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Subject: |
Raising Teenage Boys into Responsible Men |
| Date: |
2009-06-02
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Raising Teenage Boys into Responsible Men
Hi, I'm Dr. Laura Schlessinger and welcome to my YouTube channel, and thank you for the letters you write in. This one is about raising teenage boys. Just remember they do grow up and move out. That's probably the saving grace in all the frustration.
"In your next monologue would you discuss some of the things I can do as a father, and a man, to motivate a straying son, 19 yrs old, who would rather run with his friends, than get a job, or educate himself. He is not currently living under my roof. He wants to come and go as he pleases. This has been an ongoing problem for 3 years.
Thanks a zillion,
Dave from the left coast"
Well, you know what? Males have a harder time growing into men than I think girls have in growing into women. Because I think there's something more innate in women about getting in touch with maternity and femininity and all of that. I don't know, I think there's a biological thing happening there about nesting and all of that. But with males, it's different.
I want to tell you a story about a reserve in Africa, where a lot of the rhinoceroses (if that's how you say more than one) were getting killed. And they couldn't figure out who was killing...I mean a rhinoceros is not that easy to kill. Maybe a bigger one could kill a smaller one, but they were really perplexed.
Turns out somebody had decided to take the older bull elephants out of the reserve and put them elsewhere. So the only elephants that were left were the young male elephants. The young male elephants, without the control of the old bull elephants, were out of control and hyper-masculinized, and violent. Sound familiar? Kind of like our streets with the young males, without the fathers at home.
Well, what happened was, when the older male elephants weren't there to control the behavior of the younger male elephants, they would go out and kill other animals. So they put the older male elephants back in, and they kept those younger elephants in control.
In our society today, men have gotten so emasculated by the feminista movement and by "metro sexuality" (or whatever the heck that is), plus families are not mostly intact. Plus, there are two-career families, plus, plus, plus...with all of this chaos, I don't think we largely have in our culture as a whole, much less in each home, a strong male influence to control what is the normal, natural chaos that is a young male. And it takes a strong man to turn a young male into a man.
So, at 19, the battle is a little bit at its end, but I think that you should start showing more strength about the requirements and expectations in your home, and throwing his tushy out when he's not behaving properly, not helping him financially and letting him know that he's being a "male", not a "man" and that you are disappointed in his behavior. So, in other words, your commentary as well as your finally acting like a strong male (the older bull elephant) could bring about a change for the better.
I'm Dr. Laura Schlessinger. See you on the next YouTube.
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