At some point in his development, you can bet that every son will wage war against his mother. Some boys wage war at age four, some at fourteen. Some do it once, others ten times. No matter what age this happens at, or how often it happens, these wars are lonely and confusing, and every mother who goes through them—as every mother will—is convinced that she is losing her son, and often blames herself for it. If this is happening to you, if you have recently been declared the enemy, or feel that it’s only a matter of time (it is), hold on. There is hope ahead.
There are a few key rules to surviving the mother-son wars. The first is that you need to have a thorough understanding of what’s going on. The second is to recognize that the war your son is waging has very little to do with you, and everything to do with male development. Finally, since you are the grown-up and he is the child (yup—even at eighteen) you can get the upper hand pretty quickly—as long as you keep your wits about you. And we moms are good at that. Let’s tease apart the reasons for and stages of war so that we can equip ourselves to survive a bit better.
Several months ago Carrie came to my office with Jaden, a bubbly, towheaded five-year-old with most of his front teeth missing. He had just entered kindergarten and was in for a checkup. Carrie seemed close to tears during the exam and at one point, she announced to me that Jaden was for sale, if I was interested. When she said this, I glanced down at her son and saw an impish smile. He seemed to enjoy the fact that his mother was upset by his behavior.
When I asked Carrie what was wrong, she blurted out, “Everything! He opposes absolutely everything I tell him to do. Six months ago, he was a dream. We would go to the park together and play with other kids in his class. He would get to bed on time, even help me around the house when I asked him. Then, it seemed as if overnight, he turned into”—she put her hands over his ears and whispered—“a monster!”
Jaden kept pretending to read the Highlights magazine in the exam room while Carrie was talking. He sat quietly next to her, listening to everything that she was saying. Once she started, she kept going, seemingly relieved to be saying out loud what she had been struggling with for several months.
“I tell my husband that I’m worried. I mean, maybe something’s wrong. Maybe he has a b-r-a-i-n t-u-m-o-r or something.” Carrie spelled it out so that Jaden couldn’t understand what she was saying. “I’ve never seen such a sudden change in the personality of a child. And another thing—he used to play easily with other boys in the neighborhood, but now he’s even gotten mean with them. I see him boss them around. He doesn’t hit them, but he’s come awfully close. When I pull him aside and tell him that his behavior is unacceptable, he just smiles. Of course, he’s never like this around his father; I don’t know what I’ve done, but for some reason, my son has begun to hate me.”
Carrie spoke irrationally because she was so upset. Of course, she didn’t really think that her son had a brain tumor and I believe that Jaden realized that. Her words were harsh for a young boy to hear but her near-hysterical tone let Jaden and me know she wasn’t serious; she was simply bloviating. Still, Carrie should have spoken these words to me privately, and I knew that. Before she could continue, I turned my attention to Jaden.
No, I thought to myself, not this freckled, quiet-mannered boy sitting in front of me—he didn’t seem capable of the behavior Carrie was describing. I decided to bring him into the conversation.
“What do you have to say about what your mom just told me about your behavior?” I asked.
Without looking at me, he shrugged his shoulders a couple of times.
“Jaden,” I said again. He wouldn’t look up, so I squatted down to get on his level and tried to make eye contact. “She says that you’re different than you used to be. Do you feel different?”
“I dunno,” he answered politely.
“Your mom says that you yell at her. Do you yell?”
“I guess so.” He still wouldn’t look at me.
I waited, and then asked him, “What does it feel like when you yell at her?” I thought that would hit a nerve but he was silent.
I waited longer and it was clear he just didn’t want to answer my questions.
“Being in kindergarten can be very hard,” I said. “It’s tiring and the teacher wants you to pay attention for a long time and the other kids can be bossy. Do you think so?”
Suddenly I saw Jaden’s bottom lip quiver. He looked away from me and over to his mother with a glance that said, Please tell her to go away. That was my cue to press on. “Jaden, this is important,” I said. “It’s important because your mother is concerned that you aren’t acting as nice as you used to. Is something wrong at school?” I knew that there probably wasn’t because I had seen so many boys his age go through similar mood changes, but I wanted to give him an out.
“No, school’s fine. I like it. My mom just won’t let me do what I want to do. She doesn’t understand.”
After prodding both Jaden and his mother about life at school and at home, I realized that there were no major problems. Jaden was experiencing the normal exhaustion that kindergartners get after the first few months of transition, and he was having a psychological growth spurt, if you will. He was feeling strong, independent, and quite capable. When his mother told him what to wear to school, he argued. When she told him what to eat for breakfast, even if he liked it he ate something else. When she reminded him how to talk to the other kids in his class, he snarled and said he knew how he was supposed to talk. And when she made him stop playing too aggressively with his friends, he became frustrated, believing that “moms just don’t get it.” And the truth is, Jaden’s right.
I explained to Carrie that Jaden was primarily struggling with two things: exhaustion and pressure to behave. I tried to help her see life through his eyes. First, Jaden got up early every morning while he was still tired, went to school, and mustered all the energy he could to concentrate and behave. He came home each day tired and then let all of the emotions he kept under control at school spill onto his mother each afternoon. Second, he was transitioning from feeling dependent on his mother to trying to be more independent. This was a struggle as well. For a five-year-old, experiencing both of these at once felt overwhelming and each day, he was having mini “melt-downs,” if you will. I simply told Carrie to be patient. I advised her to help him relax on weekends and give him ample time to play. He couldn’t handle one more venue like piano lessons or soccer where he had to focus and behave. With a few more months of maturity, he might be able to, but at this point Jaden needed time to be home and just play, nap, or choose whatever it was he wanted to do.
With regard to his bad behavior, I told her that I expected much of it would disappear when his fatigue left. In the meantime, however, she couldn’t ignore it. So I coached her how to set clear rules and state them during a time when he was calm. Carrie told me that there were so many things that he did that she didn’t like, she wondered where to start. I told her to pick two behaviors that she found most offensive and work only on those.
