The Courage To Raise Good Men by Olga Silverstein and Beth Rashbaum. New York: Penguin Books, 1995. 275 pages. $11.95.
Are you confused about how to raise your son? Are you wondering whether you need to toughen him up to compete and achieve in the world of men? Or do you secretly wish that you could continue to hold him close? Do you worry when you see him dressing in girl’s clothes, playing with dolls or exhibiting “feminine” qualities? How would you react if your son had the label “Mommy’s boy”?
Olga Silverstein maintains that time-honored traditions dictate how we raise boys. In days gone by it was essential that men were strong, courageous, independent and hard working in order to be able to fight in fierce hand-to-hand combat and to endure long separations from their families. An exclusive emphasis on developing a boy’s instrumental rather than relational qualities was functional for thousands of years, as a result. In a world where the frontiers are more internal than external, however, it is no longer appropriate.
The author repudiates the cultural demand that mothers sever the bonds with sons in order to help them become men. If we perpetuate the gender split–that boys must achieve and girls must relate–we deny our boys the potential for wholeness. Gender divisions are subtle in the early years but become more marked with age, until the early messages about the gender split are fully internalized. Silverstein energetically argues that mothers relinquish their boys to this gradual process by distancing themselves emotionally. She also asserts that boys experience anger and a sense of abandonment because of this maternal distancing. Even avowed feminists who defy the status quo on their own account fall into this trap with their sons.
Silverstein postulates many reasons for this unconscious withdrawal: desiring to protect sons from being identified as a “sissy”, buying into the notion that certain attributes are properly associated with males and others with females, a mother’s fear of being inadequate for the task of raising the “unknowable” males that our culture demands, avoiding the grief of projected loss “because a son’s a son till he gets him a wife,” giving boys elevated status in the family, accepting that the boy belongs to his father, dread of homosexuality, and fear of being a seductive mother. Given the mother-blaming in our society, especially since Freud, it is little wonder that mothers are unconsciously sensitive and conflicted about how they might be contaminating or emasculating their sons. However, the good news is that women can break this cycle. Women already have the relational skills to do so. She urges us to be aware of the dangers of encouraging our boys to shut themselves down emotionally, and to take that first courageous step toward teaching them the value of expressing a full range of emotions and developing rich relationships.
One of the founding members of the family therapy movement in this country and abroad, Olga Silverstein has been a faculty member and therapist at the Ackerman Institute for Family Therapy since 1972. She writes movingly of how her work at the Institute and in private practice has repeatedly confirmed that the process she attacks in this book has a devastating impact on the lives of men (and their mothers). Throughout the book she draws upon her extensive experiences as a mother and a therapist. These accounts are interwoven with analysis of mythology, literature, and movies as supporting evidence.
The Courage To Raise Good Men is provocative. Silverstein’s repeated reminders of our blind acceptance of the status quo are disquieting. However, two considerations make her arguments less than completely convincing to me. On the one hand, her description of how this distancing dynamic is supposed to look as it develops between mothers and their sons does not mesh well with my own understanding of the details of the mother-son relationships of a number of men I know. On the other hand, she uses such emphatic, highly emotive language to illuminate kernels of truth that I couldn’t help wondering about the significance of her choice to expose her own mother-son relationship and to rework personal issues in such a public forum. I was left feeling both a little suspicious about how these personal matters clouded her judgment, and slightly skeptical because mother-son relationships do not always develop in the way that she predicts. Just as Freud’s sample of the population was biased by his clients, so I think Silverstein underestimates the number of mothers who have been doing things differently all along. Such maternal strength reduces a son’s need to visit the offices of therapists to work out his resentment over being emotionally abandoned by his mother.
Nevertheless, Silverstein has put her finger on a genuine and worrying dynamic in our social life. Her passionate stance challenges us to rethink our child-rearing practices with regard to boys. Whether you agree with the author’s perspective or find yourself driven to caution by the strength of her convictions, it is difficult to avoid wrestling with the questions she raises. It is critical that we grapple with the challenge of fostering wholeness most effectively in boys–and in girls, too. The future health of our relationships and our society depends on it.