Lashlie - Hell be OK: growing gorgeous boys into good men

A researcher and social commentator, Celia Lashlie worked for 15 years within the prison service, starting in December 1985 as the first woman to work as a prison officer in a male prison in New Zealand. Her final role within the service was as manager of Christchurch Womens Prison, a position she left in September 1999.

Celia, who had a degree in anthropology and Mori, went on to work on a number of projects, all of which were linked to improving the lives of at-risk children and empowering families to find their own solutions to the challenges they were facing.

In September 2004, she completed the Good Man Project. The project, which facilitated discussion within and between 25 boys schools throughout New Zealand, aimed to create a working definition of what makes a good man in the 21st century.

What arose from the project was a significant insight into the minds of teenage boys, and what they are feeling at this period in their lives. There are also some challenging suggestions for parents, as well as a call for women in particular to rethink the way they interact with the men in their lives their sons and their husbands if they want to see their sons become the good men they want them to be.

Celia Lashlie is the author of the bestselling books The Journey to Prison: Who Goes and Why, Hell Be OK: Growing Gorgeous Boys into Good Men and The Power of Mothers: Releasing Our Children.

Celia had begun working on a revised edition of Hell Be OK before her death in February 2015.

For the many good men I met on the journey:
know how special you are.

For the many gorgeous boys I met on the journey:
know that magic lies within you.

For Bek and Gene
and all who continue to walk with me
on the journey of life:
know it is you who give my life meaning.

Contents

I met Celia Lashlie only once. We were far away from our respective homes, at a conference in Cape Town, South Africa, where we were both scheduled to speak to the 200 educators gathered in the theatre of the Wynberg Boys High School. Wynberg is a single-sex state school that serves all boys black, white and of mixed descent who will be the future men of South Africa, a country which is struggling with some of the highest rates of murder and rape in the world.

As in many countries, South Africans worry about their boys. The system of apartheid destroyed black and mixedrace mens sense of themselves; it also destroyed traditional tribal cultures and traditions which maintained male self-respect and self-control. Apartheid left behind it a legacy of violence and exploitation of women. Parents, teachers and principals are now faced with the challenge of raising boys who witness violence all around them. How can they raise these boys to be law-abiding men, loving fathers capable of raising moral sons and daughters?

Celia Lashlie and I came to Cape Town to offer our help. The conference we were speaking at was sponsored by the International Boys Schools Coalition, an association representing English-language boys schools from around the world. Many of us in the audience, myself included, work in protected, even privileged, school environments. As a psychologist in boys schools in the United States, the problems I regularly see are to do with mental health issues like anxiety and depression, family break-ups and routine disciplinary infractions. Theyre not criminal matters, certainly not violence.

Celia brought a different set of experiences to bear on the issue of understanding and educating boys than the majority of people in the room. They were educators; she had worked for years as an officer in male prisons in New Zealand, which she wrote about in her insightful book The Journey to Prison. Knowing how different her experiences had been to my own, I was anxious to hear her speak.

When she took the stage, we were all immediately under her spell. I make my living as an author and speaker, and I am ruthlessly critical of my less-than-inspiring conference keynote colleagues. I have rarely heard a more relaxed, funny, expansive and challenging speaker than Celia. She didnt remain behind the podium, not for a second; she took the microphone in her hands and paced side to side, backwards and forwards; with her big voice and gestures, Celia swept us up into her conversation about boys. She began to talk about gorgeous boys, not disadvantaged boys, or troubled boys, or angry boys or even misunderstood boys. Such phrases are the stock in trade for those of us who are trying to get people worked up and anxious about boys (and ready to buy our books). I confess I have used such descriptors. Not Celia.

No, Celia spoke repeatedly and with obvious emphasis about gorgeous boys, even those gorgeous boys who had landed in prison in reckless pursuit of their own manhood. You could tell that she loved boys and she was requiring us to acknowledge that we loved them too. Her choice of that adjective was a demand: do not be wishy-washy about boys; do not stand back and force boys to prove themselves. She urged us to embrace their energy, their physicality, their dreams, their intelligence, their sexuality, their impulsivity, their practicality and their potential the whole package. Boys schools have faculties that are mostly 7080% male, and the conference audience reflected this gender split. This self-professed radical feminist was giving a group of mostly male educators (boys schools have faculties that are 7080 per cent men) an important lesson: dont hold back from boys and expect them to trust you. Meet boys where they are, learn from them and trust in their development.

Thats exactly what Celia does in her book Hell Be OK: Growing Gorgeous Boys into Good Men. Invited to visit a small number of boys schools in New Zealand as part of the Good Man Project in 2002, she ended up having detailed conversations with boys in 25 boys schools. She talked with them about everything: homework, girls, risk-taking and risk-avoidance, sex, procrastination, their futures, their relationships with their mothers, and whether they wanted to grow up to be like their dads. She takes conversations that might make another person conclude that boys are superficial one boy said he didnt want to grow up to be like his father because his dad was bald and she finds the practical wisdom in their responses. Time and time again, she makes sense of boy psychology in situations where many adults are confused. She sees adolescent boys as vulnerable, often more psychologically vulnerable than girls of the same age. She sees them as dependent on their peers for a sense of direction. She also sees them as highly practical, intuitive and wise, and she persuades us to see them the same way.

At several points in Hell Be OK, Celia makes me want to cheer. She observes that 80 per cent and in high-stakes situations 90 per cent of a boys communication is non-verbal and she is OK with that. She urges mothers to stop making their sons lunches (Yes!) and allow them to get to know who their dads are or were (Yes!). She declines as a woman to tell men how they should raise their sons (Yes! Yes!). She just reminds dads that their sons want a father who will walk beside them and help them open pathways to other men. But, most of all, she understands you cannot hope to change the life of boys with mistrust, over-supervision and punishment. Boys know whether or not you respect them, and if you dont... well, they wont work with you. They worked with Celia because they knew she had a deep respect for their lives.

How did I come into possession of my copy of Hell Be OK? Celia gave it to me that day in Cape Town. After I listened to her presentation and she had heard mine, she walked up to me, book in hand, and threw her arms around me. I will never forget her generous-hearted embrace. She proposed that we work together, perhaps doing a tour of boys schools in Australia. The director of the International Boys Schools Coalition was standing nearby and he immediately endorsed the plan. I left Africa feeling like I had made a new friend and looked forward to travelling and presenting with her. I was deeply saddened to hear less than a year later that she had died an untimely death from pancreatic cancer. What a loss for boys, for those of us who advocate for boys, and for me personally. I am so sorry that I never got to know Celia better, but her heart is on display in