What About Boys?
Read the Introduction chapter to my book, "Nurturing and Empowering Our Sons"!
I am pleased to share with you the Introduction chapter to my second book, Nurturing and Empowering Our Sons, abridged.
What about boys?
Have you ever asked yourself that question? Amid the loud 30-year drum beat of “Girl Power”, empowering young women, protecting women, and a female-focus in…
· school,
· college,
· healthcare,
· behavioral healthcare,
· legal justice,
· social justice, and
· the media
...have you noticed the omission of our sons from any counterpart efforts and campaigns? Have you ever seen “Boy Power” as a slogan, a “Boys Rule” T-shirt, or a major campaign for empowering boys, young men, or male victims of sexual and domestic violence? Maybe what you usually see in the media is girls and young women “crushing it” and boys and young men being crushed.
Perhaps you’ve heard a long litany of ways that our sons are “failing” in education, “failing” to launch, “failing” as fathers, or “failing” in nearly every other life domain… Or, perhaps you’ve heard about the long list of faults about our sons—spanning from toddlerhood to manhood—from many of our society’s institutions, especially from the education system. You might have even heard that our sons are considered to be toxic if they identify with their maleness and masculinity. If you’re reading this book, then some part of your intuition as a mother or father knows on some primal level that it isn’t our sons who are toxic or failing: Our society’s institutions are failing them—It is our society that is toxic to our sons.
What about boys?
I started very seriously asking that question in the early 1990s, as I entered college and began my career of working with children in multiple fields. Initially, I noticed that I could find no accurate research about male victims of sexual abuse and family violence and no support services for male victims. In fact, when I volunteered for a local rape crisis agency’s elementary school outreach program, they falsely presented sexual abuse as primarily a female = victim, male = perpetrator crime. At the young age of 22, I had a hand in redeveloping the children’s program to be more gender-balanced instead of gender-biased, thus helping to protect all children and support child victims whose trauma did not fit the gender stereotype.
However, I soon became jaded, aware that it was like shoveling grains of sand against the tide: In college, in graduate school, and then in the fields of education, human services, and mental health in which I was working, there was an incessant insistence on—an aggressive demand for, even—the Female = Victim/Male = Perpetrator stereotype. It was to the point where it negatively impacted my ability to find protective and supportive resources for the boys under my professional and clinical care—and for their brothers and fathers. After being on the inside of these and other systems for years, primarily as a licensed mental health counselor and child trauma specialist, I watched a growing tone of impatience for boys and young men twist into a glaring contempt for them. By the middle of the ‘00s, the reflexive pathologizing and drugging of our boys eventually morphed into an effort to prune and erase their maleness. By 2016, working also in juvenile justice, I decided it was time to leave clinical work and focus on this book.
Your son is fortunate to have you in his life, as you are entertaining that question:
What about boys?
You picked up this book, which is a first step at understanding your son and what nature intends for his development. It is a first step at reconnecting with him if that connection and developmental blueprint have been injured. It is a first step toward protecting him from the risks and harms of what our society’s institutions are telling you are “good” for him. You are taking the first step to helping him heal his behavioral, emotional, or learning challenges to the best of his ability. You are taking that first step to show him that he matters to you and to this world and that nature has a blueprint unique to him; unique to the gifts your son came into this world to express.
You are taking that first step at the perfect time in history to do so… and it is important to realize that it is isn’t just your son who seems out of synch with the system or just you who realizes that the system is actually out of synch with him. A remarkable percentage of our unborn, infant, toddler, young, preteen, adolescent, and young adult sons are suffering deeply in our unhealthy industrialized, digital, on-the-verge-of transhumanist society and they are exhibiting this to us through sounding off nature’s alarm signals:
· Developmental disabilities and delays
· Behavioral acting-out, defiance, tantrums, and rages
· Anxiety, depression, apathy, and withdrawal
· Learning problems
· Behavioral addictions (video games, screens, sugar, self-harm, porn, etc.)
· Chemical addictions
· Failure-to-launch
· Gender Dysphoria
· Psychosis
· Aggression and violence
· Suicidal ideation and death
Our sons don’t need more labels, diagnoses, or psychiatric drugs, however—They need our understanding that they are the canaries in the coal mine of society and their behaviors are natural alarms built into children and youths signaling distressing conditions in their environment, insecure attachment, or developmental trauma. Nature’s diagnosis for this? Unmet Developmental and Attachment Needs. Nature’s “treatment”? Restore homeostasis. It is beautifully simple, as nature is, yet examining the causes, facing the cognitive dissonance that arises in this process, and taking action to protect, repair, heal, and restore is complex. This book has reached you at just the right time, as we will walk together through the process of doing this all at whatever pace you are ready to exert.
