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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 Michael Gurian. New York: Pocket Books, 2002.
www.simonsays.com
I greatly enjoyed the ten points of parenting advice Gurian relays to us from his daughters and their friends, so much so that I can’t let pass the chance to summarize all ten of them. (Listen to me. Talk to me. Be consistent. Laugh with me. Be a parent first and a friend second since I have lots of friends but not a lot of parents. Be a good role model. Pick your battles and let me win some. Let me make mistakes. Respect me and I’ll respect you. Tell me you love me at least once a day.) If the author learns to do a little more listening and a little less pontificating, next time around he may be able to produce an even better book than the intermittently excellent but undeniably flawed one he has written. If you are raising a daughter, by all means acquire this book as a resource and a starting point for explorations and learning of your own as well as for its standout sections on brain development and the father-daughter relationship. If you don’t have a daughter, you might want to hold off and wait for future refinements of Michael Gurian’s excellent start on this important subject.
Gurian’s book is handsomely produced, skillfully written by a sensitive author conversant in but also critical of feminism. The author begins with an excellent Part I that shows him at his best, explaining “secrets of the female brain” including the importance and roles of each of the various hormones and the differences and similarities between how male and female brains are structured and operate. Gurian also discusses his hardly revolutionary but still important theory about the “three family system” needed by all developing girls (and boys)—nuclear family, extended family, and institutions in which children “have bonded with people and elements of the institutions in ways they would their own family members.”
The author explains why the years 10 through 12 are critically important in a girl’s development, and why despite feminist disinformation, drops in self-esteem are normal and even essential to healthy adolescent brain development. Gurian delves into girls’ need for precisely the sort of “moral and spiritual growth” that is largely absent from school and the media. The author surveys the “four areas of abstraction that the brain searches through in late adolescence”—the searches for identity, autonomy, morality, and intimacy. Gurian effectively interweaves an authoritative yet accessible discussion of brain development (gender differences and similarities are discussed) with analysis of the realms of social development and the specific types of support girls will need during these times. Particularly engaging is the succinct yet fascinating discussion of the function of such components of the female brain’s “relationship centers” as the cingulates gyrus, oxytocin, and the hippocampus.
While I was not extremely impressed by the chapter on daughters’ relations with their mothers, the chapter on dads and daughters showed Gurian back in top form again. He deftly encapsulates fathers’ paradoxical roles as “both rule-maker… and rule-breaker.” A father, Gurian adds, “often exists at extremes in [his daughter’s] psyche, at poles of authority and then playfulness, immersion and then absence.” The author goes on to effectively summarize the many daunting ways in which a father can fail his daughter, and the probable developmental result and harmful lesson the girl is likely to pick up in each case. It’s a bit intimidating to see all the ways we can go wrong, but it is invaluable information. No one ever promised us that parenting would be easy. The author notes the importance of gifts often only a father can give such as the gift of adventure and the gift of affection. He provides some specific ideas on how to foster affection, such as by creating rituals for your girls, by providing lots of father-daughter physical activity, and by staying close through adolescence even though this can often be difficult. Gurian also offers some excellent practical advice on recognizing possible crises that may be approaching in your daughters’ lives and on assisting one’s daughters in grappling with their peer relationships.
A couple factors evident in all of Gurian’s books are a bit more painfully obvious here, such as the overweening egotism of the founder of the “Michael Gurian Institute.” Perhaps most egregiously, Gurian later grandiosely touts himself for conferring the name of Character Regression Syndrome (CRS) on a quite possibly imaginary yet in the author’s words “frightening new kind of mental illness.” The CRS terminology is intended to describe events where children’s “moral character” allegedly reverts to the level of a six- or seven-year-old such as he suggests happened at the recent tragedies in Columbine and in Jonesboro, Arkansas.
The author also exhibits a tendency to make perfectly ordinary statements that I believe would be obvious to most parents in a manner that implies he has just released his latest brilliant sermon from the mount. (One of many examples is his list of techniques to promote a daughter’s emotional development. Items on the list include being affectionate with one’s daughter, accepting that your daughter’s emotions are real, and providing both criticism and praise when appropriate.) While Gurian’s suggestion that a girl should not date a boy unchaperoned before she is 16 is no doubt prudent, it is not something most parents need to learn from a book, and to make matters worse, he grafts this advice onto a long-winded retelling of the Cinderella story. Nor am I sure that the author is on completely solid ground in suggesting that fathers cannot experience a hormonal, biochemical bond with their children. He may also be mistaken in his statement--in this day and age of frequent gender reversals and more active fathering--that a child’s presence will usually not impinge as severely on a man’s social production as it will on that of the mother. And isn’t it a bit of a contradiction for Gurian to stress the mother’s overweening importance to a child and then turn around a few pages later to say, “where necessary, good day care is a very good option” for a child between zero and five years of age?
Too often the author’s expositions of his and his wife’s parenting choices on a particular issue are presented as if they constitute a sort of gold standard of parenting. While I almost always found the decisions the therapist couple reached to be reasonable ones, even occasionally ones from which we can all learn something of value, too often it feels as if the book is meandering, free-associating about some of the Gurians’ parenting choices without really delving into anything of deeper, more global meaning with respect to daughters. Wisdom is definitely to be found here but relative to other books by this author, the vision and organization seem uncharacteristically fragmented. Moreover,
Gurian sets himself up as a bit of a potential target with his final chapter, in which he lays out differences between feminism and his grandiloquently named “womanist” philosophy (though he concedes somewhat as an aside that Alice Walker originated the term).
Michael Gurian, previously the author of three generally outstanding books about boys as well as co-author of the invaluable “Boys and Girls Learn Differently!” (reviewed in an earlier issue) and himself father to two daughters (and no sons), has finally written a book about daughters. While “The Wonder of Girls,” which revives the title of Gurian’s earlier success “The Wonder of Boys,” has much of value to offer, in the end it—perhaps surprisingly--proves a bit of a muddle.
by J. Steven Svoboda © 2003
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