Real Boys : Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood

I needed this book 20 years ago for my oldest son whom may be lost to me forever. William

Really made me think about the differences in boys and girls. Very informative. Bought one to be passed around among my teacher friends.

As the sister of six brothers and the mother of two boys, I found myself agreeing with the author on many fronts.

What the author calls "The Boy Code" is what Steven Covey would probably call using efficiency rather than effectiveness as a goal in raising males. The problem is that efficiency leaves the boy with a limited arsenal when it comes to understanding and taking responsibility for his own emotional life. It certainly leaves the boy with limited resources when it comes to understanding or helping others who are wrestling with problems in their own inner life. The lie of "The Boy Code" is that recognizing one's own "negative" emotions is a self-indulgence that simply makes a person weak, a weakness that is permissible in famales, but not in males. Nothing could be further from the truth.

We don't do our boys any favors by teaching them to ignore their own emotions. We also do them a disservice if we let the expectations learned from females dictate what kind of emotional life we expect of males. I know men who live by what this book is espousing. They aren't "wimps", as some reviewers have implied that boys raised in this way will be. They are adults who understand their own emotions well enough to not be unknowingly ruled by them. They know when they are angry, they can admit when they feel fear, and they know how to choose to act under those circumstances, rather than simply reacting, which is what people who refuse to acknowledge their own inner life tend to do. They are certainly not men who expect themselves to experience emotion in the same way as their wives or other women in their lives do, nor do they feel some authority to dictate emotional taboos to other men. They process their emotions in their own ways, they let others do the same, and they don't apologize for it.

I wouldn't, however, limit the observations in this book to boys. There are women and girls who, for whatever reason, have learned to live by what the author calls "The Boy Code." There are men who don't process their emotions as this book implies that men raised in earlier decades will. For that reason, I would caution that the reader not presume after reading this book that he or she now "understands men." The book gives tools for understanding others and helping them to understand themselves, and points out some ineffective but "efficient" ways that people often use in dealing with strong emotion. Knowing these common human patterns isn't a substitute for paying attention to the actions and emotional style of the person you're actually dealing with.

The reviewers who complain that the book takes a great many pages to repeat the same story over and over have a point. A reader who does not want or need so many examples to get the author's point won't lose much by simply skimming the book after the first 100-200 pages or so.

In a nutshell,(which is where this book belongs), the "author" wants boys to be wimps and sissies. The fact that a major New York publisher would print such nonsense pretty well proves that Communism is not dead, but like a snake has simply changed it's skin; AKA Social Marxism. Had William S. Pollack been around in 1776, his advise to Patrick Henry would no doubt have been to "let it all out" and cry about it, and counselling for the depression.
The fact that you can buy this book for a mear penny pretty much says it all.
Few people who have actually owned and read the book feel any need to keep it on their bookshelves. Mine is now going in the trash. As an antdote to this nonsense, I recomend "THE WAR AGAINST BOYS" by Christina Sommers, also sold bt Amazon.

It took so much effort to get through this book, and I'm not even sure why I read the whole thing--I must have been really bored. If you want to read a book full of stories about wealthy teenage boys who can't decide which ivy league school to attend written by a man who clearly thinks academic achievement is the single most important thing in life, this is the book for you. And most of the stories sound fictional; maybe that's just because Pollack isn't a talented writer.

I gained nothing from this book and I want my money back.