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J. Steven Svoboda is a member of TheMensCenter Advisory Council, an Independent attorney active in human rights law and Executive Director of Attorneys for the Rights of the Child (ARC).
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By J. Steven Svoboda... |
By Steve Biddulph. Berkeley, California: Celestial Arts, 1998. Originally published in Australia by Finch Publishing
Can Steve Biddulph write a bad book or even a mediocre one? Can Rex Finch of Finch Publishing publish one? Based on their track record of excellence, you can bet that if either of these folks ever wished to stop producing superb quality work, they would be better at being bad or average than anyone else.
Luckily for us, they show no signs of wanting to do either. The beneficiaries are ourselves and also, in this case, Celestial Arts of Berkeley and Ten Speed Canada, who are handling publishing and distribution of “Raising Boys” in North America.
“Raising Boys” offers an eminently readable overview of the increasingly tricky task of bringing up sons—-who to begin with face some sex-specific challenges--in an often imposing, dangerous, and all too frequently unsympathetic or apathetic world. Biddulph laces his appealing presentation with generous portions of humor, wisdom, cartoons and drawings, presented in a variety of engaging formats, and graced with a number of absorbing vignettes by outside writers. His wife joins in to co-write the chapter on mothers and sons.
The author has some simple points to make. Few if any can say them as bluntly and clearly as he does: “If you routinely work a fifty-five or sixty-hour week, including travel times, you just won’t cut it as a dad.” Boys need male teachers, but it has to be the right kind of male, which means two basic qualities: 1) a mixture of warmth and sternness, and 2) freedom from needing to prove anything and a comfort with youthful exuberance. Intriguingly, Biddulph advocates starting to include sexual words in dinner table conversation around age ten so that sex does not get pushed underground for your boy.
I learned that young boys tend to have growth spurts that affect their ear canals, and also that the language part of the brain is not fully formed until age thirteen. Biddulph is a careful, creative wordsmith. At one point, he writes that a boy who is turning into a man senses a need to “download the software” from an available male to complete his development. An adolescent, he notes bemusedly, is a role-seeking missile.
The author may be too busy writing superlative books to go to many recent films, as he laments the absence of “movie depictions of tender, sensuous, playful and boisterous lovemaking.” Is it really true, as Biddulph suggests, that in past times “men hit their wives routinely”? (Without firm evidence, I personally tend to resist the move to demonize the behavior of past humans relative to present people.)
Biddulph goes into a rap about “creeps” a couple of times, by which he means boys who haven’t learned to harness their sexual and aggressive urges properly, so that instead those impulses emerge sideways in forms that are hurtful to others. The author seems to alternate between harshly judging these boys, and identifying or at least understanding the pressure, stress and in some cases abuse that leads boys to act this way. As readers, we can feel his ambivalence.
Steve Biddulph has specifics aplenty to offer readers, but in the end it is not so much the truly invaluable advice and ideas but rather the spirit and faith of the author that shines most brilliantly. The writer makes this father of a nine-month-old son excited about what is here and what is to come, anxious to go grab every moment available as they slip away toward the future, plunging to the earth like so many dominoes.
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