When Boys Become Boys: Development, Relationships, and Masculinity, Judy Y. Chu, 2014.
This nonfiction book is the result of Chu’s two-year study of boys moving through kindergarten through first grade and it is a fascinating read. Her focus is on the gender socialization that takes place at this age level, in particular ‘how boys negotiate their self-image, behaviors, and styles of relating to others in light of cultural constructions of masculinity.’ It was a bit eerie at times reading this because it continually reminded me of my teaching days and made me reflect on how I handled classroom situations: with hindsight spurred by this reading I see how I could have handled situations a bit more delicately with attention to the developmental processes occurring and awareness of the social pressure my students were dealing with.
In addition, I distinctly remember my gender socialization at this age level and through adolescents (though obviously I did not label it as such at the time). Especially resonant was Chu’s discussion of boys who struggle with rejecting stereotypical masculine pressure and the price they may pay for doing so. I, like a couple of the boys in the study, experienced solitude, loneliness and peer aggression by rejecting the norm and forging a more sensitive path. Likewise, it was heartbreaking to observe the boys who did accept societal norms at the cost of their relational abilities.
One interesting aspect of the book was Chu’s relating of the meetings she held with the fathers and mothers of the children in the study. She relates how they interpreted the changes in their children as they navigated gender norms in the classroom and in the home. Not surprisingly, they spoke of the regret they had that their boys were losing their ‘sensitive side’ or what Chu has labeled their relational presence. Parents also could easily relate to their children’s difficulties as they remembered their own childhoods and the sacrifices they made in their personalities in order to fit in to gender expectations.
How When Boys Become Boys informs my writing.
I learned of this book while reading Carol Gilligan’s book In A Human Voice (Gilligan was one of Chu’s teachers and advisors in her studies), and as expected it turned out to fit into my gender and gentleness studies rather well. There is so much information in this book that I can use to model characters and situations in my novel-in-progress. Especially informative is the aspect of the pressure on young boys to adapt to a clearly maladaptive expectation and the trajectory of their further behavior based on the decisions they make at this early age.
My story Idle Hill fits perfectly into this dialogue. In the story an adolescent male struggles with generational male aggressiveness and insensitivity and the resultant pain and grief caused to himself and others by the solutions he finds. It is available to read in my collection Not So You’d Notice at Amazon.
