Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys

The title of this book says a monumental truth.
In virtually all societies, throughout time, BOYS are raised to be strong, and any variance of that is "A Problem". The Problem, however, is strongly rooted in the society a boy is raised. There is no common factor other than the basic issue that BOYS become MEN, and MEN RULE THE WORLD.

Thustly boys are, in virtually all societies, ethnic and religious, economic and existential, boys are generally drained of their "emotional body" as they grow, and by the age which their social realm dictates, are honed into the male image of the culture they are raised.

Far too many boys, over all the world, in all situations, are neglected EMOTIONALLY as they grow up, resulting in strong men who make up the warriors, regardless of their eventual position and place in life.

It is all too common that the basic emotional needs of young boys are neglected, even refused, often brutally, in an effort to "make them strong". It's been going on since the dawn of time.

As society fragments into far more complex expressions for both male and female role-models, something that has been changing since the Rennaissance, boys, despite their diversification in potential, have generally been either brutalized into uniformity, or segmented, eventually compartementalized into roles dictated by local moral, religious or financial revenues.

"Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys" tackles an age-old problem with great insight, and while there are no common solutions, there are ways of thinking that can help raise boys in a way that is "Complete".

You might read the back cover of this book and think, "oh, this doesn't apply to me.". But anyone parenting or spending time with children should have a look. It helps you (or rather, it's helping me) step back and realize how subtle ways that we interact with children have lasting repercussions. For instance, how we might respond to a boy when he says "oh look, that kid over there is crying" vs. our response to a girl. Studies show that we'd steer the boy away, distract him, move on to something different. But to a girl, we encourage her to help, to be sympathetic, and engage in a discussion about what happened.

Towards the end, the authors offer some suggestions on how to tap into the emotional side of our boys, how to develop modes of communication that can last through adolescent years and into adult hood. I find them useful, and hope that my husband and I are & continue to use them.

I am a father of two boys and I came across this book by searching on Amazon for books that could help me improve my parenting skills. I love my boys and I consider my parenting as a full time job. I read other readers comments and I did some research before I purchased a couple of books, Raising Cain being one of them. My main motivation in buying these books is derived from the frustration that I experience when I know I fail to understand my son on some issues and also from my worry that I do not understand what is going on in a life of a young man in today's world.

Raising Cain opened my eyes in many aspects. It is written well and it makes no assumptions about the level of knowledge of the reader. It talks about the relationship between the boy and the father and between the boy and the mather, then it talks about general attitude of society on boys with short comparisons with the girls world. The books continues in discussing boys' psychology explaining how their inner world is built, what factors influence it most and consequences of their influence. It talks about drinking, drugs, sex and violence.

There are some very good positive points that I took with me and there are some points that are missing from the book despite the fact that they are quite important.

I can summarise the book by saying that it does a very good job explaining the need of talking to our sons and helping them to see their feelings as a way of diffusing tension, but it fails (in my view) in providing the tools that parent can use in implementing this concept.

The books showed clearly that the lack of fathers' positive involvment in sons education causes a lot of damage in the long term. The boys have an anger that is internalised over the years and it vents, for some, through violent and aggressive behavior. That is why most of the violent crimes are committed by males. I liked the chapter that talks about relationship between fathers and sons (I am a father and I was interested in that). However, the books stops there, by limitting this part to a description that is most of the time negative, without much practical outcome. Although the book observes the fact that the studies show how critical this interaction is, and that the education system lacks male teachers and that all this compounded with the huge impact of high rate of divorce that leaves sons without male models, puts the boys at an enormous disadvantage at the start of their adult life, the book offers only 20 pages dedicated to this subject (father-son relationship). Mothers get 37 pages and the rest is dedicated to drinking, drugs, violence and sex. The authors talk almost as much about masturbation as they talk about father-son relationship.

It is good that the authors talk about the big problems the boys have; I felt however they insist too much on the negatives by using stories, their personal recount of sessions they conducted as school psychologists (consultants). I was looking for some advice that I could use as a tool for parenting, but I haven't found much support from that point of view. For instance, the book has a chapter called Anger and Violence that dedicates 21 pages to describe various experiences and discuss some general observations on this topic. At the end, it concludes with Strategies and Circuit Breakers: Teaching Boys do Defuse Anger. That section spreads across one page (!) and it has no strategy. The last sentence says it all, and I have the impression that it is representative for the entire book in showing how advice is provided by the authors: "If you can get a boy to figure out what it is he's mad about, then he's in a position to begin to change the destructive pattern of responses in his life". It sounds logical, I agree with that, but I feel it would have been helpful to get more concrete advise about how you do it.

Overall, the book is very good, I recommend it to anyone who wants to understand their sons. It does a very good job in showing that their education is more than instilling discipline and it is very important to handle their pride with care. I followed this book with reading "The Good Son: Shaping the Moral Development of Our Boys and Young Men" by Michael Gurian. I found this book extremely useful and complementing Rasing Cain very well. I gave me what I was missing from the first book: more practical parenting advice and uptodate information from research in neurology and psychology. I would strongly recommend the purchase of both books. For me it was a very good investment.

I appreciated the insight in this book and have recommended it to everyone I know, and most importantly to the women in my life so they can understand me a little better when I do that male "thing" that confounds them so. As others have done I also read Reviving Ophelia and I would recommend these two books be read in tandem.

This book provides a fascinating insight into the emotional development of boys. I am only on Chapter 4 of the book and already it has provided answers to some fundamental, why-does-he-do-that questions that I've had about my son. It should be required reading for teachers and administrators. I definitely recommend this book to any parent of young boys.