“That’s easy,” she said. “He yells at me and it hurts terribly.” I said that she should start there. I encouraged her to find a time when he wasn’t upset to sit down and tell him that he wasn’t going to yell at her anymore. If he did, he was to go to his room and stay there alone until he was ready to tell her that he was sorry. Only then could he come out. I warned her that training him to stop might take time. Most important, when she said something, she had to mean it. If she told him that he couldn’t yell at her and then he did, she was committed to following through with consequences. At first, he would test her to see if she was serious. He might yell and then run away and hide. I told her that strong-willed boys often intentionally do what they’ve been told they can’t just to see what will happen. In a sense, they “declare war.” I told her that when Jaden did that in the future, she had to take as long as it took to win. Really stubborn boys will refuse to comply for hours. So mothers like Carrie need to be ready to make consequences stick even if it takes up their whole afternoon, a day, or even a week. Strong-willed boys need stronger-willed mothers.
Boys realize very quickly that they aren’t like us. We are female and they are male. Even at age two, sons seem to have a sense that we function on different planes—not simply because we are older, but because of our gender. And the truth is, many of us mothers feel this way as well. We understand where our daughters are coming from—why they cry suddenly, how they color so neatly in their coloring books, and why they are afraid of snakes. But when our sons tackle their friends in the living room, our discomfort communicates to our boys that yes, indeed, we are a very different species. And that’s a good thing.
As boys mature through different developmental stages, the fact that we are different becomes intensified and, often, misunderstood. When they first feel the urge to strike out and do something on their own, they can’t imagine we ever felt such inklings. We are the adult, but since we are also female, we experience our yearnings differently from them, and they intuit that. When our three-year-old decides to dress himself or our sixteen-year-old insists that he buy a car with his own money, they genuinely don’t believe that these desires could resonate with us because we are female. They want independence and control and they believe that these are strictly male feelings. Here’s the good news: They don’t need to know that we understand and we don’t have to exhaust ourselves convincing them that in fact we do have the same desires; we just have to negotiate well during the battle.
When sons wage war against their mothers, much of it stems from a need to exert some independence. While we want our boys to be independent, we can only trust them to make decisions they’re ready to handle. Our job is to figure out how much latitude to give them and how much to hold back. This can be very tricky.
Life became easier for Carrie after we talked about two things. First, we discussed the fatigue issue. All kindergartners are overtired, I said, and when they are, all bets are off. When your child enters school, it’s the first step into their adult life. It comes with a new sense of adventure, but also with a more structured day, and those two things can both be exhausting. Tired kids fall apart easily and much of Jaden’s irritability stemmed from that. Beyond fatigue, however, we talked about the war that he was waging—and waging only against her. Jaden needed a way to feel independent. He needed to make some decisions on his own, while still recognizing that mom was the boss. So I encouraged her to pick her battles. Don’t fight over clothes or games in the backyard. This is “boy stuff” and not a battle you are likely to win. Make sure that he behaves well at school and that when he is with other kids he is kind. Focus on the big picture and let the little stuff go. If she worked on just a few issues at a time, the stress level in the home would dramatically diminish. She did, and it worked.
Sooner or later—and sometimes sooner and later—every son will feel threatened by his mother. We can do nothing to avoid this. It is simply something that they, and we, must bear. When a boy begins to feel cramped by his mother, he strikes out, telling her that he wants to be able to make more of his own decisions.
But there’s another element that underlies much of the mental and emotional turbulence brewing in the maturing boy; every boy reaches a time when he needs to make an emotional break from his mother. As painful as this feels at the time, it’s one of the many steps a son must make on his journey to becoming a man. Bruno Bettelheim used to say that sons “kill off” their mothers during adolescence in order to survive. As they mature, boys who love their mothers feel a conflict emerge because on the one hand, they want their mothers to love and care for them, but on the other hand, they hate that they still want this. They want to be men—independent and capable of standing on their own—all the while yearning for the comfort their mothers offer. Daughters don’t go through this. They don’t feel that their independence is challenged if they remain emotionally tied to their mothers. But boys do. We need to understand this and respect it. And we need to go one step further—we need to help them make the break that they are so conflicted about. It’s painful for both parties, but necessary, if they are going to mature into men and not stay trapped in adolescence. Plenty of us have seen (and maybe lived with) men who never quite wiggled out from a mother’s control, and the results are disastrous. A boy who can’t leave his mother at the appropriate time and in the appropriate way will never become the type of man who will find a sustaining and happy marriage. He may find a woman who wants to experience a deep connection with him, but he will be unable to because he remains in emotional conflict with his mom. He is attached in unhealthy ways and he is stuck with those attachments. A good mother cannot let this happen. So it may turn out that the war our sons wage is actually a good thing. But it is nonetheless painful for us mothers.
Typically, the battle between a boy and his mother begins at the onset of adolescence, but it may rear its head a bit earlier, as it did in Jaden’s case. For Sonya, her son Tyler was seventeen before the war they’d been waging quietly broke out into the open. Most of their difficulties had their roots in issues that Sonya had experienced as a young girl.
Sonya had grown up in a large, middle-income neighborhood. Her father was a truck driver who traveled a fair amount and her mother was a nurse at a doctor’s office. She was close to her parents but shielded them from her difficulties because she knew that they worked hard and she didn’t want to burden them with her own worries. She struggled with academics and being bullied in junior high because she was a bit chubby. In high school, when her boyfriend broke off their relationship, she cried alone in her room because she didn’t want to bother her parents. When her father was home, she never wanted to do anything that would make their time unpleasant, because she didn’t want him to go back on the road upset.
She was a nice girl and had lots of friends in their neighborhood. One night, during a sleepover at a friend’s house, her friend’s father snuck into the bedroom after everyone went to sleep. He went to Sonya, covered her mouth so that his daughter, asleep in the same room, wouldn’t hear her, then proceeded to fondle and kiss her. When he was finished he told her that if she spoke about it to anyone—including his daughter—he would hurt her family. In an effort to spare her parents worry about her, Sonya suffered in silence. Little did she know the man was doing the same thing to many of his daughter’s other friends.
