I’m more likely to vote against—and I’ll wager that, when the “robot call” sounds like some well-known person who’s respected even by the opposite party, it’s actually coming from the opposition party. Dr. Dobson has been on TV long enough, and stayed out of trouble long enough, that the worst thing his enemies can do to him is probably programming his voice into an obnoxious computer-calling device.
End of rant...back to the book. Do you, as a parent, teacher, custodial relative, baby-sitter, etc., want to read what Dobson has to say about the care of little boys? A summary of what he says may be helpful.
As a family counsellor, Dobson isn’t worried by the appearance of gender stereotypes in rival siblings; he titles one chapter “Vive la Difference.”
He lists a range of sex-influenced mental problems that boys can have but discusses only attention deficiency in detail. Although the others are more common in males than in females, they’re not common.
Like too many authors, he hears loudly and clearly the words of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, “This is for everyone who teased us,” but overlooks the “prescription medication” that was aggravating and distorting the memories of whatever blows to their self-esteem they and the other schoolboy killers had suffered.
He discusses evidence that little boys instinctively crave a father figure and typically start moving away from Mom and toward Dad, unless Dad is abusive, as toddlers.
He observes that most boys are noisy, impulsive, restless, destructive, and competitive, but charitably mentions that about 15% of little boys are relatively calm and quiet and are not likely to grow up effeminate...just intelligent.
He defends the traditional role of fathers as providers, protectors, leaders, and spiritual directors..
He warns mothers that, although disrespect should not be tolerated, most boys are going to have a need to reject or disrespect their mothers at some time in life.
He idealizes the work of a full-time mother, warning that yuppie mothers who worry about getting onto a “Mommy Track” may be merely “chasing the caterpillar” ahead of them, as the peculiarly stupid processionary caterpillar can often be persuaded to do until it starves to death. (I think conservatives are barking up the wrong tree with this one. Instead of nagging women to quit work for the sake of two to five years of full-time motherhood, after which the women's careers may never get back on track, the conservatives would do better to demand that employers rehire women who take time off to be full-time mothers and men who take time off for full-time military service.)
He insists that the origins of homosexuality lie in emotional problems parents should prevent. He observes that, while teenaged girls seem to do just as well or better without a father figure in the house, teenaged boys just might do just as well or better if they lived with their fathers and had no mother figure in the house—this doesn’t happen often enough for anyone to be sure. (I will say that my late lamented Significant Other, as a single foster father, did raise a shining jewel of a Lad.)
He affirms the benefits to children in spending quality time with grandparents.
He advises parents not to try to make boys less competitive, but try to help them win.
He’s concerned that “stupid guy” jokes may damage the self-esteem of little boys. He encourages home schooling as an option for boys who don’t fit into the classroom environment.
He classifies unchristian moral influences, as well as pedophiles, as “predators” likely to harm children.
He encourages parents to enforce rules, while warning them that “rules without relationships lead to rebellion.”
Although a well-known advocate of Tough Love, he recommends relatively mild displays of Tough Love as routine discipline for children.
My concern would be that today’s young parents, lacking historical background, may find some of his advice inexplicably strange. Doesn’t everybody know that nobody can afford to be a full-time mother any more, economically or socially, and society no longer has much use for guys who can’t develop the attention spans and self-discipline and tolerance for sitting still that the girls modelled for them in elementary school, and so on. Well, no; while today’s parents are beneficiaries of whatever the 1970s wave of feminism accomplished, good and bad, Dobson was one of the older, conservative-minded men who never were comfortable with the 1970s feminist movement. A full half-dozen TV stars, including Kathie Lee Gifford, Frank Gifford, Regis Philbin, and Kathie Lee’s first husband, got a huge publicity boost in the 1980s as Dr. Dobson gave Kathie Lee fatherly or pastoral advice to quit TV and try to be a full-time housewife, and her first husband discovered, along with her, that he didn’t want a full-time housewife, and so on. Dobson has lived and learned, and Bringing Up Boys reflects plenty of recent research and awareness of the way things are, but it’s still obvious that a part of him wishes that the “Leave It to Beaver” TV show had ever resembled the way most real families were.
How harmful is this kind of advice likely to be, especially if parents have girls as well as boys? I’m going to split hairs, go out on a limb, try to think of another metaphor to add to this mix, stick my neck out and say: I don’t think this is the harmful kind of advice from the prefeminist era. The kind of devoted family Dobson has in mind may not be as bland or as smooth as the Cleaver family on television, but neither is it abusive or oppressive.
In the carefully orchestrated trend for people to abandon farms and rural environments and flock into cities, I see a massive male identity crisis: there aren’t a lot of jobs in the city that give men a chance to “win” by using their upper-body strength and physical energy. These things are assets; men deserve to be able to use and enjoy them. I could wish that Dobson had shown more concern about this, and less misplaced concern about stupid guy jokes or girls who excel in sports.
Women my age learned to base our self-esteem, among other things, on our not acting like the female stereotypes in the dumb blonde jokes, catty brunette jokes, bossy mother-in-law jokes, nagging wife jokes, big-spending daughter jokes, etc. etc. ad nauseam, that men told; if men can’t learn to cope with stupid guy jokes in the same way, they really are inferior.
But I don’t think there ever was or will be a problem with women lacking respect for Real Menschkeit (as distinct from stupid redneck macho acts). The problem is that not enough men are developing and demonstrating Menschkeit, as distinct from machismo. They probably need to depend on the help of God to become admirable human beings first and let nature take care of the sex appeal (no worries, it will). I think this is the problem Dobson is trying to address, and, to the extent that he or his audience are able to help resolve it, women will not complain.
