William S. Pollack - Real Boys : Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood

ALSO BY WILLIAM POLLACK

In a Time of Fallen Heroes: The Re-Creation
of Masculinity (coauthor)

A New Psychology of Men

(coeditor)

REAL BOYS

WILLIAM POLLACK, PH.D.

RESCUING OUR SONS FROM
THE MYTHS OF BOYHOOD

Owl Books
Henry Holt and Company, LLC, Publishers since 1866
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10010
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An Owl Book and are registered trademarks
of Henry Holt and Company, LLC.

Copyright 1998 by William Pollack
Foreword copyright 1999 by Mary Pipher
All rights reserved.
Distributed in Canada by H. B. Fenn and Company Ltd.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Simon & Schuster and A. P. Watt Ltd. on behalf of
Michael Yeats for permission to reprint four lines from A Dialogue of Self and Soul
from The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Volume 1: The Poems, revised and edited
by Richard J. Finneran. Copyright 1933 by Macmillan Publishing Company.
Copyright renewed 1961 by Bertha Georgie Yeats. Rights outside of the
United States are controlled by A. P. Watt Ltd. on behalf of Michael Yeats.
Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster and A. P. Watt Ltd. on behalf of Michael Yeats.
Grateful acknowledgment is also made to Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc.:
For My Son Noah, Ten Years Old, from Man in the Black Coat
Turns, by Robert Bly. Copyright 1981 by Robert Bly. Reprinted by permission
of the author and Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc.

A version of the foreword by Mary Pipher appeared in Family Therapy Networker.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pollack, William S.
Real boys: rescuing our sons from the myths of boyhood / William
Pollack.1st Owl Books ed.
p. cm.
An Owl book.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Originally published: 1st ed. New York: Random House, 1998. With
new pref.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8050-6183-3
ISBN-10: 0-8050-6183-5

1. Boys. 2. Sons. 3. Masculinity. 4. Child rearing. I. Title.

HQ775.P65 1999 99-10388

305.23dc21 CIP

Henry Holt books are available for special promotions
and premiums. For details contact: Director, Special Markets.

First published in hardcover in 1998 by Random House, Inc.

First Owl Books Edition 1999

Designed by Tanya Prez-Rock

Printed in the United States of America

To Marsha and Sarah
who have sustained the man and nurtured the inner boy

To my parents and grandparents
who knew how to make a boy feel special and loved

And to the boys and their parents
who opened their hearts and gave voice to their feelings

All of the stories and voices contained in this book are derived in part from my clinical experience and in part from my ongoing Listening to Boys Voices research project at Harvard Medical School. However, names, places, and other details contained in these materials have been altered to protect the privacy and anonymity of the individuals to whom they refer. Therefore, any similarity between the names and stories of individuals described in this book and those of individuals known to readers is inadvertent and purely coincidental.

A work of this scope rarely involves the toil or ideas of just one person. The author inevitably stands on the shoulders of many strong personal, professional, and creative pillars, including many friends, family members, and professional colleagues. Therefore, Id like to take this opportunity to offer my sincerest gratitude to some of the many people who helped make Real Boys possible.

First, Id like to thank my editor at Random House, Kate Medina, whose perspicacity, energy, warm support, and critical thinking were central to making this book come to life. From our first meeting in Cambridge I sensed her deep connection with my work and her hopefulness about how my researchand this bookcould help make an important difference in how we think about and raise boys. Her editorial comments and suggestions were nothing short of brilliant, and I shall be forever grateful for her creative guidance in taking these chunks of ideas and shaping them into the big picture of this book. Her dedication and expertise at publishing this book cannot be too deeply praised.

Also at Random House Meaghan Rady has been essential to making this book happen and I am deeply grateful. In every way the people at Random House have shown the highest standards of professionalism and excellence.

This work would hardly be a paper, let alone a complete book, without the foresight, energy, and love for this endeavor that my literary agents at Zachary ShusterTodd Shuster and Lane Zacharybrought to the party. They were the first to see the potential for a book relating to work with boys, and helped me enormously to shape its movement from research notes to the written page. Their agents and staff, especially Jennifer Gates Hayes, Esmond Harmsworth, and Allison Murray, provided me and Real Boys with a level of support and encouragement an author has almost no right to expectbut which I did receive, cheerfully and regularly, almost daily.

Although as author one must take ultimate responsibility for the hypotheses, findings, suggestions, and results of his work, there are debts of intellectual gratitude that, though they cannot be completely repaid, must be acknowledged. Dr. Fran Grossman first invited me to study families with her Boston University Parenthood project, which led me in the direction of defining and researching the world of fathers, at a time when the world was just beginning to perceive the meaning of men in family life. Dr. Ronald Levant then felicitously invited me to join him on a journey to understand the struggles men were having in our society and to band together with other like-minded individuals to study, help, and treat men and boys. Our intellectual collaboration has given birth to two professional books on gender, a continuing collaboration toward understanding men and boys, and a friendship for which Im very grateful. I am appreciative too of my collaboration with Dr. Bill Betcher, with whom I have coauthored a book and now codirect the Center for Men at McLean Hospital.

The International Coalition of Boys Schools recognized the significance and need for a new psychology of boys and has also been generously supportive of my work. I would like to thank John Farber, who first invited me to speak; past president Rick Hawley, who has been a constant intellectual supporter; and the Reverend Tony Jarvis whose spiritual understanding of boys is both erudite and uplifting. I must especially thank Dr. Rick Melvoin at the Belmont Hill School, who with his staff (especially Connie MacGillivary) opened many doors in helping my recent research project come to fruition. Diane Hulse and John Bednall also collaborated with suggestions and ideas that have been very helpful to our project. I would like to acknowledge and thank the Research Committee of the Coalition for a grant that partially funded some of the early analysis of the data from the Listening to Boys Voices study.