The Eight Lines of Development

Your son may be taller than you by now, or soon will be, and whatever authority your size once earned you in his younger eyes is history now. The key for a parent of a boy this age is to retain your moral authority when this new big boy presents you with unexpected challenges. He needs you to recognize that he is both a rapidly changing new person and the very same boy you have always known. It is when their boys reach about fourteen or fifteen that parents begin to speak of them as if they were aliens. That’s a mistake. You need to recognize your beloved little boy in this new body—but never let on that you do.

Physical Development

Though a few late-starting boys are just embarking on puberty at fourteen, most boys of fifteen have achieved enough growth that the full impact of puberty on their bodies is now evident. They may have young-looking faces, but they have adult male genitals, long legs, and big shoulders, and for the first time in several years, they are taller than the girls around them. For a boy like Zach, who grew seven inches in the twelve months before turning fifteen, his new height is the central fact of his life: it affects his athletic career and his standing in his family because he is a foot taller than his mother and within striking distance of his father’s height of six feet four inches. His height also affects his social standing in school, because he is taller than many of the junior and senior boys in his school and will be forever. Some junior and senior boys may see him as an upstart competitor and make a special effort to put him in his place. Girls who saw him as immature in the eighth and ninth grades are now literally looking up at him. So are many teachers!

Because their athletic classmates are getting so much attention from high-status girls, the nonathletes start to define themselves aggressively as counterathletic. In early high school the boys start breaking up into “jocks” and “preps,” “geeks,” and “freaks.” Though there are numerous criteria at work in the shaping of male social groups, such as race and class (we will discuss them below), one of the bedrock distinctions for all boys is “athletic” or “nonathletic.”

The problem for nonathletic boys is that in their eagerness to embrace their own interests and identity—whether that is debate, band, art, drama, Scholastic Bowl, or video gaming at home—exercise can vanish from their life.

If you are a parent of a fourteen- or fifteen-year-old boy, you have almost no influence on whether your son is motivated to be an athlete or not. There simply are boys whose male identity is not connected to sports. Many simply prefer physically demanding recreational pursuits. Happily, there is much physical work that a fourteen-year-old boy can do around the house, and you should ask him to do it. There is exercise to be had—and allowance money to be made— mowing lawns, washing cars, taking out the trash, and raking leaves. Also, you need not and should not drive your son everywhere; he can walk or bicycle at least some of the time.

Attachment

At this age, attachments are not as much based on actual physical dependence as they were in the past. Fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds spend hours and whole days away from their parents, so these are ages when a boy experiences himself to be big enough and competent enough to come and go as he pleases. For the boy whose home life is abusive or who finds his attachments too complex and painful, the idea of running away becomes a daring but realistic option. As a practical matter, in modern society it is extraordinarily difficult for a boy of that age to support himself, and in most cases—sadly, not all—the police are likely to find him if his parents have reported his departure, as Shane’s parents did. However, the idea that he could theoretically look after himself has a profound effect on a boy’s psychology. His attachments suddenly have an elective quality at this age. He doesn’t have to love you, he chooses to love you. He doesn’t have to respect his dad, he chooses to do so, and he likely may say exactly that in a verbal fight.

A boy feels he must regulate both his distance from his parents and his response to them; there are times when he blocks you from being attuned to him as you have been all of his life. While this is intensely frustrating for mothers, fathers tend to be more relaxed about it, either because they have not been as closely attuned to their sons or because they remember doing the same thing to their parents. “Don’t bug him,” they say to their wives.

At the same time that he may be opting out of the mother-son bond, he needs profound attachments in life because every human being does. So a boy may turn to a favorite coach, a teacher, the leader of an extracurricular activity at school, or a camp counselor. Here is someone he can idealize and even love; though boys avoid the word, I am witness to the fact that boys really do love their mentors at this time of life, and that the mentor-mentee relationship in school has all of the same structural elements of adult mentor relationships in business, for example. These strong attachments are an evolution of the parental attachments to include an outside person that allows a boy to grow in new ways.