After this attack, Sonya had trouble sleeping. When she did fall asleep, she was plagued by nightmares. She left her overhead light on at night and when her mother turned it off, she would turn it back on as soon as her mother fell asleep. She couldn’t concentrate during school. Her friendship with the daughter of her attacker was strained and she began to feel enormous guilt over what had happened; she wondered if she had done something to attract the man into her friend’s room during the sleepover. Should she have screamed when he first came into the bedroom? Her mind reeled with scenarios of what she should have or could have done. She emotionally berated herself because of the things that she didn’t do that night. But she never said a word to her friend, or to anyone.
Sonya eventually married a kind, hardworking man. He did not learn about the abuse until they had been married ten years. When Sonya finally divulged her traumatic secret, he simply looked at her and said, “Well, honey, that was a long time ago.” Sonya told me that when he said that, she wanted to jump across the room and choke him. That statement shut down any further conversation about her abuse and she began to feel that she couldn’t trust her own husband to offer the sympathy and caring she deserved.
Tyler, the oldest of Sonya’s three children, was an outgoing, bubbly kid. His only problem, as she would come to admit to me years later, was that he was male. He didn’t really do anything wrong; she just couldn’t help but put him in the same pot as her husband, her father, who had never been home, and (though she didn’t want to admit this) her abuser. Somehow deep in her soul, a part of her connected all four men. Too bad for Tyler. Too bad for her.
Throughout his childhood, Sonya found herself mad at Tyler for no reason, particularly as he became a teenager. This bothered her terribly. Sometimes, she told me, she didn’t want to be in the same room with him, even though he hadn’t done anything wrong. He smiled like his father and this bothered her. He walked liked his dad and she hated it. “He moves like a wounded duck,” she told me once.
By the time Tyler was sixteen, he routinely snapped at Sonya. Then he became verbally abusive. He called her names and swore at her, but only when his father wasn’t around. Sonya decided to seek help from a counselor because her son’s behavior was so antagonistic. During her sessions with the counselor, she began to see patterns in how she related to men. She realized that since the time her friend’s father assaulted her, she harbored deep animosity toward men. Because she never resolved her anger toward her offender, she carried it forward into all of her relationships with other men—her husband, her son, and even her father. But she didn’t feel anger alone—she felt a complex web of emotions toward men, which stemmed from her assault. She couldn’t really trust them, allow herself to get close to them, even to completely love them. Once she recognized her feelings, she was able to see how they impacted her relationships with the men she cared about, especially Tyler.
Once she realized this, she decided (probably subconsciously) to overcompensate for her animosity toward men by treating Tyler differently. Rather than discipline him when he did something wrong, she made excuses for him. She tried to treat him more like a peer than a child. Many times, she spoke to him with the tone she would use if he were one of her close girlfriends.
This made Tyler uncomfortable and angry. He wanted his mother to act like a mother, not a friend. So when he spoke to her, he acted disrespectful and defiant, which in turn made Sony feel rejected and hurt, and the anger between them spiraled out of control. That’s when she brought Tyler in to see me. She wanted to know what she could do about her relationship with Tyler. We began to dig together.
“What are the themes of the arguments?” I posed.
“It seems like we fight about everything,” she said.
“How about at the beginning, when you first started fighting?” I asked.
“Well, at first he told me that I treated him like a child. That I didn’t trust him. Then things got worse. He told me that I did his laundry the wrong way, so I made him do his own. Then we had a knock-down, drag-out one night over his girlfriend. He was out until two A.M. with her. I waited up and when he came home, I was seeing red. He broke curfew, he had been drinking, and when I confronted him about it, he pinned me up against the wall and told me to stay out of his business. He said he didn’t want my advice, he didn’t respect me, and I was too controlling. And that I didn’t understand him.”
She took a breath and then continued. “I was scared. I’m not going to lie. He outweighs me by fifty pounds and he’s a good six inches taller. For the first time since my abuse, I was physically scared of a man. I recoiled from him, ran into my bedroom, and cried for two days. I didn’t speak to him. He didn’t speak to me, either.”
That had happened a few months before our conversation, and I could tell that she was still shaken up from the incident. I told her that I would like to speak with Tyler. She agreed and one week later, he sat with his mother across from me in my office. He didn’t appear engaged at all. In fact, he looked quite annoyed.
“Your mother tells me that the two of you haven’t been getting along,” I said.
“Nope,” he said curtly.
He clearly thought I was on his mother’s side and he in turn wasn’t about to give an inch. I was enemy number two. So I spoke up boldly.
“What do you think is wrong with your mother?” I knew that he would like the way I framed the question.
“She’s psycho! That’s what’s wrong. She treats me like a kid—like I’m ten, not sixteen. She tells me what to eat. She tells me what to wear. If she doesn’t like my friends, she tells me that I need to make new ones. What does she think they’re going to do—stick me with needles and shoot me up with drugs?” His voice was cracking and he was getting angrier as he spoke. I was glad for that. Sonya looked embarrassed but relieved; from her point of view I was getting to see the side of Tyler she always saw.
I tried to interrupt but Tyler kept talking, so I let him. “And there’s another thing. She’s always bad-mouthing my dad. Poor guy. He’s not even around to defend himself. I know he gets home late, what doctor doesn’t? He works hard and she complains about him. I know he’s not perfect—he’s got problems, I mean, who doesn’t? She tells me stuff about him. She tells me that she’s not sure she loves him anymore. Then she tells me not to tell anyone. It’s our secret. Gives me the creeps.”
“Tyler and I used to be real close,” Sonya blurted. “We used to do so many things together. When his dad was away on a trip, we would stay up late and watch movies. He would have friends over and I would cook for them all. He used to love it. I’d even take him shopping every once in a while and he’d tell me if something looked good on me or not. I knew that, unlike my friends, he’d be honest.”
As the two of them bantered, the reason for their conflict began to surface. It was as clear as the nose on my face.
“Tyler,” I interrupted. “Did you ever feel like one of your mother’s girlfriends?” I asked.
