‘90s FAMILY : Boys, Too, Are in Need of Life Guidance

The anonymous man’s voice on my machine was calm but bitter.

He resented reading last week’s parental tips for raising girls in conjunction with tomorrow’s national Take Our Daughters to Work Day. Boys, he claimed, are being ignored in a blatant act of reverse sexism. “Where is the concern about helping their brothers?” he asked.

Boys need help, he said. They lag behind girls in language skills; men don’t live as long as women. “But what do I know,” he said before signing off, “I’m just a dumb man, right?”

More likely, just a verbal stealth bomber. But his complaint is increasingly common.

The cry, “What about the boys?” has surfaced every year since 1993 when the Ms. Foundation for Women first sponsored the day for girls to learn what their parents do at work and what they too are capable of doing.

Lagging behind the women’s movement, the men’s movement hasn’t yet come up with an organizational counterpart for boys, although boys clearly need plenty of help.

It’s true that boys compose an estimated 70% of remedial reading classes in the United States. It’s also true that men die earlier than women--as of 1991, the life expectancy for men was 64.6 contrasted to 73.8 for women. (Men are also more violent, commit suicide and abandon their families more often.)

Those who believe in cultural explanations point to a variety of culprits: absent or distant fathers, stress, and messages that value macho lifestyles, career and material success and devalue caring and communication.

“It starts with Day One as soon as you’re born and you’re a boy,” said John Shanteau, a counselor with the Tri Valley Men’s Network in San Ramon. “If the parental expectation is to raise a man, you gotta be a man; you can’t cry; you can’t be aware of your feelings; you gotta go out and provide.”

If a day were set aside for boys, Don Elium, author of “Raising a Son” (Beyond Words Publishing, 1993), would call it “Teach Your Son to Care Day.”

In the ‘90s, one challenge for girls and boys is to figure out how to forge partnerships with one another since they will be living and working side by side. Boys, particularly those with limited opportunities, need to be exposed to work, not only for themselves, but to see how men and women coexist in the workplace.

But while girls are learning to cross over the gender line from home to work, the equivalent task for many boys is to gain better access to the emotional worlds of home and family, art and literature.

Elium, a marriage, child and family counselor from Orinda, said it’s not enough to take boys on field trips, say, to day-care centers or homes where dads are changing diapers and doing laundry. They need to see successful men doing those things.

In general, boys, more than girls, need leaders, according to Elium. “Boys need to know three things: who’s the boss, what are the rules and are you going to enforce them. They’re looking for a leader. If they don’t have a leader, they’ll become the leader.

“Boys need to have exposure to successful men in the world who are also able to participate in a group at home, where the goal is not to produce widgets but to produce care.”

It could be caring for animals, for babies, for parents or for relatives. But to be effective, teachers need to make the lessons exciting for them, he said.

Elium still recalls with emotion the day he and a group of boys visited a rest home with a particularly charismatic youth director. At first the boys rolled their eyes, but the leader promised each a dollar if he didn’t act up. As Elium watched the young man gently joke and play with the frail, elderly patients, he said he learned some of the most powerful lessons of his life. That day set the direction for his career.

“He showed me how to care,” Elium said.

At the end of the day, neither Elium nor any of the other boys asked for the dollar.

* Lynn Smith can be reached at the Los Angeles Times, Life & Style, Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles, Calif. 90053.