It’s always an adventure when you have 4 boys. This morning four year old Cal put a tall plastic box on top of a precarious folding chair and climbed up on it, prepared to jump. This was his battle cry: “Don’t try this at home, kids! Try it at a friend’s house!”
Boys do dangerous things. Boys get scrapes, cuts and bruises, and claim not to know where they got them. Boys get dirty. Not just a little dirty under the fingernails. They get caked from head to toe in mud and grime. They go outside on a beautiful day and find the one mud puddle left over from last week’s rain, and that is where they play.
Boys climb trees, and they aren’t satisfied until they go too high. Boys chase each other from the living room through the kitchen, down the hall and back again until there’s a wear pattern in the carpet the shape of a NASCAR track. Boys take every opportunity to wrestle and tussle with one another.
Boys manage to get their church pants grass stained on the way from the car to Sunday School. Boys can fashion their own guns out of Legos.
This is what boys do.
So what’s a mom to do?
I find myself repeating words like these: “Don’t track that mud in the house!” “Get down from there!” “Stop wrestling near the fireplace!” “No running in here!” “You boys are too loud!” “Be careful with that….(sling shot, BB gun, dart gun, pair of scissors).” “Don’t play so rough!”
Why do I say these things? To protect them from themselves. To protect them from each other. To protect our home and everything in it. To preserve my sanity.
These are worthwhile goals, but I have to remind myself: what is the greater goal here? Is it to shield my little boys so that I never have to worry about them, or is it to raise up men who will be prepared to make their own way in the world?
This doesn’t mean I’m giving them license for any kind of reckless foolishness their little boy hearts desire! But I am realizing, as my boys get older, that they need some freedom to try and act like men. They need to be trusted, they need to take some risks, they even need to be able to make mistakes and get hurt from time to time.
I don’t want to raise passive, sissified boys who are always clean and always careful. I don’t want boys who act like girls. I want my boys to become the kind of men who take risks, and who aren’t afraid of hard work and getting dirty. I want to raise boys who don’t need to be protected and who are capable of protecting others. I want my boys to be strong, confident leaders. How will they become this kind of man?
By being allowed and encouraged to be this kind of boy.
As the mom to one son, who is DEFINITELY different from his two sisters, I loved your post! I had to laugh. My ds fashioned guns from Legos too. He also chewed his toast into a gun. My friend’s ds, whom she vowed would never play with guns, even folded his sister’s Barbies into fine gun-like weapons as well. (She finally gave up and just let him be a boy.) :o)
On a more serious note, though, I couldn’t agree more with you about “passive, sissified boys.” I appreciate the approach my daughter and her husband take when their boys take a spill: “No blood–you’re OK!” Or: “Look, blood! How cool!”
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