“That’s a strange question.” He paused. “Of course not. I mean how could I be like her girlfriend if I’m not a girl?” What a stupid question was written all over his face.
“Here’s what I mean. Do you ever feel like your mother talks to you the way she might to her girlfriends? Or do you feel as though she talks to you the way you’d expect, and want, your mom to speak?”
He looked at the floor and Sonya looked at me. I think she was even angrier at me than he was.
“Now that I think about it, maybe I did feel the stuff she talked to me about was stuff that I thought she should tell her friends instead of me. There were all kinds of things that I wish she just wouldn’t have said.”
Sonya jumped in at this point. “Like what, Tyler? That’s not fair! I always treated you with a lot of respect. I never wanted to be a burden to you. Sure, maybe I shouldn’t have criticized Dad so much. I’m sorry for that. But what else did I do? Is this ‘Let’s beat up on Mom time?’ ” She stopped, looking quite forlorn.
We talked for a while longer and I tried to get Tyler to let Sonya have a peek into his mind. He felt suffocated. He felt that his mother needed him to be there for her. He saw her as fragile. He said that sometimes he felt that his mother leaned on him too much. She called him whenever he was out with his friends. Sometimes he felt that she was even jealous when he brought a girlfriend home. As he revealed his feelings, guilt mixed with relief swept over his face. I could sense that he didn’t want to hurt his mother’s feelings, but that he needed to tell the truth.
Sonya was a good mother. She adored Tyler, and once she absorbed his feelings and allowed them to percolate in her mind, she began to look back on her behavior from his perspective. She had been so worried that he would somehow pick up on her dislike and mistrust of men that she overcompensated by treating him like a friend rather than a young man. She was determined not to let her anger (even hatred) toward men spill onto her son. In order to prevent this, she went overboard with Tyler by treating him as a close confidant. This sounds ironic, but we mothers do peculiar things with our anger. It doesn’t simply erupt with shouting matches, but often triggers us to compensate for it by acting too nice toward the ones we feel angry with or too sympathetic with people we feel animosity toward.
The problem for Tyler when his mother overcompensated by acting too much like a friend was that he didn’t like being treated like her friend. He felt that something was wrong when she confided in him that way, when she leaned on him as she would have an adult. Furthermore, his mother shared things with him that weren’t appropriate. Tyler knew enough to be uncomfortable when this happened, but, because he was still a child, he couldn’t put his finger on what was wrong. So he went to war against his mother.
Sonya made a few important changes and the war ended fairly rapidly. She stopped confiding in him. She stepped back into an authority role. When she wanted to complain about her husband, she told a friend, not her son. She became the figure Tyler needed: a grown-up mom whom he could lean on, as opposed to one who leaned on him.
Being a mother is complicated, especially when we have sons. Sonya wanted to be a good mother; everything she did was meant to benefit her son, not harm him. But after she recognized the patterns of her behavior that were affecting her relationship with her son in a negative way, she changed them, and became a better mom for it. Not a perfect mother, but a grown-up who could begin to look at her relationship with her son through his eyes, and give him what he needed.
They say boys take longer to mature than girls, and in a number of ways, that’s very true. Girls, from a young age, seem to anticipate their future as a woman. When boys are young, they seem to be less fixated on their future and more able to enjoy the moments of childhood. But one of the pressing issues that all boys will face one day is that they will need to learn how to be a man. When they are young, they don’t consciously pay attention to this. But as they grow older, their awareness that this transition must take place swells. And as it grows, so too does a mom’s fear that the process may not go well.
When boys hit their preadolescent years, they begin to sense that manhood is around the corner. As I said, girls seem to start moving toward womanhood at a younger age, and more gradually than boys, who mature in spurts. But while, as women, our transition into becoming adults was probably smoother, we can still understand what our boys are going through. What is more difficult for us to understand is a boy’s concern that we are going to impede the process. Here is the real rub: A son needs a man to help him navigate the transition. Boys are visual creatures. They need to see what a man looks like, speaks like, and behaves like in order to mimic that behavior and internalize it.
This is very important for mothers to understand—especially single mothers. Often sons who live with only their mothers don’t have the opportunity to spend time with men they look up to and therefore don’t observe healthy masculine traits to mimic and internalize. So it is especially important for single moms to ask a grandfather, uncle, coach, pastor, or friend to spend a little time with their sons. Hard as they try, single mothers can’t be both mom and dad. This is both good news and bad news. The good news is that mothers should relieve themselves of the pressure that they put on themselves to be everything to their sons and just focus on being really terrific moms. The challenge for single moms is to recruit a good man or two to spend time with their sons in order to show them how great men behave.
So where, we mothers wonder, do we fit into this process? Or do we? That is the question that every son grapples with as well. An eleven-year-old boy comes home from school and tells his mother about his day. How gym went, what he got on his science test. Maybe he cries or complains because his teacher is terrible or someone in his class made fun of him. He has a problem, and so he unloads his troubles on his mother. This is a more natural occurrence with mothers than it is with fathers, in general, because women tend to display their empathy more easily than men. And, many of us coddle our sons. This isn’t all bad. As a matter of fact, this can be good—up to a certain age—because there comes a point in every boy’s development where he needs to emotionally pull away from his mother and stand on his own two feet. In other words, we mothers need to learn when it is appropriate to coddle and when it isn’t.
Since mothers tend to allow sons to express a broader range of feelings than fathers do, sons develop a deep level of comfort with their mothers. They don’t have the sense that they need to automatically “man up” when they are with them. In fact, until he is about ten or eleven, life for a boy is often all about his mother. And then the tide changes. When he enters preadolescence, he suddenly—dramatically—gets a glimpse of his future as a man. And he may start to wonder how his emotional comfort with his mother fits into his emerging manhood. He begins to question whether it’s manly to be so close to his mother. The answer can be elusive, and sons can find their confusion disturbing.
