As I read the thoughts, hopes, reflections and unbridled words of love that these moms have expressed, it became clear. I understand, as they do, that these children - our sons, grandsons, nephews and students - are precious beings. What happens when so many born with so much emotion, so much compassion, surrounded by so much love, find themselves struggling to display any emotion short of anger? How do we juxtapose the innocence, adventurous spirit, and warmth of these children with a world dominated by male violence? The words of these mothers should serve as a reminder that our boys come to us with an enormous capacity for love and emotion! The fact that this love and emotion is often stifled and overpowered by deep sadness, anger and sometimes violence is a reflection of a culture in contrast to a preexisting condition. The words of these mothers should solidify our underlying philosophy that boys are not broken, but rather we, as a culture, have much work to do! I hope that these poignant poems and essays will warm you and inspire you as they have me.

Many thanks to the Mothers Advisory Committee and all of the moms who contribute to this wonderful work.

Drew Wing

Executive Director

Boys to Men

Welcome to the January 2011 Newsletter of Boys to Men. This edition is published by the Mothers Advisory Committee. We were formed over two years ago by Layne Gregory, the founding director of Boys to Men, to be a sounding board for issues related to being mothers of boys and to give maternal input and inspiration to the work of Boys to Men in reducing violence. In May, 2010 we organized a conference for mothers of boys, and in November 2010 we held an evening session on aggression and young boys.

Boys to Men is looking for new ways to involve both moms and dads in making our work more effective and widely known. If you would like to  become more involved please contact Drew Wing, Boys to Men's new Executive Director, at drewwing7@gmail.com

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Many thanks to the women who wrote for this newsletter. These pieces reflect the personal experiences of the authors, and do not represent the views of Boys to Men.

Margot Milliken and Anne Hallward, Co-chairs, Mothers Advisory Committee

Haiku of Boys

Princess Lego

By Eden Millecchia 

We are Lego crazy here at the monkey house. It is to be expected, given that two of the monkeys are five year old boys. Sam wants to collect all the new dice games. Leo is obsessed with Star Wars, but also likes to collect Space Police, Atlantis and Power Miners. And he is practically in tears waiting to get his hands on the brand new, just released Ninjago. Newsflash: There are no female characters in these games. No tough girls fighting alongside the men. Not even girls as prizes to be saved or won in battle.

When he was four, Leo was a Disney princess for Halloween. He spent all year collecting jewelry, dresses and mini dolls (all Disney characters). For a while the boys at preschool let him be princess Leia in their games. But he kept telling me the boys were bugging him about all the "girly" stuff. He told them "I have it because I like it," but he often complained that they just didn't understand. Then came the day when they wouldn't let him play anymore. I knew these kids' parents; they weren't narrow-minded, intolerant people--quite the opposite. One boy had two mommies. Yet those boys all knew that Leo's choices were not acceptable.

So Leo made a choice that worked for him. He wore only "boy" clothes to school and saved the pretty stuff for home. I was sad. I wanted him to feel comfortable exploring the masculine and the feminine. But he's a little boy who wants to be liked and have friends, so he made a wise choice that didn't limit his options.

Last October his dad made him a fantastic costume: Lego Darth Vader. Yes, my five year old boy who has never seen a Star Wars movie or cartoon is obsessed with Darth Vader. Whatever the hook is about that guy, he's swallowed it. But he recently grabbed a pink fluffy hoodie on the way out of Target. And last week he asked me why there weren't any fairy Legos. I said that was a very good question. He said maybe everybody already bought them.

Eden Millecchia lives in Cape Elizabeth with her husband Drew and two monkeys. Twins Sam and Leo are five. Eden is currently a full-time mom who writes about Legos and gender identity issues. 

Black Enough

By MamaC 

A Mother's Nighttime Confession

By Jenny Green 

Yellow Cloak

By Catharine Murray 

FIRST THING

By Catharine Murray 

Letting Go

The Miracle of You  

By Laura Burrill

Real Boys Do Cry (And Play Dress-Up)

Mother and Son

The Unplanned Path

Being a Mama's Boy: Good for Your Health?

Being a mama's boy, new research suggests, may be good for your mental health. That, at least, is the conclusion of a study presented at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association by Carlos Santos, a professor at Arizona State University's School of Social and Family Dynamics.
 

