There’s a dog living across the road from me. It’s a young golden retriever, sweet tempered and extremely friendly. I regularly see it taking its owners for a walk. I’m not exaggerating. The dog strains on the leash and Deborah or Micheal struggle not to be pulled over. Bonnie chooses where to go, and how fast. Watch out if something exciting happens at the park! Nor is it neglect, Deborah and Micheal are hard working, kind, and well meaning owners who have taken Bonnie to classes and done their best to train her.
But that dog is nothing to a lot of teenage boys I know. Far too many are arrogant, oafish, and brainless. Far too many are entirely concerned with macho bravado and entirely unable to care about the people around them. They rule the household and their parents try and placate them or buy them off long enough to get a little peace. It’s a tragedy.
I should say that although I don’t share Rousseau’s belief in the inherent goodness of the unspoilt human, I think each person is potentially compassionate, thoughtful, brave and in every other way virtuous. But where Rouseau would have children largely undirected and untaught until adolescence, I think the reason many children fall short of that wonderful potential is a failure of direction in their upbringing.
Children are naturally selfish. They’re also naturally kind. Whether the outcome is Yahoo or Houyhnhnm depends, to my mind, on two things: role models and expectations. Children look up to, and model their behaviour on, adults and older children close to them who are accorded status in the social environment. They also may rebel against the expectations set on their behaviour, but these expectations provide the context – they set what behaviour has meaning and what goes unrecognised.
Koori culture in Australia is fifty thousand years old. Kids are traditionally taught
Lessons of respect, compassion, sharing, responsibility, love and the importance of wisdom and the law.
each of which also emphasizes the connection with tribe and country. The basis of this knowlege is parable and what we would call “myth”. Archetypical, transcendant truth might be a more accurate understanding of dreaming stories. But apart from knowlege and story, these ideas are transmitted through a careful and conscious practice of modelling compassionate and responsible behaviour. Children from a young age watch as adults show, with explanation and almost exaggerated emotional response, how wise action is performed and why.
In the west we seem to get by with the idea that boys will be boys, and role models like the terminator – macho guys without the ability to express their own feelings or understand anyone elses. Even the President bases some degree of his popularity on his appearance as an inarticulate tough guy. He deliberately dumbs down his speech, is photographed down on the ranch pulling up brush or on a flight deck doing blokey things with the other men of action. His image is of someone who knows simple truths and doesn’t think too hard about them. Who prefers doing to reflecting. Who doesn’t spend too much time with his emotions.
Of course the reason this works is that he appeals to the desire of a lot of middle America to just not go there. Mr and to an extent Mrs Suburbia from any western nation have a pretty comfortable life. The television is sufficiently entertaining, their work hours are long but not especially arduous, schools raise the children, and life is punctuated by the occasional shiny toy like the new Lexus or the skiing holiday. No one wants to have to make a real emotional connection with anyone else – because that’s all about vulnerability and honesty and it might bring to the surface all the stuff that’s been pushed under since 1985 when your own parents were giving you the keys to a Corolla or sending you to college but weren’t there to listen and care and cry with you when the dog died or your teenage crush didn’t know you existed.
Girls cope better. They’re far more socially oriented and socially skilled, and they create their own support networks which serve at least in loco parentis. They have their own problems, more to do with the techniques they use to get and manipulate attention and emotional energy, but they’re much less likely to shut down that side of their personality.
So it’s not hard to see where I’m going with this. We can’t afford another generation of shallow, angry, perpetually childish men who have substituted pleasure for love in their lives. Changing things begins with not accepting that it’s ok, either in the boys or in their fathers. Then it’s up to me and the other males of my generation to behave and engage in the way we want our boys to grow up being -
Respectful, compassionate, sharing, responsible, wise, and especially loving.