From a son’s perspective, his feelings for his mother can be fairly messy stuff—even if we’ve tried to do everything right. We mothers must understand that every son feels this internal conflict as he enters the teen years. In addition to physically maturing, trying to figure out who he is becoming, and enduring emotional shifts that hormonal changes bring, he struggles with his feelings toward his mother. He wants to stay close, but something inside him is pulling away from her. These changes are all part of the process of becoming a man. Once we understand this, life becomes easier for us because we won’t take their changing behavior so personally.
At five, a son may see your affection as comforting and wonderful. He can curl up into your lap and burrow his head into your chest while you read his favorite story. If he is tired, he can even pop his thumb into his mouth for a bit, though he’s technically long since stopped sucking his thumb. He knows you won’t tell. You are his safe harbor.
At thirteen, he wants you to give him some freedom, but when you do, it doesn’t make him feel good, because he lacks confidence in himself. Just like a two-year-old, he wants to do everything for himself, but he can’t. He yearns to be able to function like a seventeen-year-old but his mind and body won’t allow him to. He feels confused and conflicted. And he feels disappointed in himself because he can’t make his body and mind do what he wants them to.
At this juncture mothers tend to become confused, too. When a young son asks for independence and then a mother gives it, it is mystifying when he still seems dissatisfied. This happens because he really doesn’t know what he wants. So no matter what you do, it seems you can’t win. Our instinct as mothers is to draw our sons close and talk to them. But he does not like this, either, because he wants to figure things out. He doesn’t want you to explain and he certainly doesn’t want you to draw closer. He feels that since you are a mother, you can’t understand him. You are female. He is not. You are not supposed to think like him because if you do, then the two of you are alike and this idea makes him shudder.
As he hits his teenage years, a boy begins to feel an increasing sense of power. Testosterone levels are rising, he becomes more aggressive, and his muscles are changing their architecture. He is growing hair in many places and his voice is cracking. He is no longer the person that he was. Some boys are perfectly comfortable with this fact; others aren’t. Some sons are dying to surge ahead into manhood and embrace the changes, while others are insecure in the transition, frightened by the prospect of being a different person. It is at this point that boys start to feel that they are leaving their mothers behind.
Adolescence for boys is about transitioning from a posture of dependence to one of independence. If a boy feels secure in his relationship with his mother, he will try separating himself from her. Because even if he turns into a complete monster during the separation, he knows deep in his psyche that mom will never leave him. He can be as bullheaded as he wants and his mother will always be there for him. He feels that he can try on new faces, thoughts, attitudes, and behaviors in front of her because she is safe. She can handle his changes when others (including dad) might not be able to. This reasoning can be extremely tough on mothers, because we are forced to weather all of the experimenting our sons do.
So what, specifically, does he want that he feels you can’t give? First, he wants male approval. He wants to know that since he is becoming a man, he is accepted by men. For boys, the teen years are all about male attention. Your lovely, once-affectionate little boy seeks out attention from coaches, teachers, and especially, his father. He needs reassurance from them that he “fits” into the male order.
Teenage boys try on manhood and then show it off. Have you noticed your son walking around the house acting like a tough guy? Are you terrified to watch boys who seek thrills through dangerous activities like driving too fast, skateboarding, racing a dirt bike, or bungee jumping? Your son will try on for size whatever he identifies as “male.” Boys watch their fathers make many decisions—about their jobs, hobbies, sports, or how they treat women. Boys observe them intently to try to figure out what being a man is all about. Then they mimic their behaviors—not just to see how it feels, but also to see if it garners them approval. In my book Boys Should Be Boys, I discuss the importance of a son receiving a “blessing” from his father. This occurs when a father communicates to his son that who he is as a man is acceptable and pleasing to him. Some fathers give this blessing to their sons and some don’t. If a son receives it, he feels strong and self-confident. He learns to like himself because he knows that his father respects him. If a son doesn’t feel that he gets this approval from his father, he will drive himself crazy trying to prove to himself (and subconsciously, to his father) that the man he is and the work he produces are worthy of his approval. (It is important to note that when sons don’t receive this blessing from their fathers, it is necessary for us mothers to help find other men in our sons’ lives to affirm them.)
Mothers want so much to provide everything for our sons and so it is hard to accept the reality that the one thing we are not capable of providing—male approval—is the one thing that at some point our sons desperately need. But it is important to recognize that fact, because if we live with the illusion that we can be all things to our sons, we put too much of a burden on our own shoulders, and, more important, we deny our sons something that is crucial to their successful development. And we must not only recognize their need for male approval; we must help our sons recognize it as well. Once we help them realize that receiving such a blessing is an important part of feeling complete as a man, then, if they fail to receive it from their fathers (for whatever reason), we can help them recognize a few things. First, we must help them see that they had a need to receive approval from their fathers, validating the desire in the first place. Then we can help them see that the reason they didn’t receive it was the fault of their father, not the result of something they did. Often young people subconsciously feel that if they failed to receive something important that they needed, it is because of some mistake they made. They become angry with themselves. Helping sons see that they needed approval and that they didn’t receive it because their father failed to give it (for whatever reason) allows them to feel sadness and resolve it. Once it is resolved, then they can let the sadness go.
Single mothers have an added burden, because if their son’s father isn’t involved in their lives, finding healthy male role models can be tough. But it’s not impossible. There are good men all around us. There are teachers, neighbors, coaches, rabbis, youth pastors, uncles, and grandfathers who are available to model good behavior to our sons. Many single mothers ask how much time a son needs to spend with a man in order for it to make a difference, and the truth is, time is less important than the authority a man has in a boy’s eyes. If a boy looks up to a man, he will adopt his behaviors and attitudes very quickly. If he doesn’t respect the man, then he will not mimic him. And if a mother can’t find healthy male role models, she can talk to her son about men she admires, bringing such a man to life simply by telling stories about him. She could choose a president, a biblical figure, or a wonderful grandfather who has passed away. She can talk about what the man looked like, what he would have said or thought about subjects her son finds interesting, and what he did for a living. She can tell her son about his character and why he made the decisions that he did. In other words, she can create a strong visual image of a good man for her son to imitate. Sometimes, for many single mothers, a healthy image is the best she can do.
