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MOTHERS TALK ABOUT THEIR BOYS
by Colette Shulman
What better way to explore the subject of raising boys than to talk with two mothers raising three boys each, one in Brooklyn, New York, and one living in the house next door to me in Connecticut. If no one had told me, I would soon know that I had boys as neighbors; their voices at play, shrieks of boy-joy, ring out across the woods and the brook separating our houses. It is mostly the piercing voice of five-year old Jack that I hear, as he and Andy, eight years old, run to and from their campsite under the trees, as they scamper over the old rock walls and peer into the rushing waters in search of fish. Their brother Robert hasn't yet joined in the frey; at eighteen months he is still a toddler.
Caroline and Eric Holub came here from Texas two years ago. He is rising in the financial department of IBM, works long hours and commutes many miles each weekday, and Caroline is a full-time mother and homemaker, and thinks it right that with three young ones to raise, she should be at home. One quiet morning over a cup of coffee, when the older boys are at school and kindergarten and Robert is napping, I ask Caroline about the differences she sees in her boys' temperaments and personalities. Andy, she says, "has a lot of the characteristics of a first-born. He's very eager to please and tends to be conscientious and responsible. I never thought much about birth order until I read something about it. Eric and I are both first-born and we are more conservative, not impulsive, we check things out before we make a move, and Andy is rather like us. Jack is a totally different personality. He sees what his brother does and he too wants to do it, and he forgets that he is younger and doesn't yet have the physical skills, and this is a frustration to him. Mom, he laments, I can't play basketball as well as Andy!"
As a neighbor-observer I have to say that Jack is the fastest moving high intensity little boy I have seen in a long while. He is quick to discover and try anything new, and he likes to challenge authority. Caroline says, "If I say 'no, no' to Andy, he stops and listens, whereas Jack will just go on doing it. If I draw the line at something and tell Jack, 'don't go any further,' he will hang his feet over the line as if to say, 'now what are you going to do about it?'" I will be fascinated to watch Jack grow because it seems to me that his energy, initiative and daring could make him a leader in whatever he does, providing he learns to sit still at least some of the time. Herein lies a problem for many boys, especially as high achieving parents pressure the schools for earlier education -- and Caroline is concerned that it may be a problem for Jack -- that highly active five and six-year old boys find it difficult to go from kindergarten, where they can move around the room and playground, to first grade where they are expected to sit still much longer. In the current discussions about how to help boys, it is often suggested that in the early grades of school there should be more learning by doing, through projects involving physical movement, to accommodate the active motor systems of boys. I ask Caroline how the boys differ in expressing their emotions. "Andy shares everything, maybe not right away when he gets home from school, but by bedtime I know everything that has happened to him that day. With Jack I have to pry it out of him. He doesn't recognize his own feelings and I have to say to him, 'Jack, you seem really angry about that' or ' I can tell you are sad today,' or, when he's out in the yard kicking things around, I say to him, 'Jack, you are upset about something, what is it? I consciously try to identify his feelings for him.
In looking for ways to help Jack, Caroline finds that he is very responsive to expressing and receiving love through physical touch -- not just hugging and kissing, but a pat on the back, a touch of the hand as he runs by, any small gesture of physical contact to say "I love you and I'm thinking about you." Caroline is such a warm person, a southern beauty with that added charm of a soft southern accent in her voice, that she would instinctively reach out on her own. But she has also been reading a book called The Five Love Languages of Children, which identifies them as physical touch, words of affirmation (of affection, endearment, praise, guidance, etc.), gifts (not as incentives or bribery, but from the heart), quality time (meaning spending time with your child doing something that engages you both), and acts of service. The book says each child has a primary or dominant way of perceiving love, which may change from one stage of childhood to another, and it challenges parents to find that dominant way for each child. With Andy, Caroline thinks it may be "quality time," even if the two of them are just sitting nearby in the same room and reading their books.
I asked her if any particular approach to child development has guided her in raising her sons. She replied that this was her field of concentration at university, but that she doesn't agree with some of what she heard from her professors. At that time, the trend was not to inhibit your children in any way, let them speak their minds even if it was insulting, let them express their anger and then it's out and over with.
"I don't agree with that," says Caroline. "I think children have to observe limits in what they can say to parents or to anybody, so it's been a struggle for me to find the right balance. It's a matter of teaching children to respect others -- basic values. Even in second grade, the boys come home with awful expressions and comments, often about whomever is the person of the week they are dumping on, and I tell Andy, 'we don't allow that kind of talk or behavior.' It is definitely a challenge to find out what kinds of disciplining and encouragement works best with each boy. Andy, for example, responds quickly when I take away his television time or send him to him room -- he doesn't like that. With Jack, sometimes it takes a spanking. I know you have to be very careful how you do that, because society doesn't approve of physical punishment. But sometimes that is what Jack needs, and he prefers to have a spanking and get it over with and be restored to good grace rather than be sent to him room, which for him is torture."
