Raising a Son

Raising a son is clear an easier endeavor than is raising a daughter. However, given the simplicity of the task, the mission is complex: How does one create raise a son who does not lie, cheat, rape, pillage, murder, rob....etc. One only has to read the newpaper to see that males are committing the majority of the more heinous crimes.

I need to take a moment here, before I continue, to add that I have a lovely son and three lovely grandsons.

However, I was watching a documentary the other day about terrorists and how their wives do not always approve of their husband's terrorist activities and urge them to stop. Despite the earnest plea of an earnest wife, not one of the men would change his path. I called my sister, with whom I love to discuss such topics, and asked her why women were not effective in moving men off the path of mayhem. She replied that women, since Lysistrata, had not been successful. Changing a man would be more difficult than trying to build a dam across Niagara falls while the water was running full blast.

There may be, however, another approach to influencing men, and that is the influence that mothers have over their sons. Bachofen assumed, as did others of his time, that a mate who, with “desperate valour,” defended his home and provided for his children, made it possible for a mother to attend to all her children’s needs. Before males became assets, however, a mother had to curb male selfishness through her authority over her sons; mothers had “to tame man’s primordial strength,to guide it into benign channels” (Bachofen, 1861:144, 151). They had to move adult males into a “voluntary recognition of feminine power” (p. 84). Bachofen wrote: "at times the woman has exerted a great influence on men and on the education and culture of nations. The elevation of women over man arouses our amazement most especially by its contradiction to the relation of physical strength. The law of nature confers the scepter of power on the stronger. If it is torn away from him by feebler hands, other aspects of human nature must have been at work, deeper powers must have made their influence felt"(p. 85).

Bachofen pointed out that males as kinsmen and fathers had to learn to restrain their selfishness and use their strength, intellect, and resources for the benefit of vulnerable others. If it is true, however, that human males initially learned to father by watching and copying (being influenced by) their mothers, then maternal care provided the model for paternal care. Bachofen’s claim that the origin of culture owes a great deal to ancestral mothers, needless to say, did not form the foundation of modern social theory. Although Bachofen’s words may seem like little more than wishful thinking, I will be risking little if I build on the argument he raised, as scholars still are uncertain if, when, and/or how humans learn to parent. Biology indeed plays a role in maternal behaviors, genes are expressed, however, in an environment that is, for many primates, social. Among humans, mothering behaviors are learned, taught, supported and reinforced, by and large, through traditional kinship and moral systems (Edel & Edel 1959). Traditions, ancestral strategies coming from the past, are the key to human parenting. They also may be a key to taming male behavior.

I would write more, but my feet are freezing cold...