What happens when nature’s alarms are ignored in a child for too long?
Before we answer that question, think for a moment of all of the hopes and dreams you have for your son. Ideally, at the core, we all, as moms and dads, want our children to be happy and joyful. No one wants to think of the worst, yet so many parents spend their children’s childhoods in a low-grade state of anxiety trying to fight the worst. What is the worst?
Most parents would agree that one of the greatest imaginable nightmares would be their child going missing… I remember when I was 10 years old, a little girl, Tammy Belanger, vanished from Exeter, New Hampshire and to this day has never been found. I helped one of my Nanas, the one who worked for the Exeter Police Department at the time, put up Missing Person posters in surrounding towns, wishing I could find her. When an apparent abduction attempt (I believe by the same perpetrator) was made on me not long afterward when I had biked outside of the zone of where I was allowed to be, I experienced a glimpse of the child’s side of the horror of staring into the face of doom.
When my son, Brycen went missing for a week at age 23, it was, at that time, the greatest nightmare of my life… When I heard that pounding on my door during the 3 AM hour, my heart and insides felt like they violently ejected from my body, and in that moment—before I even answered the door and collapsed twice when I beheld the two police officers—I realized, trembling in convulsions, that hope was lost: The greatest nightmare of my life was that my son was dead. I didn’t need the police to tell me—mother’s intuition had grippingly whispered to me that he was in peril during the timeframe when I would later learn that he died. (Mother’s intuition had even propelled me to try, unsuccessfully, to reach my son.) I knew what that pounding at the door meant because I had, for nearly 13 years, stared in the face of doom at Brycen’s side, striving to help my precious boy fight that immense trauma “demon” that lured him toward suicide as early as preschool age.
Brycen died in 2017… Yet 2005, the year that I had adopted him at age 11 from the foster care system, seemed like only yesterday. My son and I have always been, from the moment our eyes first met, deeply close, with remarkable synchronicities constantly unfolding to signal some grin from the universe that a divine creative force had a hand in us coming together. So many of our years together were joyful, with him having the support of our family to bring his dreams to fruition. During these periods, my hopes and dreams as a mother for his lifelong happiness would come to epochs of plausibility. But the tentacles of childhood developmental trauma and attachment wounds suffocating Brycen’s present moments had indelibly fractured his psyche, hijacked his neurochemistry, and devastated him down to the epigenetic—chromosomal expression—level.
What happens when nature’s alarms are ignored in a child for too long?
Brycen wanted you to know the answer to that question as early as when he was 12-years-old and announced that he wanted to accompany me on a speaking gig in Chicago, to deliver his own presentation (to a roomful of city mental health and education professionals) on how violence in parenting and education harms children. He continued to speak at my side until 2015, and he echoed in 2017 what he told me in 2007 when I sat down to write my first book, Instead of Medicating and Punishing:
“Mom, you have my permission to share any part of my life story as long as it’s used to help other children.”
No one has helped me understand the answer to the question…
“What happens when nature’s alarms are ignored in a child for too long?”
…better than my dear youth clients and students—spanning volunteer, professional, and clinical work from 1996-2016—and my own beloved son. The echoes and energy of their voices will all be “spoken” through my own words in this book, and you will also read the literal words of Brycen through quotes, insights, and interviews that he contributed to this book—including a final interview he gave shortly before his death. While the precious voices of boys, girls, young women, young men, and trans youths alike all form the energy and power of this book, augmenting my research and my expertise that I offer to you, the focus of this project is necessarily on boys and young men.
I knew this was necessary when I first sat down in attempts to start this book in 2011 and I was attacked on social media for considering a boy focus. I was appallingly accused of not caring about girls because I believed that it was finally time for boys’ voices to be heard amidst the mountains of Girl Power and the religious-fervor of female empowerment. I took a five-year hiatus from the book project to focus on my son’s needs and his busy music career, but I continued to speak, write, and accept interviews. However, at every mainstream media door at which I knocked in hopes of advocating for boys, doors closed as soon as I said the word “boys”. In 2016, this unwritten book was like a creative, humanitarian, and spiritual torment inside of me, and I knew—and my clients’ and son’s problems were signaling—that it was time to write it.
