I had just come back to my office from a meeting when I was told that a reporter was on the phone. When I answered the call, the reporter asked what by now has become a familiar question: "Did you hear about the shooting?"
Because the reporter called me, I knew several things right away. First, whoever was shot was a child. Second, the victim was not a child with whom I work. When one of my children from Harlem is shot and killed, nobody calls; death by handgun is so common that it is no longer considered news. This shooting must have taken place in a nice, middle-class suburban or rural community. Third, I knew that more than one child was shot. Today in the United States, the shooting of one child, even in affluent communities, is not considered newsworthy. And fourth, I knew that the shooter was a boy. In this country, our girls surely have their problems, but our boys are the ones who kill.
Boys in Trouble
At a time when we have made incredible advances in technology and medicine, we have managed to create a generation of boys who are more in trouble than ever before. The signs ought to be clear, but we are not heeding the warnings. The shootings in Paducah, Jonesboro, and Littleton might seem, by themselves, like isolated tragic incidents, but collectively they form a familiar pattern.
I saw a similar pattern begin in 1985, although I must admit that with all my years of working with children, I didn't have a clue about what I was witnessing. In 1985, one boy with whom I worked at the Rheedlen Centers for Children and Families was shot and killed. In 1986, two more of our boys were shot and killed. In 1987, four of our boys were shot and killed. This pattern continued until, in 1989, seven boys were shot and killed. Even then I didn't recognize the killings for what they were. I tried to understand each killing as the separate act of a violent perpetrator against an innocent (and sometimes not so innocent) victim. Not until 1990 did I realize that what was happening in my New York City community, Harlem, was happening in communities in Chicago, Detroit, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Boston—indeed, in cities and towns across the United States. We had not a series of individual violent acts, but evidence of a full-scale epidemic of violence.
In my first book, Fist Stick Knife Gun, A Personal History of Violence in America (1994), I wrote about the escalating violence in poor communities. By then, we had lost more than 60,000 children to handgun violence in less than 10 years. My purpose for the book was not just to recite the facts and horrors that poor children grow up with during conditions of war, but also to serve as a warning. This epidemic would spread out of the ghettos and into our middle-class enclaves if we didn't do something about it.
We haven't done much, and the killings have not abated. The Children's Defense Fund reports that between 1979 and 1996, more than 75,000 U.S. children and teens were killed by firearms and a staggering 375,000 were wounded. And we see the first signs of the same pattern of epidemic violence in communities that are not poor, not minority, not urban.
In 1996, after taking a closer look at children and violence, I realized that boys seem particularly susceptible to the most virulent form of the epidemic. The more research I did, the worse the news seemed—not just in terms of violence, but within a whole range of categories. I found a disturbing pattern among people ages 15 to 25. Three out of four deaths are of males. Males are five times more likely to die from homicide than females are. Six out of seven suicides in this age range are by males. Nine out of 10 arrests are of males. My research led to a shocking conclusion: Not just a small sample, but a huge number of boys are doing poorly.
My second book, Reaching Up for Manhood (1998), focused on the troubling social and environmental conditions that boys face today. On the basis of my research, I suggested what we can do to raise better boys.
Healing
Boys are in pain. Years of conditioning starting when boys are toddlers teach them to deny their pain, that "boys don't cry." But boys should cry. It is a natural reaction and a way to acknowledge and release pain, both physical and emotional. Denying emotions not only represses and stunts emotional growth, but it also masks our hurt from others so that they don't know that we need help.
We have to reach out to our boys early on and get them to talk about their feelings. This is easier when boys are young, but somewhere between 10 and 13, boys begin to resist talking. When they hit puberty, boys feel that it is taboo to talk about shame and inadequacy, especially with their parents. How do we get boys to remain in touch with their feelings? How can we ensure that adults in their lives are compassionate and skilled at talking with them and listening to them during this crucial period? For every boy we work with, we must ask, With whom does he talk? When the answer is no one, we must find the right people to fill that void.
Risk
Boys are encouraged to take risks very early in life. We think it natural for boys to jump off steps, climb trees, jump puddles. Adults, including parents, often consciously or unconsciously reinforce this risk-taking behavior, and boys confuse taking risks with being male and masculine. This prepares our boys for dangerous risk taking when they become adolescents. Boys often break the laws (both legal and parental) when peers challenge them. The words "I dare you" or "What's the matter; you scared?" have ruined the life of many a boy.
We must make sure that our boys can take risks in safe environments. There are plenty of risky things for boys to do that challenge them, but in a healthy and developmentally appropriate way. Some boys play sports, some dance, some ride bikes or horses. We must offer a full menu of choices. All boys don't like basketball; some get a thrill from facing an opponent one-on-one in a game of chess; others find that nothing short of jumping into the air on a skateboard and doing a 360-degree turn will do. But one thing is certain: If we don't provide safe risks for boys, they will engage in dangerous activities that can leave scars more damaging than scraped knees and wounded egos.
Self-Worth
Our boys are the target of successful sales and marketing strategies by large and sophisticated retailers. They connect our boys' sense of self-worth to how they look and what they wear, eat, or drink. Boys get the message that they are what they look like and what they consume. Vulnerable boys are taught to focus less on their internal development than on the external world. Parents and teachers struggle to get boys to pay attention to such values as cooperation, kindness, and service. We think our boys are shallow and lack values, but we fail to realize that their minds are influenced by the smartest and most savvy advertisers in the world.
