If you’re a regular reader, you may know Tom Matlack from his weekly column, Good Is Good. An article of his recently jumped ship and was published over at parenting blog Babble. The topic? How to raise boys.
Here’s a sneak peak:
Watch his body, not his mouth. Again, like adult men, the clues to how your son is doing will show up first in his body language. Jumping up and down with six-inch vertical leaps is the natural state of being and is good. Slumped shoulders are bad. Yelling is good. Quiet needs attention.
Batman lives forever. Boys, even at a young age, realize the importance of superpowers. They want to be good and believe in the existence of ultimate good in the world. Boys sort out their identities in relation to the mythical characters they hear about.
Pointless physical activity is perfect. My brother and I once convinced his two sons and my older boy, when they were all around the age of 10, that they really needed to build a structure out of rocks. The rocks were on one side of a beach, but the perfect spot where the structure had to be built, according to our sage advice, was on the other side of the beach. Each stone weighed between ten and thirty pounds. The boys started moving the boulders one by one, working together to lift the heaviest ones. My brother and I set up our beach chairs midway from the rock pile to building site. We read the paper most of the morning while the boys tired themselves out moving rocks and then assembling a tremendous cathedral. By lunch they were tired and happy, and my brother and I had enjoyed a peaceful morning.
For more bulleted pearls of wisdom (and some pretty sweet anecdotes), check out the rest of the story on Babble, here.
Image sarahboergersmith/ Flickr