Santos recently conducted a study that followed 426 boys through middle school to investigate the extent to which the boys favor stereotypically male qualities such as emotional stoicism and physical toughness over stereotypically feminine qualities such as emotional openness and communication, and whether that has any influence on their mental well-being. His main finding was that the further along the boys got in their adolescence, the more they tended to embrace hypermasculine stereotypes. But boys who remained close to their mothers did not act as tough and were more emotionally available. Closeness to fathers did not have the same effect, his research found.
 

Using a mental-health measure called the Children's Depression Inventory, he also found that boys who shunned masculine stereotypes and remained more emotionally available had, on average, better rates of mental health through middle school. "If you look at the effect size of my findings, mother support and closeness was the most predictive of boys' ability to resist [hypermasculine] stereotypes and therefore predictive of better mental health," Santos says. He adds that his research did not examine why a close mother-son relationship differed in its effect from a close father-son bond, but he suspects that fathers use stereotypically male behaviors to guide their sons into adulthood. "It could be, men see close relationships with their sons as an opportunity to reinforce traditional gender roles," he says.
 

So what's wrong with learning to stop sniveling and "be a man"? Research has shown that stereotypically masculine traits such as autonomy and toughness can make men less likely to seek medical help when it's needed. At the same time, close emotional connections and relationships can provide a sense of safety and emotional security that can reduce stress and foster good health. In one famous study, participants standing at the base of a hill judged the hill's gradient to be considerably less severe when standing next to a close friend; the researchers concluded that humans find life's challenges less daunting when they have close interpersonal relationships. But adolescent boys tend not to take advantage of that fact.
 

"Boys have unbelievably deep relationships with other boys," says Niobe Way, a professor of psychology at New York University and author of the upcoming book Deep Secrets: Boys, Friendships and the Crisis of Connection. "But then at adolescence they feel this pressure to 'be a man.' That can be damaging. It's right at the age of 16 that suicide rates go way up among males. I say, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, Growing up can be bad for your health."
 

In Santos' research, he asked boys to rate the importance of statements designed to measured how much they value the qualities of autonomy, emotional stoicism and physical toughness. For example: "It's important to talk about my feelings with friends"; "Fighting others is something I have to do to prove myself"; "If I have a problem, I take care of it on my own." Participants were from different racial and ethnic backgrounds: 20% were African American, 9% were Puerto Rican, 17% were Dominican American, 21% were Chinese American, 27% were European American and 6% were of another race or ethnicity.
 

He found that boys from all ethnic and racial groups tended to adopt masculine stereotypes at roughly the same rate. "That was striking because even in the [scientific] literature, ethnic minorities are often portrayed as hyper-masculine versions of their white counterparts. That may be because the research has focused on delinquency and violence. But among ordinary boys, I found no differences."
 

Despite the growing popularity of evolutionary psychology - which argues that male and female brains may be wired differently - Santos believes male adoption of hypermasculine traits is influenced primarily by culture. Certainly, as Way points out, attitudes about what constitutes typical male behavior have changed drastically in the past century. "In the 19th century, male friendships, as evidenced through letters and historical documents, were explicitly intimate," Way says. "On middle-class honeymoons, it was not unusual for the man to bring not only his bride but his best friend along."
 

Sharon Lamb, a professor of mental health at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, believes she has identified at least one cultural influence that pushes adolescent boys toward hypermasculine traits: modern superheroes. At the same conference that Santos addressed, Lamb presented the results of a survey of 674 boys ages 4 to 18 that showed how deeply they were saturated with images of action figures.
 

"There is a big difference in the movie superhero of today and the comic-book superhero of yesterday," Lamb recently wrote in a press release about her research. "Today's superhero is too much like an action hero who participates in nonstop violence; he's aggressive, sarcastic and rarely speaks to the virtue of doing good for humanity. When not in superhero costume, these men, like Iron Man, exploit women, flaunt bling and convey their manhood with high-powered guns."
 

To Way, however, the action figure is just one part of a wider cultural embrace of hypermasculinity that is, she believes, paradoxically related to America's growing acceptance of homosexuality. "I suspect it's a backlash to the recent enlightenment surrounding the acceptance of homosexual men," she says. "There is an increased rigidity to gender stereotypes in the name of demarcating who is and who is not gay.
 

Both Santos and Way believe that such gender stereotyping is lamentable. Way says, "We have come to view fundamentally human attributes such as empathy, emotional skills and the desire for intimate relationships as being girlish or gay. They are not girlish or gay skills - they are human skills, or at least they should be." The more boys take that to heart, the healthier they'll be.