Mothers who are married or who have sons whose fathers are involved in their lives should ask themselves, “What can I do to help my husband, or son’s father, be a good role model for my son?” It is important to do everything we can to help a father have a more positive impact on our sons. And there is a lot that we mothers can do to help our husbands (even ex-husbands) be good fathers to our sons.
The most important thing we can do is to recognize those moments when our advice can feel like criticism. As mothers, we all tend to feel that we always know what is best for our sons, but the truth is, sometimes we do and sometimes we don’t. Sometimes fathers just know how to handle boys better than we do, and we must always be open to this, particularly as our boys mature through adolescence. It’s a difficult thing to accept, especially because when our sons are young, they depend on us almost exclusively. But when they hit adolescence, our sons may gain much more from their father’s influence than from ours. But because we are the Mom, we often can’t help feeling that it is our job to interject our feelings, opinions, and corrections, even when we’re not exactly sure we’re right. Many times, we need to simply hold back and wait to see how the male in our son’s life handles things. He may innately have a better understanding of something our son is experiencing by token of the fact that he has lived it and we haven’t.
If, through our need to constantly be a mother, we end up criticizing the job being done by the male in our boy’s life, the message that gets sent to our sons is that men just don’t know how to do anything right; that we women need to be there to correct them. When sons hear such criticism repeatedly, they begin to believe that their fathers (and by association, themselves) aren’t very valuable people. There is so much anti-male sentiment circulating in our culture these days that it is very easy for us to reinforce this idea at home without even meaning to. Consider popular movies and sitcoms; fathers are portrayed as weak or goofy. Ray Romano’s character in Everybody Loves Raymond is funny, but he is depicted as a doofus. When is the last time you saw a movie where a dad was depicted as smart? And even advertisers even chime in. I remember an ad that shows a father trying to throw a baseball (a skill that most fathers are expected to have); he is so bad at it that ultimately he reassures his son that while he can’t provide him any athletic skill, he can at least give him a nice car.
But anti-male sentiment is prevalent in real life, too. Often in a divorce situation, fathers receive less parenting time than mothers so sons don’t see them as often. And if there is animosity between the divorced parents, sons often hear their mothers rail against their ex-husbands. I see this all the time, even in marriages where the couples aren’t separated or divorced. When a mother allows her anger toward her son’s father to surface in front of her son, the person who loses the most is the son. It is terribly painful for him because it muddies his relationship with his father. He feels torn between his mom and his dad.
Many angry mothers don’t intentionally hurt their sons this way, so it is important to understand that we must always keep our anger toward our son’s father to ourselves. Because unless the father is abusive or otherwise unfit, every son deserves to have his own relationship with his father, and this relationship should never be lived through the filter of another person’s point of view.
The most important thing that we mothers can do for our sons who are maturing into manhood is to offer them support and encouragement and allow them to break free emotionally for a time. We must teach them that they can stand on their own two feet in every way. We must guard against doting on our sons too long or coddling them too much. Yes, many mothers have strong emotional connections to their sons, but as I’ve discussed, there comes a time in every mother-son relationship when we need to pull back. For some boys this happens during the latter years of high school but for others it comes when they go off to college. Every boy develops differently. But the most important thing to remember is that since we are the adults, the burden is on our shoulders to see what’s coming and give our sons permission to be men who don’t need us. Often sons will give us clues that they want independence. They will ask to make decisions on their own regarding which classes to take or what time their curfew should be. So when our sons display such signs, we must work with them to find age-appropriate ways to offer that independence. Yes, they can love us and we can love them back, but the intense bond that stems from need must be broken, painful as it may be for both of you.
Once we wrap our minds around the fact that a boy wages war against his mother, not because she is doing anything wrong, but because he is experiencing certain stages of his own development, then war is easier to bear. And once we recognize what’s really going on, we can change our own behavior and take a step back, in response to the knowledge that it’s not about us. Such behaviors that we sometimes impose on our sons, without being conscious of the fact, include:
• Being too dependent on our sons for emotional comfort
• Expecting our boys to act as men when they are still boys, and on the flip side,
• Refusing to let go when our sons try to separate from us emotionally
• Talking to our sons as if they are confidants and protectors, much as we’d treat an adult partner
• Being overly critical of all male figures, especially the boy’s father
• Being overly protective and overly possessive in our efforts to be good mothers
We need to keep a check on our feelings, expectations, and emotions when it comes to our sons because when they are inappropriate, they not only trigger the war that is inevitable, they make it much worse. Sometimes, the mother-son war is a painful but useful way for us to see that we need to make some adjustments, but our ability to make those adjustments depends on our willingness, as mothers, to see clearly where our behavior needs changing.
There are those sad cases where sons never feel that early, deep emotional connection to their mother at all. This can happen with a mother who’s addicted to drugs, abused by her husband, or depressed. Some mothers love their sons deeply, but simply don’t have the emotional capacity to show them. That mother can seem distant and disengaged. So, in those cases, will the son still wage war? Yes, and that war can be even more disturbing. When that son, who has wanted but not received his mother’s attention and support, hits adolescence, he goes to war more ferociously because not only does he yearn to break away from any dependence on a woman; he is emotionally charged by the fact that he never had the intimacy in the first place. He wages war with an underlying anger at the fact that mom was never there.
One of the real delights in raising boys is that they are, in general, less complicated than daughters. They aren’t less emotional than daughters but they are more pragmatic in general. When a problem arises, they try to identify the problem and then find a solution. Girls might experience the same problem but overanalyze it to the point of missing the solution. Many women experience this with their husbands as well: Men see a problem and immediately try to find a way to fix it. And if it’s a quick or “easy” solution, we get doubly irritated! Women are not as cut-and-dried. We look at the complexities of situations—where they originated, why they continue—and we try to find our part in the problem. In short, we mothers approach problems that arise for our sons very differently than they do. So we must be careful to listen to our sons, because when such problems arise, sometimes the solutions are simpler than we think.
