Shame and Anger, Cont'd

In his book Die Jungen-Katastrophe (The Boy Katastrophe) author and speaker Frank Beuster writes this about a boy's vulnerability: "Especially boys who see themselves as weaker than others wish to have their sense of self-worth boosted continually. In order not to feel as complete failures or losers and, then, be pulled into a vicious circle of failure, boys clearly require more praise and acknowledgement. In order to solidify their personality boys have a continual need to be told about their strengths, even if those strengths are not always of primary scholastic relevance." Here is an example of what Beuster is talking about from and e-mail exchange I had with the parents of a twelve year old adopted boy (I call him C):

Boys in general, but especially boys like C [who are adopted], are in constant need of praise and acknowledgement, even when the things they are proud and happy about are not academically relevant. Without such acknowledgement they cannot develop a solid personality platform to stand on. It's about confidence. C does not have much confidence in his writing skills. Admitting that is an acknowledgement of defeat for C. given his otherwise quite competitve nature, this seems almost counter-intuitive (except that his strong competitive nature probably also is a result of his confidence issues). So, his aggressiveness doesn't mean he is confident. It means the opposite. His throwing in the towel about writing is honest (his rationalization of it, i.e., that he won't need it as an athlete, of course, is not).

So, I would say to C "wow, you worked 35 minutes on writing and were distracted for only 15 min. That must have been hard. I am amazed you lasted that long." (Here I would insert a story about a boy who was so scared of writing he couldn't get a single word on the page). "I am sure many other people who, like you don't care about writing, would have given up much earlier." Then I would tack on, depending on his reaction to the first part, "so, was it worth it? Do you feel you learned something important about writing in those 35 minutes. Tell me what did you learn?"

I do not think that it is helpful for the teacher to personalize C's resistance to writing (by being hurt that he doesn't appreciate writing the way she would prefer). In that same way I don't think that C's resistance is disrespectful. Low confidence is not a respect issue. Aggression, on the other hand, is.

Strategies for us adults to deal with our children's low self-confidence include things like

--willingness to experiment with a gentler tone and content; this can never be stressed enough.

--a willingness to be empathic (i.e., really understand what a situation looks like from the child's perspective),

--a willingness to tolerate that our experience with learning may not match theirs (they get to have their own feelings about learning and need not have the same feelings we had when we were their age). 

--willingness to talk about how much we love learning. If possible compare that love to something we know the child loves to do.

--a willingness to tap into the child's passions and use them (but not misuse them) as vehicles for his/her learning. (For a child who is athletically inclined like C this could include essays about the history of the trampoline, teaching manuals for trampoline amateurs, autobiographies about his love of athletics, questions about acceleration when on a bike, calculating speed and height, etc. the possibilities are infinite.)

A long time ago someone published a book titled All I ever needed to know I learned in kindergarten. I wonder if just the idea of a single experience leading to so many different learning opportunities could be useful also in order to understand how we can engage our children. This, of course, means that we have to know them enough to teach them.

In order to understand male aggression we need to understand more how a boy processes his subjectively felt sense of weakness.

First of all, 99% of boys feel weaker than other boys. And if they don't feel acutely weaker than other boys, they at least know of the potential of being weaker than their male counterparts. They will do whatever they can to avoid being seen as weak or to slide into weakness. The strong urge to be the strongest, a constant need to dominate and prove his superior qualities are, some argue, built into the male psyche beginning with the sperms' fight for dominance as they approach the egg.

Nature needs for boys to self-select in this way, i.e., through dominance and competition. And nature has developed a marvelous mechanism to ensure that no "normal" boy will tolerate his weakness and simply opt out of competition. For, while a boy who doesn't fight might not be a loss for the gene-pool, his very absence will also entail a softening of the fight for dominance and, therefore, make it more likely that a boy not quite qualified will reach his final destination. The more contenders there are, the more likely it is that only the truly strongest and most qualified will win the battle. This is why nature has developed "shame." Shame is so awful a feeling, so deeply and insidiously aggressive and torturous to the male psyche, that we will go to great lengths to avoid it or, at least, cover it up. Lying, anger, revenge are common symptoms of a male's attempts to process shame.

I sometimes like to explain shame to clients by refering to the biblical creation story: The quintessential gesture of shame (after Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil) is to cover up. If boys have not learned about and have not been reminded of their strengths, then, at moments of weakness, they will do whatever they can to cover up that weakness. The best way to do that is through aggression. The urge to avoid, at all cost, the awfulness of shame drives boys towards continual competition and aggression. It is easy to see that, given this link between aggression and shame, boys will likely not react well to being shamed about their behavior. Instead shaming will likely cause them to act out more, to be less willing to control their outburst, their learning or any of the other things we would like for them to learn.

What would it be like, I continue to ask myself, if we could see boys, and especially boys like C, with compassion. By compassion I don't mean "pitty." I mean, instead, what would it be like, if we could see that all he is trying to do is survive. He is trying to make it. What would happen, if we could see that when boys "misbehave" it might be their will to live, their will to be successful that is actually driving them? Of course, that seems ironic and paradoxical. How can it be that such a will to live and be successful could lead to so much havoc and chaos? But what if our task with boys (and men) is not to constantly resist their energy, but rather to figure out ways of how to make it useful for them? How exciting might it be for us as teachers to tap into that energy and witness the learning that can happen?

I think of how Robin Willliams teaches poetry (girls' stuff, right?) to a bunch of hormonal adolescent boys in Dead Poets Society: he taps into their sense of life and death (carpe diem), he invites them to celebrate poetry in the darkness of a cave (with cigarettes, etc. around), he connects poetry and action (reciting lines of poetry while kicking a soccer ball).

All I ever needed to know I learned from watching my fish-tank. I encourage you to find your source of strength and to see how it impacted your learning and understanding of people, the world and all the marvelous things in it.