Michael Gurian shares how President Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper initiative is an essential alliance for a White House Council for Boys.
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President Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper Initiative has the capacity to do great things for our sons. Over the last three decades, we have seen the gradual decline of important markers for all of our boys—mental health and behavioral wellness, academic performance (noticed both in low grades and low standardized test scores), college attendance, and career strength. These issues face boys throughout the industrialized world, as data from the latest OECD shows. Boys are struggling to succeed in cultures that seem to believe boys are privileged, tough, and will do fine without boy-specific support.
As a mental health counselor, I began working with boys and their families in the late 1980s. My hometown, Spokane, Washington, had only a handful of therapists who specialized in male health (out of hundreds of therapists in the area). I came from a troubled background, having been the victim of both physical and sexual abuse as a boy: both my heart and head longed to help families of the next generation to live better lives. As my counseling practice evolved, I worked with children and families of all races, creeds, and colors, and discovered two important things about boys.
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Originally appeared at Gurian Institute.com
- First, one group of boys did not corner the market on pain; all races and groups of boys were hurting.
- Second, boys of color were, on average, so far off health and wellness markers that the situation felt epidemic.
As I began public and political outreach regarding this situation, walls of denial rose in social service and governmental agencies. Everyone cared about children, but caring about boys was difficult, given the political fervor with which our culture was being taught that all males have unearned privilege while all females are victims of the privileged males. Though most professionals knew the truth–only some males have privilege and only some females are victims–political reality lived in a power paradigm that allowed for blanket denial of the needs of males.
Soon, white boys began to kill classmates in schools across the country. These boys now entered a conversation about violence and its causes that had barely begun regarding boys of color in urban areas. In the media and in political spheres, analysis of the struggles of these boys exploded then dissipated. But in some pockets of our culture, the conversation continued, and many people at grass roots levels, are to thank for that. Communities are talking about these, among other, issues, and forming alliances to look at them:
- unmotivated boys of all races
- boys of all races failing in school
- lower male college enrollment across the board
- lost fathers across the board
- employment difficulties that males of all races are facing
- male mental health concerns faced by all kinds of boys and men.
As the grass roots works on these problems, national politicians have tended to stay at arms’ length. A decade ago, the East Wing of the Bush White House reached out to a number of us to help with “the state of boyhood in America” but that outreach died very quickly. Over the last five years, Dr. Warren Farrell, I, and many others in the male development field—Christina Sommers, Michael Thompson, William Pollock, Cathy Young, and others, as well as advocates from the Boy Scouts of America, professors from Harvard and elsewhere, and researchers in the field—have lobbied the Obama White House to create a White House Council on Boys and Men. The White House has refused to meet with us. We understand the politics of gender in the political sphere, especially in the White House, to impede any meeting.
However, a slight shift has occurred. The Obama Administration’s new initiative begins the process of committing our political capital to helping our boys. In taking this step, the Administration is beginning to help heal the most important social problem in America today—the state of our sons. The new initiative for boys of color is much needed and will lead, hopefully, to a national conversation on behalf of all our struggling males.
What Works with Boys of Color
After a successful two year pilot study at the University of Missouri-Kansas City from 1997 -1999, reported in Boys and Girls Learn Differently, a national network was formed in Colorado Springs, Colorado to provide pilot programs, train professionals, and conduct research in issues facing children of both genders, especially students and children in distress. Over the last fifteen years, this network has developed training programs for schools, parents, communities, and policy-makers that close achievement gaps, lower discipline referrals, generally improve student behavior, embolden parent involvement, and improve teacher effectiveness in both public and private schools.
Here are some data from schools that have utilized the teacher and community training on behalf of boys of color. http://gurianinstitute.com/success/test-data/. More than 60,000 teachers have been trained in these programs and interventions, from more than 2,000 schools. We believe the reason for the success of these programs is their holistic nature: they provide teachers and others the training they did not receive in their college, graduate school, or medical training.
This holistic training is not a new curriculum; rather, it helps teachers and others teach and mentor boys (and girls) in all present curricular, extra-curricular, and behavioral areas. Its holistic nature grows from its fidelity to all three fundamental areas of child development: nature, nurture, and culture. The training draws on brain scans and cultural anthropology, biochemical data and parental influence, racial and ethnic belonging as well as the cultural and racial elements of male isolation.
Over the last fifteen years, we have discovered what works and what doesn’t. Especially with boys of color, many of whom are raised without fathers, without clear, healthy identity-paths, and/or without enough parent/home/mentorial support for educational aspirations, programs and interventions that focus on only a single element of nature, nurture, or culture don’t tend to work. Some quick gains can appear from any intervention, of course, but those gains are quickly lost. If nature, nurture, and culture are not knit together in theory and practice, our educational and community dilemmas do not get solved in the long-term.
The Decade of the Boy
My Brother’s Keeper is a much-needed initiative toward greater public health. I desperately hope it will help our nation launch a “decade of the boy” that will bring to the high waves and public forum all of the grass roots work that is going on successfully in so many impoverished and disadvantaged communities. Hopefully, too, this “decade” will last longer than a decade—to solve the problems that all our sons face we will need the same kind of social investment that we’ve made over the last fifty years as we’ve worked to solve problems faced by girls and women.
If you would like more exact information on the specific issues boys face, please click www.whitehouseboysmen.org. If you are interested in research-based programs to assist schools and communities in interventions and programs that solves issues faced by boys of color, please click www.gurianinstitute.com. On behalf of our whole team, I join colleagues from around the country to applaud the White House. I hope many will now become politically and personally involved in fighting the battle of social justice for our sons.
Photo: NGader/Flickr
Originally appeared at Gurian Institute.com
@Julia Byrd Whats up bro?I am still fighting the fight and savoring each round.I trust you are well also.At some point a more holistic approach that ties together the cords of commonality which unite us all must be found.It is difficult to appreciate the wisdom in isolating these groups of men along racial lines when essentially their problems are similar. By the way,we have another youngman from the program going pro,this year or next year-Jabari Brown who is at Missouri.
As much as I agree with the premise,I can’t agree with the proposed solution. We need to figure out how to help ALL those that need it simultaneously. There are millions of so called conscious egalitarians out there who only have the capacity to see victimization through a gendered or racial or religious lens. To them, only their group suffers and therefore are only victims and could not also be perpetrators. As a result, their group becomes THE victims, no one else. These very people claim to be allies of equality when they are not. I say we need a… Read more »
@ogwriter,
I could not agree more with you Bro. I see the struggles, pain, anxiety, and frustration with ALL men and boys. Therefore, we ALL need help!
I just finished reading a book by Lisa Bloom called “Swagger..” I think this woman is on the money. If you have not done so, you must read it. While she too acknowledge that men of color have more difficult circumstances and face greater challenges, she too concludes that ALL boys and young men MUST included.
How have you been Bro? Hope all is well.