Boys Into Men : We’ve taught mothers to toughen up their sons by standing aside. Can we be surprised our men can’t relate to women? : THE COURAGE TO RAISE GOOD MEN: A Manifesto for Change, <i> By Olga Silverstein and Beth Rashbaum (Viking: $21.95; 275 pp.)</i>

The other day my friend, who has a daughter, was complaining about cartoons and kids’ stories. Even now, she said, the protagonists are usually boys, and too many of the heroines just wait around for the prince. I was secretly relieved: My son will not lack images of active boys. But when I thought about it, I started to worry too. I don’t want him to grow up thinking that girls are just the backdrop for boys’ accomplishments. What to do? Lately, there’s been a spate of books on raising feminist daughters. Now, there’s a book for those of us with sons.

Olga Silverstein, in “The Courage to Raise Good Men,” says that men suffer from emotional isolation and pain, and that women suffer from misogyny. And she provocatively locates the crux of both problems in the mother-son relationship. The experts are wrong, she says: Mothers do not need to push away their boys to raise them to be men. Even readers who don’t follow Silverstein as far as this theory takes her will find this a challenging, serious and (presumably thanks to co-author Beth Rashbaum) readable book.

Silverstein calls conventional wisdom on boys “the lone ranger” theory. Woven throughout her book are her analyses of the messages in myth, literature and pop culture about mothers and sons. From Achilles to Dr. Spock, she says, the primary lesson for the mother has been to toughen up her boy by getting out of the way. If she doesn’t, we believe she risks contaminating him with her femininity and creating a sissy, a psycho or a homosexual.

Advised to stand back, says Silverstein, many mothers withdraw from their sons or push them away. This section makes good reading, because Silverstein draws on convincing case histories from her family therapy practice, and a poignant reconsideration of her own experience raising a son.

We “elevate the boy” above his mother, Silverstein argues, when what he still needs is for her to be in charge. She cites the casual mandate when dad departs: “Take care of your mother!” She tells of the mom who was rather proud of not being able to control her 3-year-old: “He’s strong-willed like his father.” When their sons hit adolescence, mothers may suddenly “dumb out,” convinced they can no longer discipline a boy. And some mothers carry self-sacrifice too far; says Silverstein dryly, “A man who does not know his mother as a separate person is at a great disadvantage with women generally.”

Silverstein bluntly calls all of these withdrawals abandonment. These boys, she says, betrayed by the person who nurtured them most and longest--their mother--become lonely, angry, sometimes violent men who don’t like women very much. “The real pain in men’s lives,” she says, “stems from their estrangement from women.”

A mothers who doesn’t let this happen, she suggests, commits a revolutionary act. Her son will be happier, and he’ll also be less contemptuous of those qualities we call feminine. Maybe he won’t need to perpetuate a system that denigrates women.

The flip side of the deeply ingrained belief that mothers should step back to let sons become men might be expressed as “it takes a man to make a man.” Silverstein challenges that advice, too. Sons are not copies of their fathers, she says; good parents teach and guide children to be themselves. That means either gender can do the job, she argues, pithily observing, “Being taught by a woman isn’t emasculating: failure is.” She reassures single mothers that they need not be obsessed with finding “male role models” to replace all those missing fathers.

Maybe so. We all know men whose fathers were largely absent, yet who are undoubtedly men . But Silverstein’s narrow focus leaves a lot out. I was uncomfortable, for example, with her scathing analysis of Robert Bly and the “mythopoetic men’s movement.” Yes, it’s scary to hear men suggest they need to drum all mother’s influence out. But I do think they’ve put a finger on the genuine pain men feel about their absent fathers. And acknowledging that need not detract from pain caused by estrangement from their mothers.

Silverstein also made me nervous when I read her assessment that most men “were not raised for empathic parenting,” (though she clearly says some are capable). That means, once again, that the job of raising the kids right (not to mention the job of changing the world) basically belongs to the mother. Silverstein argues that it will be a joy, not a burden, for women to raise sons to respect instead of reject them. Still, I wish she’d emphasized that fathers who do build strong emotional ties with their children also alter the dynamic that turns little boys into “lone rangers.”

Still, a lot of what Silverstein describes rings true--even embarrassingly true. Like a woman in one of the case studies, I panicked when the amnio showed I was pregnant with a boy. Maybe it was my stepsons’ crowing about how they’d teach him to throw a baseball, but I began to wonder if I had anything to give a son. “Relax,” said my single mother friend who has raised two boys. “He’ll be a baby for a long time before he’s a boy.”

Silverstein in “The Courage to Raise Good Men” extends that reassurance to a lifetime of mothering. Her book will help mothers understand the implications of pushing boys out of the family before they’re ready to go. I think a lot of mothers will take her advice.