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A five-year-old boy
in New Hampshire finds that another boy his age has begun to punch him without
provocation every time they meet at a local playground. A fifth-grade boy in a
Massachusetts public school reports to his teacher that a girl in the class has
been cheating on tests. The teacher ignores the evidence and treats the boy
coldly. In suburban Boston, a 10th-grade wrestler tells the senior team captain
that hazing younger members of the team must stop, and that he is becoming the
protector of the younger boys.
These are summaries
of a few of the true stories I tell in detail in The Men They Will Become (Perseus,
1999). My purpose is to help parents, teachers, and other caregivers become more
competent in guiding their boys toward admirable character. I trust almost all
of these adults to be well intentioned, but I believe all of us can enhance our
understanding of this fundamental process.
Character, I
emphasize, is very different from temperament. Every boy is born with innate
temperament that can be influenced and modified to a degree from without, but
will basically be his for his whole life. He may be temperamentally calm or
restless, shy or gregarious, difficult or easy to soothe, and so forth.
Character is not
innate or given. It develops from a continuing interplay between a particular
boy’s distinctive wiring and his experiences. Importantly, the principal
building blocks of character are laid down early. The way we judge a boy’s
character is by assessing the choices he makes in situations that are morally
challenging or tempting. Many people are dependable or predictable in their
choices of action; they are disposed to act in certain ways. Yet sufficient
stress will provoke almost everyone occasionally to act in uncharacteristic
ways—and these exceptions are part of their character, too.
Boys make some of
their choices in private, but they do not make them free of all influence.
Character formation is extremely interactive—between a boy and his parents,
siblings, other relatives, peers, teachers, coaches, and others he meets only in
passing. Thus, if an adult wishes to influence a boy knowledgeably, it is
essential that the adult understand his or her own characteristic ways of
interacting with boys. To promote this process, I work from a model created by
my wife, Carolyn Moore Newberger, a clinical and developmental psychologist who
discovered four different levels of "parental awareness." Depending on which of
these levels an adult exemplifies in a particular situation, a boy’s character
formation will be guided in various possible directions. Teachers and other
caregivers will find it easy to transpose these types of awareness into
non-parental situations. In the stories I recount, the reader will usually find
wise and mature adults on the scene where boys are making good choices—and
adults with limited understanding where boys are going astray.
Much attention has
recently been paid to the influence of peers on each other’s character. Much of
this influence, of course, is constructive, but some of it is not. In their
quest for independence, many children and adolescents do not see that their peer
culture is often nastier than anything they confront at home. Parents, teachers,
and coaches do not always exercise the beneficial influence open to them. The
situation is not hopeless, however. Adults still have enormous influence on the
formation of boys’ character.
As an invitation to
adult readers to think deeply about their own characters and their own
interactions with boys, I have reported on my upbringing by parents who had
their own pressures that handicapped their capacity to be the parents they
wanted to be. My story, like everyone’s, is a reassurance that perfection is not
the standard so far as character goes. We all have our slips. What is accessible
to us is an opportunity to acknowledge our slips, and then to do better. It is
the open-endedness of character formation that consoles us all. For until death,
there is always something ahead for a male: the man he will become.
--Eli Newberger,
M.D.
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Eli
Newberger M.D. is a leading
figure in the movement to improve the protection and care of children, is
renowned for his ability to bring together good sense and science on the
main issues of family life. A paediatrician and author of many influential
works on child abuse, he teaches at Harvard Medical School and founded the
Child Protection Team and the Family Development Program at Children’s
Hospital in Boston.
contact@elinewberger.com
SMSC online is grateful to Eli
Newberger for allowing us to use excerpts from his book. |
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