We must recognize that our boys are brainwashed by the sneaker companies, the fast food industry, the soft drink industry, and others too numerous to name. Remember Joe Camel? The cigarette company knew what would appeal to our children and launched a successful campaign. Our children are a market, and marketers understand our children's fears, aspirations, and fantasies—often better than we do. They use this understanding to shape our children's attitudes and beliefs.
We must pay attention to the values that these industries sell to our children and contrast them with the values that we talk to them about. Most teachers and parents do well to give their children five positive messages a day. In contrast, by the time that day is over, our children will have heard 50 negative messages from their music, television, video games, and radio. It's not that our children don't value our messages. Rather, we are drowned out by the number of negative messages that they hear from other sources.
We have to even out this equation by giving more positive messages of self-worth and by reducing the number of negative messages from others. We must talk with our boys about how they view themselves on the inside and encourage and reward them for focusing on both their internal and external selves.
Mentors
Too many boys lack positive male role models. The number of fathers who are not intimately involved in raising their sons because of separation, divorce, or abandonment has reached staggering proportions. Boys struggle to understand the concept of manhood, and if they don't have positive role models, too many of them look to the streets, to television, or to the movies to understand what it takes to be a man. In these places, they are liable to find manhood defined as a combination of toughness, promiscuity, hard drinking, and a willingness to solve every dispute with violence. Boys emulate those visions of manhood with the youthful exuberance with which teens embrace most things.
We must ensure that our boys have male role models who take a personal interest in their moral, intellectual, and emotional development. Where should we look for male mentors? At our institutions of faith, at our college fraternities, at our youth organizations. Boys need not one, but several male mentors in their lives.
What We Can All Do
Can we raise better boys? We can and we must. In one year alone, more than 1.3 million boys under 18 were arrested. One out of every four males in the United States has a record. Fully two-thirds of boys who reach the age of 15 in Harlem can expect to die in young or middle adulthood. If we raise our boys in the same way, we will continue to produce huge numbers of boys who are crippled emotionally and are unprepared to fulfill their roles as fathers, husbands, and productive members of our society. The following are some additional suggestions.
Monitor What They See and Hear
Our children watch too much television, and with the advent of cable, children at very young ages are exposed to violence and sex in a way that was unimaginable 20 years ago. Do you know the lyrics to the latest rap song? Do you watch MTV? Looked at Saturday morning cartoons lately? We should watch what our boys are watching. The mass media shape so much of a boy's sense of himself and his image of manhood. If we spend time watching and listening with them, we will find plenty of opportunities to engage boys in real conversations about real issues before someone else is allowed to shape their thinking.
Find a Place for Spiritual and Moral Education
Most people from my generation (I'm 47) were introduced to spiritual and moral development through a formal institution of faith. I'm a Christian, and my mother made me go to church every Sunday, even though I didn't want to until I was 12 years old. In church, I heard about good and evil and about the responsibility to give back, to help others, and to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Too many of our boys receive scant, if any, education in these crucial areas. It doesn't matter what our particular faith is; we must encourage parents to expose their boys to their faith institutions. Too often, we don't think about the moral development of boys until they are in trouble. Everyone who is raising a boy should plan out his moral and spiritual development while he is still young.
Expose Boys to Different Cultures and Points of View
Boys tend to be intolerant of others. They can be racist, sexist, and cruel to other boys who don't conform to their ideas or standards. We give too little thought to broadening the experiences of boys so that early in their lives, they learn about many different cultures, attitudes, and beliefs. We wait until our boys have developed rigid prejudices before we talk with them about differences and tolerance. Our work should begin in elementary school and continue throughout their educational lives.
Know Their Friends
By the time most boys reach puberty, they do what their friends do. If you want to know what any one boy is doing, find out what his friends are doing. Sooner or later, he will do the same thing. This means that when we try to influence a boy, we should not work exclusively with that boy, but also with his friends. Too many times, we try to reach boys as individuals without acknowledging the power of the peer group.
Expose Boys to New Experiences
Take boys on nature walks. Start with frogs and turtles, but include plants and flowers. Teach them about the environment, sailing, singing, sewing, and dancing. By the time boys are 12, they usually say that they don't want to try something new if we haven't made a habit of expanding their experiences when they were young. Very quickly, boys decide that some activities are for boys—riding a bike, playing sports—and some are not—smelling flowers, baking bread. Our job is to not allow hastily developed, arbitrary beliefs to deprive boys of a fuller set of experiences.
Have a Multilayered Support System
I have found (not surprisingly) that boys who have several strong support systems—parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts, cousins their own age, coaches, teachers, and caring adults who run after-school activities—do better than boys who don't. Boys with more support systems get into less trouble, and if they do get into trouble, they get out of it more quickly and are less likely to get back into it. Part of our responsibility in raising better boys is to expand the number of support systems that exist for them. The less influential their family support, the more they need community support.
Reconnecting with All Our Children
Our boys are in trouble, but all is not lost. We have the know-how and the resources in the United States to dramatically change boys' lives for the better. We must find ways to bring new attention and energy to boys—without ever losing our focus on girls. This calls for us to rededicate ourselves to ensuring that we give the best that we have to all our children.
