Fewer and fewer males are graduating high school, and even fewer are entering college. Our sons...thus our future... are in deep trouble for a plethora of reasons. I salute, with the most profound respect, the mothers who learn about this, and who work with parenting skills which address their needs as young men, and light a fire under some of their sons' educators.
In my view, being a parent is an ultimate calling. We, as parents, are forming the putty of the ultimate sculpture. Today, that calling is fraught with questions..so many really good parents are a little "insecure" about the job they are doing. To me, that "insecurity", is actually an anxiety about seeking "wisdom", and is about the parent wanting to fulfill that calling as best as humanly possible. Seeing this in my clients is deeply moving for me. So, on Mother's Day, I salute those moms with my deepest respect.
This is a review, more specifically, about the "mothering" (from biological parents, foster parents, and the system at large) which is creating such a difficult path for many of our young men.
If you are familiar with the dismal statistics about males in foster homes and group homes, this book is sadly relevant. I could write many thoughts, pages, chapters...about the asexual, warmth-depriving patterns of their biological mothers, and those same frequent patterns of foster mothers who "house children for profit". About them, and the lives their sons touch, this article and book are most pertinent. The rising rates of foster/group home housing, combined with the youth's own family-(mother)-of-origin creates an overabundance of young men who are charming initially, and perhaps even cloaked in respectability....but who are narcissistic, abundantly entitled, self-centered, philandering and unable to make any sense of healthy connection and human intimacy.
Given that a scant 2% do not end up incarcerated, homeless, antisocial, or dead is a grim reflection of the serious flaws in all of the alleged supportive systems. Likewise, it is a statement about mothering of sons.
There are a very few puers who have understood the system, thus gotten an education, and/or dodged serious criminal charges. They might even be superficially and materially functional, or even deemed "successful" in society.
However they are, almost across the board, misogynistic, emotional and spiritual train wrecks who literally prey upon people who attempt to be genuinely empathic with them. Their inability to bond, and to have any empathy, creates toxic relationships which are legion. Their propensity to victimize others is, for them, like a spectator sport. At best, they inspire a sense of detached compassion...but only for a very short while. The caveats about even "glancing by" the lives of men with that profile....are too numerous to ponder.
However they are, almost across the board, misogynistic, emotional and spiritual train wrecks who literally prey upon people who attempt to be genuinely empathic with them. Their inability to bond, and to have any empathy, creates toxic relationships which are legion. Their propensity to victimize others is, for them, like a spectator sport. At best, they inspire a sense of detached compassion...but only for a very short while. The caveats about even "glancing by" the lives of men with that profile....are too numerous to ponder.
Whether he is a Lawrence Taylor, a Michael Vick, a Tiger Woods, an Elliot Spitzer, a George Hugueley, or more likely a common, boringly predictable, everyday "Joe" in our lives. And for all the pages of such exploitative males detailed on DDHG (Don't Date Him Girl!), a website devoted to exposing the evils of such men so that others may not be victimized....we need to inform our young women today of this profile.
To do anything less is simply irresponsible, since the percentage of this type of male (fatally wounded, drug-addicted, misogynistic) grows by the day. The chances of our daughters, and grand daughters, allowing themselves to be sucked into that initial aura is now about 67% nationally in universities alone. Getting it yet? That's two of three males before age 22!
To do anything less is simply irresponsible, since the percentage of this type of male (fatally wounded, drug-addicted, misogynistic) grows by the day. The chances of our daughters, and grand daughters, allowing themselves to be sucked into that initial aura is now about 67% nationally in universities alone. Getting it yet? That's two of three males before age 22!
La Pook's column about this new novel, is spot-on. It is a loud call to mothers and fathers to discuss the lack of values and character, and the essential cruelty embedded in these puers (eternal boys), who obsessively seek attention in any way they can. Since the psychological "core" of their psyche is shame-based, very little that they do is based on any mature emotion and/or hidden agenda.....no matter how they may appear.
Just as critical is the call to women who have survived and processed their own involvement with men as these...to enlighten their sisters on how to recognize, and avoid, them.
