Real Boys : Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood

The abuse Pollack describes is something we are all tacitly agreeing to impose on our boys and men. It is something we can change, one boy at a time. But doing so requires a new critical view of mainstream norms of masculinity, and the development of awareness of extremely subtle symptoms of emotionally troubled boys. Pollack provides all of this and much more.

If you are raising or helping to raise boys, and if you have a clue what it means to have an open heart, and to embrace the full gamut of emotional experience and expression, you need to read this book. You will need the framework it provides for raising boys into open-hearted, strong-hearted men with as much familiarity with love, joy, sorrow, and fear as they have with rage and dirty jokes.

You will also need courage, dedication, and willingness to be seen as the local lunatic who allows his son to cry.

I consider myself to be a woman who is happily married, continues to have good relationships with her 2 brothers and father, and has many male friends as well (I worked as an engineer). Yet this book really stunned me. I have been struggling with my son, and now realize that maybe my biases about boys have contributed to his behavior. I am thrilled to hear that he does not have to be a violent wild-man, that our relationship does not have to be crushed.

I think this is great reading for any parent of a son. The reader has to get past the first 25 pages of pshycho babble, but it is well worth it. It is well written and flows through storytelling. The author truly challenges the status quo. It's a little threatening, in fact!

Another happy suprise is that it is full of insights from start to finish. Often parenting books are written by hacks who are exhausted after 100 pages, but keep repeating themselves for another 150 pages. This guy is a PhD and the real deal.

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   Written on May 7, 2002
   Summary: Great Book
This book was required reading for a child pychology class I took. I think this should be requrired reading for everybody who has a male in his or ger life. It offers some explanation about why males are so violent. It does not make excuses but give a better understanding of males and the struggles they go through. Reading this book may help understand themlseles better.