This brings us back to:
What about boys?
While racing to finish this book, the unthinkable happened: Brycen committed suicide. Less than three months later when his daughter was born, and I felt my waning lifeforce feel a jolt of energy to be there for her, I faced my third “worst nightmare” scenario: My granddaughter—my son’s child—was taken out of my life and our entire family was erased from hers. I came face-to-face with a new world of silent suffering: Parental and grandparent alienation, and a court system that allows it to occur, especially when the erased family is the paternal side.
What about boys?
That echo haunted me like the anguishing longing for my son and granddaughter. Some days, I would lie down on the ground, over my son’s grave, and wish for death, but the echo of that question signaled that I had an unfinished job to do for the world. During periods when I would struggle to find the words, I sat at Brycen’s gravesite and I drew symbols and pictures in my project notebook until finally, the well of passion and words poured forth once again. There was a pivotal moment after hitting the absolute bottom of the abyss of my losses when I became invigorated by the power of my love for my son and by his love for me. I was held up by my promise to keep Brycen’s voice alive and to share his story in hopes of preventing one more child trauma, one more attachment break, one more broken home, one more child entering foster care, one more life ended by suicide, and one more family shattered like ours by suicide’s screams and reverberations.
In 2017, Brycen was just one statistic—About 37,000 males also ended their lives that year. Yet these alarm signals warning that boys, young men, and men are suffering in silence didn’t register on any mainstream screens. Just a few weeks after Brycen’s September 27th suicide, in fact, the growing anti-male tone in the media and on social media intensified with the #MeToo movement going viral—#MeTo was a movement that excluded male victims and victims sexually assaulted by females. It was a movement beset by hypocrisy as one of its founders, an assemblywoman, had been credibly accused of engaging in sexual misconduct against a young male lobbyist. It was a sexist movement that set social awareness about gender parity in sexual assault back to 1987’s ignorance; back when it was wrongly assumed that sexual assault is only a crime by males against females.
What about boys?
This book is for you if you are the mother or father of a son between the ages of prebirth through young adulthood (0-24+). This book is for grandparents and other committed family members concerned about a boy who they love. This book is for you “gem” professionals who are concerned about the plight of your Millennial and Generation Z male youth clients, students, patients, or cases. This book is also for you if you have no sons or grandsons, but are trying to understand what is happening to boys and young men today—Parents of daughters might have grandsons someday. The language of this book, however, will speak primarily to parents, as it is you who have the natural and nature-intended role and responsibility of protecting, nurturing, empowering, and healing your sons for as long as they are dependent upon you in some way. This book will provide you with the information and guidance to help you.
Part I of Nurturing and Empowering Our Sons will introduce you to the foundational principles of nature’s intent for boy development as well as the neurochemistry of attachment, distress, and trauma.
Part II focuses on 15 primal wounds and seven risks faced by boys and young men that cause mild, moderate, severe, to extreme harm to their holistic development:
Epigenetic
Biological
Physical
Neurological
Psychological
Emotional
Cognitive
Behavioral
Social
Sexual
Spiritual/Moral
Part III is where it all comes together—You will be given the guidebook and tools to help your son restore homeostasis and help heal the behavioral, emotional, and learning alarms that signal some degree of developmental distress in his life or even trauma and attachment insecurity.
You may likely understand all of this well enough to teach it by the time you finish this book—Repetition of simple but crucial concepts occurs throughout this book so that you will not have to keep flipping back to previous chapters, or feeling frustrated that you can’t keep up with complex content. No child will be helped by making this book too wordy or academic to understand, so I recommend reading it in order and not skipping around, as each chapter builds on previous concepts.
This book took six years to finalize: Things are so grim for boys and young men that statistics I wrote in 2016 needed to be updated by the time I edited the book. Entire sections and chapters were re-written after Brycen died and to keep up with the tumultuous, constantly mutating challenges facing male youths since 2020. This book does not intend in any way to detract from the mental health and social struggles of girls and young women—much of what is in this book can help your daughters, too. First and foremost, I am a child advocate and I have always championed all kids. However, for the past 25 to 30 years, celebration, protection, nurturing, and empowerment in education, academia, mental healthcare, healthcare, rape crisis, social justice, media, and federal human service programs have been all about girls and women while our boys and young men have been blamed, shamed, put down, villainized, and left out.