Lastly, the website of Sam Vaknin, an "out-of the-closet", self-professed, malignant narcissist who, ironically, contributes much to this world through his very complete descriptions of this profile...and increases our awareness of the increasingly growing developmental trend of this type of individual. Merely watching cable news...becomes more and more grim as we observe this condition in many of our "headliners".
The guy is Henry House, the title character of my friend Lisa Grunwald's latest novel, The Irresistible Henry House, and in addition to the fact that he's fictional, he's not a good bet. Henry knows how to please women -- how to talk to them, react to them, how and when to touch them.
The problem is that he is -- or at any rate seems to be -- utterly incapable of making a true connection with any of them.
Though pure fiction, Henry is based on pure fact: from the 1920s until the end of the 1960s, college home economic classes around the country borrowed infants from orphanages to be used as "practice babies." I kid you not.
Grunwald reels you in with the book's tantalizing first line: "By the time Henry House was four months old, a copy of his picture was being carried in the pocketbooks of seven different women, each of whom called him her son."
We see Henry change his behavior to please whichever mother he happens to be with at the moment. By the time he is a man, his superpower is to make women become infatuated with him. But he is totally unavailable.
The novel begins in the middle of the 20th century, a time when science seemed to offer a solution to so many of society's problems. If science could be applied to technology and population growth and behavior, then why not to childrearing? Well, for one thing, the attempt to train half a dozen or so "practice mothers" at a time flew directly in the face of "attachment theory," being developed by psychiatrist Dr. John Bowlby, psychologist Mary Ainsworth, psychologist Harry Harlow, and others.
Attachment disorder -- the result of the failure of an infant to form a strong bond in the first year or two of life -- results in a host of childhood and adult problems, many of which Henry struggles in the novel to overcome.
For this week's CBS Doc Dot Com, I spoke to Grunwald about her exquisitely researched and written novel. We talked with psychiatrist Dr. William Fisher about attachment disorder, and we touched on other cockamamie parenting strategies, including the advice of psychologist John Watson in 1928: "Never hug and kiss them, never let them sit on your lap. If you must, kiss them once on the forehead when they say good night. Shake hands with them in the morning."
As a parent of two teenage boys, I can tell you with one hundred percent certainty that I am one hundred percent uncertain about how best to raise a child. However, I'm pretty sure that being a dependable, consistent source of love is key. And that Lisa Grunwald has created a delicious, intriguing, "how not to" book.
The problem is that he is -- or at any rate seems to be -- utterly incapable of making a true connection with any of them.
Though pure fiction, Henry is based on pure fact: from the 1920s until the end of the 1960s, college home economic classes around the country borrowed infants from orphanages to be used as "practice babies." I kid you not.
Grunwald reels you in with the book's tantalizing first line: "By the time Henry House was four months old, a copy of his picture was being carried in the pocketbooks of seven different women, each of whom called him her son."
We see Henry change his behavior to please whichever mother he happens to be with at the moment. By the time he is a man, his superpower is to make women become infatuated with him. But he is totally unavailable.
The novel begins in the middle of the 20th century, a time when science seemed to offer a solution to so many of society's problems. If science could be applied to technology and population growth and behavior, then why not to childrearing? Well, for one thing, the attempt to train half a dozen or so "practice mothers" at a time flew directly in the face of "attachment theory," being developed by psychiatrist Dr. John Bowlby, psychologist Mary Ainsworth, psychologist Harry Harlow, and others.
Attachment disorder -- the result of the failure of an infant to form a strong bond in the first year or two of life -- results in a host of childhood and adult problems, many of which Henry struggles in the novel to overcome.
For this week's CBS Doc Dot Com, I spoke to Grunwald about her exquisitely researched and written novel. We talked with psychiatrist Dr. William Fisher about attachment disorder, and we touched on other cockamamie parenting strategies, including the advice of psychologist John Watson in 1928: "Never hug and kiss them, never let them sit on your lap. If you must, kiss them once on the forehead when they say good night. Shake hands with them in the morning."
As a parent of two teenage boys, I can tell you with one hundred percent certainty that I am one hundred percent uncertain about how best to raise a child. However, I'm pretty sure that being a dependable, consistent source of love is key. And that Lisa Grunwald has created a delicious, intriguing, "how not to" book.