The Holub family worship in a small Southern Baptist congregation where by chance most of the families also have boys. Their religious faith is important to them: they go to Sunday morning worship service and in the afternoon the boys take part in a children's program at church where they read Bible verses and do projects to help people, such as making cards and writing greetings to sick people and delivering them to the hospital. Caroline says her religious faith helps her "in giving us the big picture of the world, of what has worked well for centuries. The things said in the Bible are tried and true, whereas many of the various theories we hear now tend to come and go. Of course we are learning new things about boys and girls, but where we get into trouble is in going to extremes and ignoring what has worked in the past."
By this time Robert has awakened. He gives me a sheepish grin as his eyes struggle to find focus, and then snuggles up to his mother. He is a winsome little boy with an even, sunny disposition -- Caroline thinks he will be closer to his oldest brother in temperament. How fortunate we are to have this dear family as our next-door neighbors! Robin Harris in Brooklyn is the Afro-American mother of Drexel who is twelve and of Ian and Jason, nine-year old fraternal twins. She is a close friend of an acquaintance of mine and Robin and I have not met face-to-face, but we have had a good long telephone talk.
In her twenties Robin worked in the fine wine department of Seagram where she was trained and developed a sophisticated palate as a wine taster, and later she did administrative work for the company. When she got pregnant with the twins, the company's office moved some distance away and Robin decided to devote herself to the family, which she has been doing for ten years. She describes herself as the CEO (chief executive officer) of the Harris Home. Her husband is a corporate lawyer; he gets home late and devotes his weekends to the boys. Robin's three sons have very different personalities. The oldest is academically inclined. Of the twins, Ian is sensitive and emotional, and Jason is an "artsy" child who likes to dance, do intricate work with his hands, and express himself in other artistic ways. All three have been going to an excellent public school in Brooklyn of 300 children of whom 60% are white, l0% are Afro-American, and the rest Hispanic, Asian, etc.
Robin and her husband have similar ideas about child-raising which she said is a blessing. She was spanked as a child until the age of five, and her own boys did get spanked a little, but then she and her husband said, no more of this, from now on our way will be to talk things out with the boys. And they do a lot of talking. Even in the morning when they are all in a hurry to get off to school and work, when the radio news is on and they hear of some terrible incident that happened, Robin and her husband will talk about it with the boys right then and there, or later. "We tell the boys, ' if you ever do something wrong, share it with us and remember that we will always love you."
She does not see in her family any problem of boys separating too early or abruptly from their mother. "I have time to be with them. With us it's not like Mom is the one who stays home and Dad goes to work. We are 50-50 parents, meaning we share in everything. My husband does civic community work, just as I do, and one day soon I will go back to having a job. We have always given the boys chores to do -- we tell them we are a family and we have to work together and do real teamwork. We are very moral people. We are close to my parents and my husband's parents, and we all get together a lot to celebrate holidays and to celebrate our Afro-American heritage. We are church-going people ( although not so much right now because Robin is not keen on the new minister in her church).
This autumn Drexel will be going to a private school in New York, in Manhattan. He took a summer preparatory program to get some advanced skills and then applied to several schools. "We did not want him to be in a highly competitive environment and we also didn't want him to be with a lot of wealthy children, the kind who can afford to fly off and go skiing for the weekend. The school he will go to has kids from all income levels and one third of them get financial assistance."
Right now Robin is preparing Drixel on how to respond to police officers in case he should be stopped by one on the street, which often happens to black teenage boys, a high percentage of whom are both the perpetrators and the victims of crime and are going to jail at an alarming rate. If the police officer feels on the defensive, he might reach for his gun and the encounter could escalate into force and even into shooting. Robin is teaching her sons not to be confrontational with police officers, not to make sudden moves that would put the officer on the defensive, but to say, "Officer, I am reaching into my back pocket for my identification," or, if in a car, "I'm reaching into the glove compartment for my car registration (black drivers tend to be stopped by police more often for minor problems such as a broken car light). Robin says, "I don't want to scare my boys, but I do want them to be aware and prepared. When I was growing up, the police were regarded as pillars of the community and we kids idolized them. But it's a different scene out there on the streets nowadays." Robin told me that her cousin's daughter hangs out with a group of five girls of whom she is the only Afro-American one, and when the girls go into a store, the salespeople keep their eyes on the one black girl, even though it may be one of the white girls who is "lifting" a little something from the store, in other words, stealing.
Robin's twins will probably stay in public school. Jason does his homework on his own and finishes by ten in the evening with interruptions to do other things. Ian has to be pushed to sit down and get to work. He is however, in his mother's words, "a leader, better at verbal skills than writing ones, a very caring person who is solicitous with little children and tries to soothe ones who are crying or hurting in some way.
Robin's family belongs to an organization of black families called Jack and Jill that dates back to the time when clubs were barred to black people. It is both a social gathering place and it does civic community projects such as fundraising for various Afro-American groups and good causes.
Looking at the engaging faces of her sons in the photo and from what she has told me, it is my hunch that Robin is doing a very good job of raising her boys -- together with her husband, of course.