One of the greatest gifts that a parent can give her son during this period is the psychological permission to make a close relationship with another adult. Such relationships can be life-changing for a boy. One of the greatest fears of parents, however, even as they give permission for their son to make an outside-the-family relationship, is that their vulnerable, idealizing boy will fall into the hands of a pedophile. By now, your son should know (from talks with you over the years) and trust that he can tell you if ever he is subjected to inappropriate advances by an adult (or anyone, for that matter). What is left for you to do now is get to know the person who is mentoring your son well enough so that you trust him, and then back off and let the relationship develop without your presence. A confiding relationship with an adult can help a boy feel connected and respected, which can help him sidestep many of the serious risk factors of adolescence.

Social Development

Earlier in the chapter we discussed the changing shape of boys’ social lives, most notably the male culture of cruelty, and the emerging interest in girls. Boys become deeply attached to their friends, their group, and, unfortunately for some, their gang. This happens to boys from the most loving, intact families as well as to boys from the most dysfunctional families. Psychologist Ron Taffel calls the relationship between teens “the second family” and worries that peers are displacing the family in the life of contemporary American adolescents. This may be more true than ever, but it has long been the fear of parents as they see their influence wane and the effects of peer pressure increase. In the normal course of a boy’s development, peers replace parents as a source of companionship, excitement, and good feeling at this age—and also as a source of emotional support and advice.

Cognitive Development

“How do I get my son to think about the future?” the father of a ninth grader once asked me. “I want him to focus on college,” the dad said. “He doesn’t act as if it means anything to him.” Though at fifteen he may be taller than his mother and just as tall as his father, his capacity for planning ahead is not as developed as that of his parents. Many aspects of his thinking are not yet adult.

Through adolescence, boys are developing many different cognitive skills at different rates. Most important from an academic point of view is that a boy’s ability to engage in hypothetical-deductive reasoning is growing, and this allows him to test the logic of a proposition in his own mind. His short-term memory may be improving as well, and that allows him to hold several ideas in mind simultaneously and compare them with one another. However, not all boys become sophisticated abstract thinkers. In early high school a boy may run into either the limits of his innate capacity or his developmental timetable. This is the boy who settles in as a steady C student, doing his best for the time being.

Most of the content in elementary school can be mastered with the proper teaching and hard work on the student’s part. As the material increases in complexity, hard work and good preparation are not sufficient for complete mastery. Students must possess a greater cognitive capacity to handle the more difficult, abstract material in high school, and they have to be exposed to formal operational problems that will stir them to become abstract thinkers. High school courses are typically tracked, with the brighter kids going into the “honors” and “college prep” tracks that require formal operational thinking and less academically inclined or less motivated students winding up in the “regular” or “remedial” tracks.

Tracking is controversial, because it deprives some students of the opportunity to be challenged by high-level material or to hear sophisticated, logical discussions, but it is not irrational. It is tougher for a teacher to cover sophisticated material when the class is made up of a mixture of concrete operational thinkers and formal operational thinkers, and some students are simply overwhelmed by the cognitive complexity of the material. In most of the rest of the developed world, there is a significant separation of students at age twelve, thirteen, or fourteen between the highly academic students and those who are not as academically capable. In Japan, for instance, students take an entrance exam for admission to an academic high school; those who fail the test go to a remedial high school in which they simply complete their elementary school skills and learn a trade. That was always the case in England, where twelve-year-olds took the O-level exams and were sorted out into more and less academic programs.

As a parent, you always want to support your son’s potential, but until now it may not have been clear whether that potential lies in sophisticated academic work or some other field of endeavor. By ninth grade your son’s teachers will know whether he possesses the powers of reasoning, metacognition (the ability to think about thinking), and the ability to think in unconventional and imaginative ways that will allow him to do sophisticated academic work. If he does, then he’ll be equipped for coursework that requires it; whether he is motivated to do it remains to be seen. However, if your son is not developmentally equipped for that academic rigor, it can be a setup for chronic struggle and failure. You support your son’s fullest potential by respecting the mind he has and supporting the most challenging and appropriate academic placement for him.