For these reasons and others, our sons are really hurting and are largely hurting in silence. Under their grins, hugs, stoicism, dreaminess, shyness, self-depreciation, hyperactivity, silly shenanigans, wild antics, reckless choices, wit, charm, wisecracks, crises, swaggering, fixations, achievements, ambitionless apathy, and even under their cockiness, shirt-off-their-back generosity, and aggressive outbursts—they are hurting. In order to understand why and how, we must dredge into some dark, heavy, and at times painful historical and cultural material.
We will weave in and out of the intensity of this information to help you grasp how the micro-details all layer together to form the large tapestry of what is hurting our sons—especially at the subconscious level. Once you gain insight and awareness into this “tapestry”, you will be on solid ground to understand why neuro-somatic trauma treatments, attachment interventions, unschooling and alternative education, a toxin-free diet, and the many other holistic interventions that we discuss in Part III will help your son heal to the best of his capability. You will understand why behavioral modification, talk therapy, medication, screens, a mainstream diet, opposite sex hormones, and other standard interventions only continue the cycle of distress, suffering, and crisis. You will also understand why parenting skills that transcend punishment, permissiveness, “helicoptering”, and “bulldozing” will support optimal development in your son—including behaviorally.
You will be taken by the hand and supported step-by-step through the healing guidance in this book and finally, challenged to release our human tendency to place blame upon ourselves and others for things we wish had been done differently. My focus in this book is not on blame, but on uncovering, exposing, showing, and understanding the overlooked and hidden harms to our sons. Once the sun is shined into the dark places, my focus is on how to heal the wounds in a way that projects love, empathy, compassion, and forgiveness to ourselves, our sons, our parents, our children’s other parents, and to any others who were involved in their lives.
What happens when nature’s alarms are ignored in a child for too long?
Sometimes the damage is so profound that the bleed-out can’t be stopped in time. Brycen’s first serious suicide attempt was in preschool. His suicidal ideation and gestures rose up again and again in his childhood through terribly harmful actions such as smashing his head against rocks, throwing himself out of moving cars, stabbing himself, and running down a main road in the middle of the night planning to jump off of a fire tower. A month after I met Brycen, he told me that had I not come into his life when I did—thereby answering his prayer to God, his letter to Santa Claus, and his wish upon a star for a forever family of his own—he planned to end his life after giving God, Santa, and the star a grace period of about a month. I have no doubt in my mind that Brycen was serious.
In this book, weaved into all of the powerful content, you will learn Brycen’s story:
· Early childhood abuse, two early rapes, neglect, loss, abandonment, and being cycled through at least 15 different foster, respite, and group home placements.
· Encountering misandry (sexism against males) as a child and young man in our society’s institutions, especially later as he stepped into the world of fatherhood.
· A heart-wrenching passing of a brilliant, loving, and prodigious young man’s life from this realm to one I can’t physically touch.
Examining extreme cases like Brycen’s will help us bring context and a continuum to framing mild and moderate problems in your sons. It shows us what can occur if we don’t take action as early as possible. It helps us appreciate that even mild trauma and mild attachment disruption can lead to extreme outcomes like aggression, violence, criminal behavior, and yes, suicide, if left to fester. Studying extreme cases can also help parents feel urgency and passion to protect and advocate for their own sons and realize that there is always hope. There is still hope even in Brycen’s story! I believe that, while his life was painfully too short for me, his daughter, and all of his loved ones, Brycen’s life was also a success, because he stayed for 23 and ¾ years—almost 19 years longer than he had desired and intended to stay. Had he died in preschool or at age 11, his beautiful spirit wouldn’t have left its indelible mark on so many and his story wouldn’t be here to help you and your son…
What about boys?
In this book, it will be all about boys—and all about your sons. It will be a respite from the negativity, pathologizing, criminalizing, and contempt toward them and a look into how beautiful, wonderful, creative, brilliant, intelligent, silly, industrious, generous, strong, sensitive, and loving they are—just like your daughters! I hope this huge resource/tome/encyclopedia—book—will inspire you to protect, heal, nurture, and empower your sons…
Laurie A. Couture, M.Ed., LMHC
January 19, 2023
Link to the book: https://www.amazon.com/Nurturing-Empowering-Sons-Laurie-Couture/dp/1958729302/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=