Shoulder to shoulder parenting
6 September, 2010
Michael Grose was in Kyneton last week
By Andrew McKenna
‘We need small town mindsets with our kids. We need to look out for each other’s kids. Child raising needs to be shifted back to a group endeavour.’
Those words are comforting to those of us living in small towns, but also reassuring to anyone who has thought that a nuclear family is inadequate to raise children.
Nationally renowned ‘boy expert’, international presenter and author of eight books Michael Grose presented a talk at Sacred Heart College in Kyneton last week with the topic ‘Raising Mighty Boys’.
He is the Body and Soul parenting columnist, and reaches six million Australians every Sunday.
His latest release is Thriving!, and his books include the best-selling Why First Borns Rule the World and Last Borns Want to Change it.
He has an education background, and holds a Master of Educational Studies with research into what makes healthy families tick. He has conducted over 1,500 parenting seminars over the last two decades.
Kyneton’s presentation was wide-ranging, and there was a goldmine of information in there for parents of boys. He probably knows his material so well he jumped around a bit, but CI captured as much of it as we could.
DADS: Dads need to build up frequent father points. You have to be interested in your boys otherwise you won’t get far. Good relationships at a young age will give you leverage as they get older and enter their own world. At age 15-16, some boys are breaking from their fathers, and may not want to be with their Dads at this stage. Some men experience real grief about their sons.
Grose trained as a teacher in the 1970s and he says the training was lacking in one important point.
‘What was left out of my training was that boys and girls are fundamentally different,’ he said.
‘The differences are fairly obvious but sometimes we forget. What is important for boys in learning is behaviour and confidence building.
‘Boys are heuristic learners – they learn by trial and error, which can be a hard gig for parents. The best way to parent kids is to get into their space. Boys live in the now. The best way is to walk along beside them.
‘It’s what you do with kids, rather than for them. What we lack is time, and sometimes it’s easier to do something for them rather than with them.
‘You’ve got to be patient to grow a boy. Boys are approval-seeking missiles.’
He says you have to get comfortable with your boys, and while they don’t come with a manual, we do – our own experience and baggage as adults.
‘I open my mouth sometimes and my dad comes out,’ he said.
Many of us who are parents have heard that, no doubt.
FAMILY LIFE: Small families bring intimacy. Finding space is hard, intimacy is easy, but boys – like the rest of us - may not always want intimacy. Parenting styles change with a small family, but the constant is: do things with your boys if you want to have influence with them, especially as they get older. You’ll have capital in the bank you can draw from. ‘Look for entry points in their world to talk to them,’ says Michael Grose. ‘That’s why I don’t like tv in bedrooms. Modern homes are set up for individual enjoyment, not group activities. There’s a difficulty with boys often in those transition periods from one school to another, but it’s also a journey for the parents. ‘I always work from strengths, as boys are more visual and spatial. Boys are hightly kinesthetic, they like to fiddle. ‘So when a boy is angry get him to focus on a red light. When that fades think of a yellow light, what was it that made you angry? When that fades think of green, and then you can talk about it.’
Draw a box
Work life balance. They can see it. Boys (as they get older) need practical structural things if they are to find their way:
Growth/development
0-5 early
5-10 middle
11-18 adolescence
19-26 ‘adultescence’
In the early years the pre-frontal cortex is developing.
It’s important to talk a lot to boys at age 0-5.
‘Little kids are all arms and legs, the synapses are developing. It’s an age of language development. A high indicator or reading at a later age is their language development at a younger age. Mothers are better to help boys at this age as they do a lot more talking.
‘Children can hear 600 words an hour. They’re developing gross motor skills, visual and spatial skills.’
At age 5-10 they stop saying no and start asking why. This is a latency time between two periods of brain development. They grow taller and that will let them learn what they can do and fit in. It’s a competency and self-esteem time.
MOTHERS: Strong boys require strong mothers, but mothers who’ll also let boys break out. Praise must be private, but do encourage them: ‘I reckon you can do this’. Be a strong mother and talk to your kids as much as you can. ‘Women talk more to kids than blokes do.’ Also talk up the men in your life and the others around you. Shame is not far below the surface in boys. Let go. Don’t always step in and rescue them: sometimes it’s better to stand still and watch.
US psychologist Martin Seligman set out on a project in the US to depression-proof America, to teach people how to be optimistic, but the theory didn’t hold as there are physiological – and no doubt environmental – issues at play.
He found a correlation between boys and girls and the mother’s explanatory style by the age of eight, about how children see, view and explain the world. Be very careful how you explain the world to children.
You need to have a ‘talking home’.
It’s a time to be with them, a time they are downloading the software about how to be a male.
At 11- 18 they’re the ones not smiling.
Boys drive parents crazy up to age 10, girls do it from 11-18. (Grose explained of course, that these are generalisations.)
Girls convert their feelings to words, boys convert theirs to movement.
At 10-13 boys battle with their brain to a degree, and it’s not an easy time for them. They grow with testosterone, get gangly. Parents may need to be the boy’s brain for a while on adolescence. And you have to stand up to them.
