The Parents' Guide to Boys

Key Takeaways

Under Consideration — to be added.

Interconnections

Under Consideration — to be added.

Highlights

• My father told me that if you love what you do, it isn’t work. The flip side is that no matter how much money you make, if you don’t like what you do, it is torture.
• What he needs for you to teach him is that failure is the first step toward success; that insisting on getting your own way usually makes other people unhappy or mad; and that intrinsic motivation lasts whereas extrinsic motivation, like money, is temporary.
• You are going to find out that reading to your child provides many different benefits aside from language development, and it is the single most important thing you can do to help your child succeed in school.
• Not every family eats dinner together at a table. In fact, the habit for many 21st-century families is for everyone to grab something and eat in front of the TV. Research points out, however, that children who eat family dinners do better in school.
• Most importantly, decide what is serious enough for you to forbid it. Just because your child is annoying is not reason enough to make him stop.
• research is clear that the best adjusted and behaved children have parents who provide strict guidelines and are alert to their child’s activities, but they let their son or daughter make mistakes. Parents who are restrictive and psychologically controlling have children with more behavioral problems
• I pay the schoolmaster, but ’tis the schoolboys that educate my son. —Ralph Waldo Emerson
• When the approach of schooling changes and there is a shift from learning to read to reading to learn, some boys will still not be ready for the change. When that happens, a boy who previously loved school may change his mind and now may be reluctant to do his work, may refuse to be cooperative in class, and may even resist going to school.
• As long as the late-developing child understands that his problem is one of maturity and he will be able to read well before long if he just keeps at it, then there is no difficulty in labeling a developmental reading problem as a disability. On the other hand, if the school leads the child to believe that his reading problems are due to some permanent disability, he may not even try to read.
• He may be not interested in the subject. Remember, boys learn well what they like. If they don’t like a subject or they think the teacher does not like them, they won’t work.
• boys won’t compete when they know they can’t win.
• It is losing that helps a boy learn to become a winner. If children win all the time, they don’t value winning, and they don’t understand the effort required to win. Then, when they do lose, they simply give up. Boys need the challenge to motivate themselves; otherwise, they just let others carry the load.
• Play card games because it’s more about
• the conversation and interaction among the players than the game itself. Families with regular “card nights” will find their children bringing their friends home to join in rather than going out with them to places you are not necessarily comfortable with.
• Yes, boys compete with each other, and it can be very personal, but they are less likely to take either failure or success as defining them unless an adult encourages them to do so—so don’t do that.
• Adolescents identified with circadian rhythm problems are a growing issue in middle and high schools today.
• Most teachers require students to study in ways that make sense to the teacher. They think the best way to learn is the way that they learn. This is the very reason why many boys have problems in school: they don’t learn in the same way their teacher does.
• Teaching him to break the mountainous task into molehills and chip away at those will go a long way to showing him how to cope with tasks that seem insurmountable.
• If you say to yourself that you are helping either because your son won’t do it or because he does a bad job, you are probably hovering.
• Once you get used to including your child in a lot of what you do, you will realize that even a six-year-old can understand the basics of budgeting and how to balance time and work.