Talking about boys

Hi Misty!!

First of all, congratulations on your family of 5 boys!  I am so jealous.  I am a step-mother to three boys (14, 11, almost 10) and I love every minute of it.  My husband and I hope to add more boys to our family as the Lord sees fit.

Let me begin by saying that an advice I offer up is humbly done.  I am a young mother (25) and have had to learn very quickly over the last 6 years, and am still trying to learn all that I can!  I also strongly believe that every family is different, with unique children and dynamics, so what works for me may not work for you 🙂

You mentioned how different boys are from girls, and you are so right!!  Boys, from a very young age, seem to have this inate drive to be conquerors and explorers.  They need more physical activity than girls do.  Sometimes this desire, which I believe is totally made in the image of God, can lead them to be rude, pushy, or unkind.  Not that it excuses poor behavior, but it can help explain some of the “why” behind their actions.  You mentioned that you’ve listened to Dobson’s “Bring up Boys,” but it didn’t seem to do much for you.  I would urge to keep finding books on raising boys and read all you can.  I would encourage you to read both Christian and secular books on the subject.  I’m sure that this goes against what many Christians would say, but I believe that God gives all sorts of people gifts, and you might gain something from a non-Christian author.  However, you do need to take everything you read with a grain of salt and have a firm foundation in God and what you believe so as not to be led astray by something that sounds good, but may not be Biblical.  All that being said, two great Christian books you may be interested in are “Raising a Modern Day Knight” and “Wild at Heart.”  RMDK is a book written for father’s raising boys.  It talks about the different stages a boy will go through in becoming a man and what his needs are at each age.  If you can get your hands on this, please have your husband read it!!  “Wild at Heart” is a book written to men, but I highly encourage mothers and wives to read this to gain more insight into how our great God created the men in our lives and to learn a little bit more about how they tick.

I don’t remember how old your boys are, but with our family I have noticed that the older a child has gotten, the greater their desire for some alone time has become.  I feel like this is vitally important.  We live in a small house, so our family is ALWAYS around each other (something that for the most part we all love very much).  However, this can be a problem when one person is feeling crowded or their frustrations are running high.  We encourage our boys to come to us when they are feeling the need to be alone, and we will occupy the other children elsewhere so they can have that time alone to sort of rejuvinate themselves and come back to the family refreshed and with a calm spirit.

I don’t know if this is true for your family, but with our boys we had a lot of tattling going on.  Mainly, it was when the boys were wrestling or playing very rough with each other.  Someone inevitably got hurt (someone is ALWAYS hurt) and they would come running and screaming over the offense.  These were never major injuries, and more often or not the intent was to get someone in trouble.  We offered them a simple solution: either stop running and tattling every time something little happened, or stop wrestling with their brothers.  That cut down on 90% of all the tattling.  Also, when tattling was happening over unecessary things we started to punish the tattler instead of the other child.  We are strong believers in our home that friends will come and go, but your siblings should be your friends forever, and we do not encourage them to throw each other under the bus.  They know that tattling is allowed ONLY if someone is doing something that could get themself or someone else seriously injured, or if they have calmly talked to the person and asked them kindly to stop doing what they were doing and explained how it made them feel.  We often talk to the kids about how to handle different situations that might arise with their siblings to help reinforce that.

One thing I noticed with our boys is that the more I try to control them and become to worrisome with them the worse their behaviors get.  If I give them space to be boys, to run,explore, climb, jump, get muddy, experiment, do things that some parent might consider unruly or dangerous (for example-our boys climb to the top of the highest tree in our yard and go to the bathroom off the top of it.  I know many parents would chide us for that but those are the sorts of things boys like)….the more freedom they have the better behaved they are.  It also sometimes means for my husband and I learning when to interfere into sibling bickering and when to stay out.  A lot of times when I just ignore it, it will simply resolve itself over the course of a few minutes.  This is not to say that we don’t teach them what God’s word says about loving each other and how we should treat one another, because we frequent this often and when we hear hurtful words we do have them go over Bible verses on this subject.

One last peice of encouragement that I would give you is that when you begin to feel weary and discouraged about your children’s behavior take a look at the world around you.  I garuntee you that your children are far better behaved than many other children out there.  Let that remind you of why you are training your children the way that you are, and give you that push you need to get through the hard times.

Meagan