Academic Development

As a general rule, it is possible to differentiate between the more capable and less capable students by the beginning of high school, but that is not invariably the case with boys. Because they mature more slowly than girls in all ways, it is possible that you may have a late bloomer, cognitively, emotionally, or in terms of his ability to organize himself. I have certainly seen boys who seemed to wake up and focus in middle to late adolescence, suddenly becoming much stronger students. I have seen inspiring high school teachers energize and motivate boys who had disliked school previously. Many men have told me that they did not become sophisticated thinkers until they arrived in college and applied themselves to a problem that seemed relevant and related to an eventual occupation.

If you hope to help your son achieve in high school, whatever his level of innate academic ability, the best thing you can do is help him with time management and organization. More than anything, the average boy in high school struggles with being disorganized. Boys tend to carry everything with them in their backpacks because they are physically strong, but they do not know what they have in them. If it were up to me, the majority of boys would be enrolled in study-skills classes and would be taught how to use planners and how to manage their homework time. Such skills would be every bit as important to them in life as the content of advanced classes that they may or may not remember. In any case, because so few high school boys will show their work to their parents, and even if they did, many parents are not capable of helping their sons with the content of advanced courses, the one thing that parents can do to help ninth and tenth graders is to remind them to attend to their work, to limit screen time, and ask them whether it is done. If it isn’t done, it may help to ask them where they are in it, how it’s going, what’s left to do, and what their strategy is for completing on time—though not all those questions at once. Sometimes they may stall out in the process of taking an assignment from start to finish, and attention to the process itself offers them a chance to step back and see where they’re stuck, and a way to reason through how to get back on track. Some boys do not need this monitoring, some will accept it, and others will resent it and fight it. You will need to work out what role he will let you play in his academic life, but I believe you may still have a role in the first two years of high school; it will be less and less, if any, in the junior and senior years.

One thing over which you likely still have some control is television viewing. Remember the substantial research linking television time with academic woes. In just one of the most recent studies, researchers at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and New York University School of Medicine reported that frequent television viewing during adolescence was associated with higher risk for attention problems, learning difficulties, poor homework completion, and adverse long-term educational outcomes. Maybe your son is tuning in to TV because he is already turned off to school for other reasons. Whatever his reasons for turning it on, TV is unlikely to make matters anything but worse.

Emotional Self-Regulation

Adolescent self-control and judgment seem to go backward in late middle school and early high school. Boys appear to their parents to be more sullen and less joyful, more egocentric and less helpful than they may have seemed just a year or two earlier. They now avoid things in the family that they used to enjoy. They suddenly are embarrassed by their parents or younger siblings in public and can turn angry when family members inadvertently act in ways that make them feel acutely self-conscious or ashamed. My own mother’s voice rings in my ears: when I turned fourteen she began to complain, “Where has my sunny boy gone?” When she asked it, it would infuriate me. It seemed to me a demand that I stay a little boy and not grow up.

Hormonal shifts are partially responsible for the mood changes of early adolescence, and there is nothing that a parent can do about hormones. A boy has to become accustomed to the new messages and impulses that are racing around his body. Perhaps you can require that your son get enough sleep, negotiating reasonable school night hours and allowing him to sleep late on weekends, because boys of this age need enormous amounts of sleep. They might naturally nap throughout the day, alternating moments of high energy with complete lassitude.

As we have discussed, much about a boy’s mood depends on context. Is he with his friends or his family? Does he feel that he is in control of his destiny, or does he feel that he is being bossed around by adults? As a school consultant, I have watched teachers work with fourteen-and fifteen-year-olds, and if I were to characterize their successful techniques for working with this age student, it would be to maintain a sense of humor, don’t get into power struggles, allow them to express themselves before you express yourself, and give them a physical outlet.

