Raising Boys: Our society often gives little boys a message. That message is that their career paths and their lifelines are locked together. Is this the right message to give a boy?

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Boys: Raising Confident Boys

Boys and Career Messages
Parenting Boys to Manhood

Jan Wilson

Parenting Boys: Raising boys to become healthy, happy adult men may mean teaching him the opposite of the message society will give him about careers.

Our society often gives boys a message. That message is that their career paths and their lifelines are locked together. 

It starts when they are young and continues to adulthood.

This is not the message boys of today need to become healthy, happy adults.

Elizabeth Perle McKenna in her book When Work Doesn't Work Anymore writes, "When my father came home to this country after fighting in World War II, he went to law school on the GI Bill. He knew opportunities his parents never had known. He had known poverty and promise. He delighted in giving me an easier life than he's had. My father believed that social and economic mobility know only one true direction--up. It was his duty to make sure his family benefited--not for power's naked sake but for the sustenance and pleasure and growth of those he loved. But long after I have been self-supporting, my father still works as though my life depended on it. For the men of my father's generation, being a man and being a provider were almost synonymous. For him, who he is and what he does are fused so completely that I have often thought that the moment he stops working he will stop breathing. It wouldn't surprise me. I've seen it before."

Parenting boys and raising confident young men.

McKenna opines, "For that generation, what a man did for a living wasn't merely about putting food on the table. What and how much he provided determined the importance, value, and meaning of his life and of his children's."

McKenna continues, "This is the way that work--and by extension, manliness--became endowed with a kind of sacredness and power way beyond its actual activities. The moment that survival was no longer the exclusive reason men left home every day, work and masculinity became synonymous. If work failed, the man failed."

Are you communicating this message to your son?

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