Raising Boys ... and Girls
After my last post I realized that some readers might think that I am really old-fashioned. What do you expect but for 13-year-old girls to be rowdy? I don't know about that. I wrote this next section in my son's school newsletter recently: ======= As I mentioned books for mothers last week, I should also mention a very good book for both mothers and fathers: Raising Boys by Steve Biddulph. Biddulph divides boyhood into three parts. Age zero to six: the boy ‘belongs’ to the mother; age six to thirteen: their father becomes the ‘hero’; from thirteen onwards, with the second surge in testosterone, boys wish to ‘declare their independence’ and look for influences outside the home. This division makes a lot of sense to me as a social anthropologist. We know in many ‘pre-modern’ societies, boys reaching puberty are taken away to undergo special tutelage by their fathers (and often mothers’ brothers). They go through a stage of ‘liminality’, of feeling ‘between and betwixt’. Then, w