For instance, a boy may struggle at school and find his grades dropping. Rather than simply asking her son what’s going on, a mother may overanalyze it; she might speak to the teacher about how her son is being treated in class, or if his mood has changed, or if he has learning issues. But perhaps the child just needs glasses! Or he isn’t getting enough sleep. I’ve seen cases where the answers to a son’s problems were as simple as that.
Sometimes we need to talk with our sons directly and ask them what is bothering them. I have found that very often, boys from middle grade school on will tell you what’s wrong if you simply ask. No matter the case, once you learn what the issue is, the first step is to believe him, and to make sure he knows that you do. Then you can both work toward a solution.
If your son won’t or can’t reveal what is bothering him, you may have to dig a bit. Take the time and ask your son to go for a bike ride or do some other fun activity. Often when boys are relaxed, they are more likely to open up and tell you what is bothering them. Boys hide their feelings because they fear that they might look “stupid” or “weak.” If a boy feels hurt by a comment a friend made or if he feels badly about a poor grade, he will be quicker to hide his feelings than a daughter will. This can be difficult for mothers to understand because we are more verbally oriented than men, and because daughters are quicker to communicate feelings than sons are (in general). The larger problem for us mothers is that when we fail to understand what is going on with our sons, we react poorly. We take their lack of communication personally and we become defensive and then angry. This only fuels the wars.
Many times, however, boys strike out against their mothers because they want more independence. They may not really be angry; rather, they simply need to show us that they want to pull away and act more like a man. Because they don’t come out and say this, we misread their behaviors. We get hurt or feel that they don’t like us or want us anymore. So we must remember that they do want us and they do need us, but the way they want and need us is constantly evolving.
We must also always remember that usually there is more going on with our sons than meets our eyes. Because we think differently than they do and because they mature through developmental levels that we are not experiencing, we must be careful to stand back and not jump to conclusions too quickly when a war is brewing. We must exercise patience and realize that very often, we aren’t the cause of the war. Sometimes sons just feel very conflicted. And other times, if we are contributing to the wars (by exhibiting one of the behaviors listed previously), then we must own up to our part and correct our mistakes. We can get through the mother-son wars and come out the other end with a stronger bond, but we must stay loving and calm and, most important, never let them forget that we are the adult.
Has your son ever had a remote-control race car? If so, you’ve seen the thing race around the driveway or your kitchen floor, screeching before it suddenly slams into a curb or your kitchen cupboard. BAM! It flips over onto its back with all four wheels spinning in the air.
Your preadolescent or adolescent son is like that race car. He too charges from one mood to another, from one activity to another, from one stage of his life to another. He, like the race car, so full of high-octane fuel and fervor, bangs into things repeatedly. What does he run into? Sometimes his father, sometimes a teacher, and many times you. He runs into things because that’s what boys do. They need to hit boundaries head-on because they need to find out exactly what those boundaries are. When they find them, they begin to understand their own limitations and the limitations that life imposes on them. We all live with those limitations, but boys need them to be clearly defined.
It feels awful to have our sons slam into us. It makes us feel guilty, and bruised, and it pushes our buttons. We don’t like our authority challenged and we most certainly don’t like telling our sons that they can’t do something only to have them turn around and do the exact thing that we just told them not to do. When our sons bang into us in this way (“No, you can’t stay out past your curfew,” “No, you can’t go to a party of a friend whose parents we don’t know”) it’s exhausting and dispiriting. We want to fight back, or throw up our hands, because we don’t know which way to turn. Sometimes it makes us second-guess ourselves. Often we give in to their demands thinking that will make life easier. That’s a mistake. Don’t let up. Remember, when our boys were toddlers, they needed literal fences placed around them to keep them safe. Teen boys are the same, though the fences are figurative. They need us to implement rules for them to keep them safe. They need a safety zone because they can do serious damage to themselves. And they need to know where the boundaries to that safety zone are. Of course, they hate boundaries and feel that they should be able to create their own, but you have to remember that they can’t. They aren’t cognitively mature enough—sometimes even at seventeen or eighteen. One of the biggest mistakes that well-intentioned, good mothers make is to take down the figurative fence too early. Boys naturally need to run into things, and if they aren’t hitting fences erected by their parents, then they will have run-ins with teachers, coaches, or even the law. And if a teenage boy doesn’t learn how to respect boundaries and rules at home, you can bet he won’t pay attention to them anywhere outside of his home. With testosterone flowing in their veins, they test boundaries because they want to see how strong they are. So if a son sees that the boundaries you impose really aren’t enforced, he will plow right through them and get into trouble.
I see this fairly routinely with sons of really easygoing mothers. When a boy tests his mother by staying out too late at night, going to a party he was told not to go to, or sneaking out at night with friends, he waits to see how his mother will react. In fact, he is sometimes more interested in seeing how his mother will react than he is in actually going to the party or breaking curfew. What he really wants to find out is whether or not his mother cares enough to see what he’s done wrong and then give him consequences. Rules actually make teenage boys feel loved, as odd as that sounds. Without them, they feel lost and uncared for. And that’s when they really get into trouble.
Make rules he—and you—can live with. Determine what you think is reasonable and stick to your guns. This can be really hard because many sons know exactly how to get their mothers to change their minds and renege on rules. My son, for example, knew he could get me to change my mind on rules more easily than he could get his dad to, so, naturally, when he wanted to do something he knew he wasn’t allowed to do, he came to me. Sons use language they know will pierce our armor. Typically, boys will say something like “You just don’t trust me,” or the old “If you really thought I was a good kid, then you’d let me …” Boys are smart when it comes to getting mothers to bend, so we need to be on guard. They don’t manipulate intentionally or maliciously. They do so because being crafty increases the odds they’ll get their way. So, if your son ever draws you in with arguments like these, don’t take the bait. Rules have nothing to do with trust. Everyone—including us—lives with rules, and good mothers help their sons learn how. You can always show him that you trust him in a variety of other ways (trust him to do his chores on time or get his homework done!).
