Parents and siblings all play a part, to varying degrees,
in the socialization of boys in the home. Books, bedside stories,
games, television programs especially ‘violent cartoons,’
are some of the many ways gender is shaped long before boys
experience any socializing in the schools. The way behavior
is modeled in the family is more important than what is said
or taught and parents need to be vigilant about the values and
behaviors they demonstrate.
The old style man-in-control-top-down families where children
learn that it is normal to use manipulation, coercion or even
violence to impose your will on others, are schools for violence.
These are the foundations to dominator societies but will be
handicaps to the young man’s life in a democracy based
on equity and human rights. Many of the men and boys I’ve
worked with come from these types of families, as indeed I have,
and we have struggled individually and collectively, to recover
from this terrible legacy.
Eisler says:
Children who are dependent on abusive adults tend to replicate
these behaviors with their children, having been taught
to associate love with coercion and abuse. And often they
learn to use psychological defense mechanisms of denial
and to deflect repressed pain and anger onto those perceived
as weak, in other words, in scapegoating, bullying, and
on a larger scale in pogroms and ethnic cleansings.
Youth futures are impoverished when their vision of the
future comes out of a dominator worldview family and a dominator
worldview. This worldview is our heritage from earlier societies
structured around rankings of "superiors" over
"inferiors." In these societies, violence and
abuse were required to maintain rigid rankings of domination
- whether man over woman, man over man, nation over nation,
race over race, or region over religion.
Today many parents are doing a good job of dismantling old
clichés such as “Big boys don’t cry.”
It is important to teach young boys and girls--preferably
by modeling-- about emotions and how to express them functionally
(emotional competence). Children can be taught from quite
a young age that it is normal to have emotions but they don’t
always have to act them out or be at the ‘effect of’
these emotions. Anger can be managed or transformed instead
of stuffing it down, the old way, which had the effect of
that anger looking/waiting to come out at a ‘legitimate
target.”
Eisler again:
A key component of this model is a more equal partnership
between women and men, and with this, more focus on nurturing
and creativity rather than violence and destructiveness.
The first laws making it illegal - illegal – to hit
a child in the family – came out of the Scandinavian
world. And it is not coincidental that care-giving policies,
health care policies, child care policies, elder care policies,
care-giving being stereotypically associated with women
– they pioneered that, they pioneered all this including
parental leave – paid parental leave for both men
and women.
Nations such as these have provided good support for men
to adopt new male parenting norms, nurturant norms which they
in turn pass on to their children.
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