LEARNING: The best knowledge you can give boys is self knowledge. Use positive language. If we want better behaviour, we need to catch it when it happens and praise it. Boys will often shut down if they don’t like their teachers. As learners, confidence is the key, far more for boys than girls. Boys are often organisationally challenged (which you can see by entering a boy’s bedroom). Many work at diminished capacity. With a purpose they’ll do the job, but then can go back to a diminished state again, whereas girls are generally more steady. Early success is important. Let them score well with easy work before you introduce more difficult work. Let them experience their success. Give them reason and structure. Shorten their timeframes, such as for music practice. (With our boys we’ve said now they need to practice for five minutes. This invariably lasts longer, especially if we participate and play with them. But it’s not the insurmountable ‘half an hour of practice’.) Your job is to help your boys remember, not take the responsibility for them. Give kids responsibility. One of the reasons boys go into being chefs is because it’s highly structured. The biggest predictor of a reader at 14 is how he’s reading at 6-7, and the predictor of that is his language ability at 2-3. John Marsden has said it’s not so important if boys do read, as long as they can. Michael Grose had a ‘no lights out’ policy at his house, meaning he let the child decide when to turn the lights out, getting to see reading as a normal part of life. In a study in the UK they found that men needed to be seen to read.
Age 13-18 a boy’s brain decreases by 1 per cent. Boys are making decisions from their limbic or ‘reptilian’ brain – the fight or flight part of the brain. As adults our pre-frontal cortex usually controls our behaviour (maybe not on a saturday night outside many pubs), so we need to parent in a different way for our sons.
Age 15-16 is the next testosterone stage.
Boys may not want to be with their Dads at this stage and some men experience real grief about their sons.
Never say to an adolescent that thee are the best years of your life, because it’s ‘bloody hard’.
There’s a space for mentors at this age.
It can be easier encouraging other people’s sons now because with your own son all you see sometimes are the faults.
The pathway for adolescent girls is about relationships, but for boys it’s more about taking risks, testing yourself out.
They don’t assess risk very well.
From 18-26 boys are the most at-risk group, and they need adults to guide them: viz Ben Cousins and many other young men who get in trouble at this age. Ben Cousins ‘fell down to a fair degree’.
In males, the adult brain arrives by about age 28.
The amygdalae (singular: amygdala; also corpus amygdaloideum) (Latin, from Greek, 'almond', 'tonsil', listed in the Gray's Anatomy as the nucleus amygdalæ) are almond-shaped groups of nuclei located deep within the medial temporal lobes of the brain in complex vertebrates, including humans. Shown in research to perform a primary role in the processing and memory of emotional reactions, the amygdalae are considered part of the limbic system. Amygdala is the reptilian part of the brain, and it’s 16% larger in males than females. (Thanks to Wikipedia)"
PARENTING: We are wimpy about setting boundaries. You have to 'take the heat' of adolescent boys, which is why single parenting is so hard as you have to take the heat alone. If you're a duo, be authoritative, form a pair. Family life has changed drastically but rituals are still important. One third of families in England don’t have a kitchen table. There’s far more media noise around these days. Boys need to help around the home without being paid, which is part of the move from self-interest to social-interest. We lack not resources as they did in the 50s and 60s, or food as in the 30s. We now lack time. 'Quality time' entered the lexicon in the 90s, and Grose believes the term is basically nonsense: ‘I’ve only got 18 seconds and it’s going to be the best 18 seconds of the day. I’ve tried that with my wife and it doesn’t work.’ You need to work hard with your family otherwise it won’t happen. Protect the rituals that bring you together. They anchor kids back to childhood. Boys will attach emotion to place, they’re like cats, and if they’re comfortable they’ll open up. Boys like one-on-one time. Five ways to have a relationship with them: talking, sharing time, acts of service, gifts and mementoes, and kinesthetic (touching, cuddling, wrestling). You need to build downtime into your family life. Effective parents are flexible, and at different times your son may need a different style of parenting. Families work as benign dictatorships. Someone has to be in charge and it’s better if it’s the parent. When boys misbehave mothers talk too much and fathers don’t talk enough. Let boys verbalise their behaviour. Ask them why they did something. What would have been a better way? What should you do now? Go and apologise?
GOALS: Boys are goal-driven. Play an instrument? Are you kidding? Play in a band? Cool.
ANGER: There are usually four emotions for boys: anger, happiness, sadness, fear. Help them tap into them all. If you don’t handle sadness and fear it comes out as anger. A lot of anger is sadness and fear. Open the emotions up. Let boys smash into a tree, go for a run, a walk, get it out kinesthetically.
Conclusion
Boys think two things: what are the rules and who’s in charge? Boys are born and it’s all about me. Our job is to develop them for society.
Be firm and interested, remove them from self to social interest.
You have to be interested in them otherwise you won’t get far. Good relationships at a young age will give you leverage as they get older and enter their own world.
‘Shoulder to shoulder parenting’ works with boys – that is if there’s a pair of parents on the job. Be in concert with your partner – present a united front.
‘I feel sorry for children after their parents have been to a parenting seminar,’ he said.
‘Don’t go home gung ho.’
Go to Michael Grose’s website
