By Dan Kindlon, and Michael Thompson

This book is all about protecting the emotional life of boys. I would urge everyone who is teaching, mentoring or parenting a boy to read this book. For that matter, I would recommend it to women in general so they can better understand their husband/father/brother, and for men so they can better understand themselves.

Kindlon and Thompson (both psychologists) give an overview of the life of boys at different stages of growth, backing up their statements with stories from real life: their upbringing, how they are treated, how they treat each other, how this influences their thinking and behavior, and so on. According to them, the underlying issue to problems concerning boys/men (aggression, loneliness, not being able to relate or get close in relationships, etc) has to do with the fact that they are not taught to develop an emotional awareness and vocabulary. The following passage from the book provides a good general summary of the authors’ perspective:

"How a boy resolves these three challenges of his emotional life - intimacy, lust, and power - defines the quality of his intimate emotional relationships. Every boy moves toward manhood with his own unique history of emotional experience and education of the heart. There are many boys who are prepared for loving, intimate relationships because they have experienced emotional attachment through a loving relationship with a parent, and perhaps they have seen a good marriage in action in their own parents' relationship. They see it as a doable, believable thing - something they can copy for themselves. Unfortunately, they are not the majority. The majority of boys are not prepared to manage the complexities of a loving relationship because they've been shortchanged on the basic skills of emotional literacy: empathy, conscience, the vocabulary for meaningful emotional expression, and the idea that emotional interdependence is an asset - not a liability."