Love is gritty. Saying no and keeping clear boundaries and solid rules makes sons feel loved. A deep voice or a thick beard should never fool us. Boys can’t reason like men until they are in their early twenties, so until then, we need to be strong mothers to keep them safe from themselves.
I had a young, teenage patient whose mother taught me a trick she used when her son was in a horrible mood and she didn’t know how to communicate with him. “I pretend that he is someone else’s son,” she told me. Her approach makes sense. When you’re in the midst of battle with your son, it’s important to separate yourself from the situation emotionally by reminding yourself that this is not about you. This emotional distance cuts down on the guilt and anger we feel and enables us to approach our son’s behavior in a much more rational, patient, and matter-of-fact way. Think back to when your son was two. When he threw his skinny body on the floor, flailed his arms violently in protest, and screamed, “You are such a bad mom!” did you believe him? Did you call up a psychologist and make an appointment to come in and talk about how you were ruining your child’s life and needed training on how to be a better mother? Of course not. You knew that he was two and that part of being a healthy two-year-old was to have temper tantrums. The same is true with older sons who wage war: They strike out at you for no good reason except to see how you’ll react. And, as it was when they were toddlers, their temper tantrums (yes, teenage boys have them) still aren’t about you—they are about them.
Colleen was superb at staying self-assured when parenting her kids. As a single mother of three, she determined early on in her children’s lives that she would do everything that she could do in order to be a good mother and that would have to be enough. Her confidence in her parenting was a breath of fresh air. She didn’t beat up on herself, and if her kids acted out she wasn’t always examining her own behavior to see what she had done to make them upset; she looked at them and held them responsible for their part. She was Mom. She wasn’t Dad, teacher, psychiatrist, or coach. She was Mom and it was a role she loved.
Colleen had her work cut out for her because she knew her two strong-willed boys were going to need a male influence more than her daughter. Her ex-husband had moved out of the state and saw the kids only a few times during the school year and during the summer. As the teen years approached, her younger son began challenging her. She had a curfew for all of the kids, but Craig, who was fifteen at the time, decided to ignore it. He decided to sneak out at night and go to parties where kids were drinking heavily. Colleen found out what he was doing and devised a plan.
She confided in her brother what her son Craig was doing. She told her brother that a party was being held at a certain boy’s house on a Saturday night and that she anticipated Craig would lie in order to find a way to go. She was right. When she called Craig’s cellphone at 11 P.M. to see what was happening at the friend’s home where he was supposedly staying, she could hear a raucous party going on in the background. She called her brother and the two of them drove to the party, walked in, and found Craig in a corner smoking pot and drinking vodka from a paper cup. They went up to him and demanded that he leave. When he refused, his uncle grabbed him and literally manhandled him out of the house. Craig didn’t speak to his mother for a week.
When I asked Colleen if she regretted embarrassing Craig, she looked at me quizzically. “Of course not. That’s what we need to do with our kids sometimes to save their lives. He was headed down a terrible path.”
Had Craig returned to lying and partying after the incident, I wondered? “He tried it once about a month later. My brother and I did the same thing. Being embarrassed once is tough but twice is unbearable,” she told me.
This occurred about four years ago and I can say that Craig is doing quite well now. He finished high school and went on to play basketball in college. During his senior year of college, at a basketball ceremony, he made a point of telling his entire team that he would have never made it through college had it not been for his mother. He thanked her for her encouragement and her strength during all of the “tough times” in his life. What he was thanking her for was her grit and her ability to do what was right for him, even when it felt really uncomfortable for her. When I asked her years later what helped her most in getting through those tough times, she said it was her ability to not take Craig’s actions personally. Bingo.
It’s difficult for mothers to stay patient with our sons, and with ourselves. We want our boys to behave and we want to be better parents, too. But the rules are changing all the time, because as our sons grow older, the circumstances change. It’s hard to be the first-time parent of a toddler. It’s equally hard to be the first-time parent of a teenager. Just when we’ve figured out how to best handle a certain situation, our son shifts gears and enters a different stage. He becomes whiny when before he was always compliant; he becomes moody when he never was before. It feels as though we can’t get a firm hold on how to be a good parent.
Every stage of development, every battle, every temper tantrum, and every breakup with a girlfriend requires a new batch of patience from us. And patience requires mental and emotional energy. It’s tough to handle. When our son craves male attention and begins taking his frustration out on us because we can’t give him what he needs, we need to be patient and let him vent. And when he challenges us by trying to break down rules and boundaries we set for him, we must dig deep within ourselves and find the resolve to keep the boundaries well built and the rules clear and fast.
The great rewards in parenting boys usually come later in life. Sure, there are wonderful moments of tenderness and laughter when he says something that tickles us. There are days when all we want to do is keep him home in his footed pajamas and read stories together. The moments when we want the world to go away and leave the two of us alone. In those moments we believe that we can manage just fine, the two of us together as a team. But life progresses and one day turns into another and the alarm clock tells us that it is time for school. Then it’s time for soccer practice, campouts, homework, you name it.
The moments of joy far outweigh the anguish in raising boys and the best way to ensure this is to remember a few things. First, tension and misunderstanding are part and parcel of raising them because they are male and we are female. So expect it and prepare for it. Second, realize that at some point in your son’s life, you will make mistakes and he will get mad. Every good mother misunderstands her son and makes mistakes, so learn to accept them and move forward. We all go into parenting with issues and scars, and sometimes these work their way into our relationships with our children. But the important task each mother has is to recognize what those issues are and then to separate them (the best we can) from our relationships with our boys. Third, we must face that at different points along the way, our sons will begin to pull away from us. We can’t keep them close forever, because every son needs to separate from his mother in order to find out who he is as a man. When we embrace this, we survive better.
Because of all this, wars will ensue. Sons will get mad and the anger will come out sideways. Sometimes they will be mad at us; other times they will be mad at someone else. Either way, the anger will come out onto us because we are his safety net, and therefore his target. We are the ones who will never leave. We are the ones who can take the arrows because we love our sons when no one else will, and they know it. And we will always be there when they return, regardless of how volatile the wars have been. How blessed we are to be the mothers of sons.