Boys will gradually gain more control over their emotional ability and their need for impulsive, exhibitionistic displays. Senior boys laugh at ninth-grade boys when they see such behaviors, both because they are so “immature” and because the senior boys well remember that they were like that two short years ago. If you want to be reassured that your ninth-grade son is going to get a grip on his emotions, go watch some senior boys. They will seem enormously mature by comparison with your emotionally raw son.

One of the ways that boys continue to control their emotions is to work at being stoic. While we usually refer to the problems of stoicism for boys, there is a reasonable, healthy role for stoicism in adult life; it enables us to keep our emotions in check as we work through challenging moments. The only thing you need to worry about as a parent is whether your son’s apparent stoicism is depression and/or whether he has started to treat his emotional distress with drugs and alcohol.

But avoiding contact with adults who might provoke them—that is, their parents—and suppressing their feelings is a normal developmental phase at this age. Though this is frustrating for moms and dads, you have to learn to respect this rather rigid form of self-control. It helps a boy maintain his sense of masculinity and his dignity when he is full of feeling. He will gradually become more open once he is acclimated to his growth, once he develops a better vocabulary of feelings (girlfriends are a help with this), and once he has a more solid identity.

Moral and Spiritual Development

Perhaps the most prominent aspect of the early high school boy’s approach to spirituality is skepticism and even cynicism. Why is that so? As they develop a greater ability to question the logic of adult propositions, boys become more critical of absolutes, and they can see the double standard at work in adult behavior. Being no longer as intimidated by authority, they feel freer to question it. Identifying adult hypocrisy is a major occupation of ninth- and tenth-grade boys; they can be both accurate in their perceptions and withering in their criticisms. Remember Mark Twain’s much-quoted observation: “When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished by how much he’d learned in seven years.”

This critical stance toward adults stands in stark contrast to the rather flexible, self-forgiving morality of middle adolescents. From an adult point of view, adolescent boys often break rules, can give no reason for doing so, and display little remorse. That is because they are playing a different game than the adults are; they are testing themselves, taking risks, and holding to a morality that makes their group of friends the most important moral touchstone in their lives. Being loyal to the group, not being a “rat,” protecting his friends from being discovered drinking beer or smoking marijuana—these may be the highest form of morality for a fifteen-year-old boy, who is likely to be a Stage 3 moral thinker in Kohlberg’s scheme describing progressive stages of moral development. The stage is characterized as the “good child” stage mentioned earlier, but at this age that also means being a good friend, which may put a boy into frequent moral conflict.

The group is so important to a boy that at times his strongest need is to be a good group member in his own eyes and in the eyes of his friends. There are other times when he will want to be a good person in the eyes of his family or his girlfriend, but without being grounded in a Stage 4 understanding of rules and laws, his morality is attached to the opinion and behavior of others around him. Asked by an adult why he committed some moral transgression, he will shrug and say, “I don’t know,” but what he means is: I am a conventional thinker. I was going along with the group and trying to be a good friend. Now I see that while I was loyal to my buddies, I failed to be a good son or a good member of the community, but hey ...I was with them at the time. As a parent, you need to hold your son morally accountable while understanding that his new life outside the family will put him into frequent moral dilemmas: friends versus family, friends versus school.

Identity

In the years of childhood, a boy is dependent for his identity on his parents, his brothers and sisters, his church, his neighborhood, his personal interests, and the sports team he roots for. As he grows up, much of his identity is provided by his social groups, the “uniform” he chooses to wear (prep, hip-hop, goth, etc.) and the labels that are available to him, or affixed to him, in high school. Is he a “nerd” or a “prep” or a “freak”? If others call him that, must he accept it? In the next chapter I interview a young gay man in college who said he was labeled as “gay” from the beginning of middle school but who rejected the label. He knew he was homosexual, but he did not accept the label of “gay” in the way the boys in school used it against him. He denied it, fought back against it, and competed in many different ways in an effort to prove he was not “gay” in the way they meant it. He still does not accept the label fully. This tendency to react against a label—“that’s not who I am”—is characteristic of this age.

Identity is not complete at this age. Critics of the concept of identity claim it is never an absolutely permanent or stable part of the personality. That may be so, but it is demonstrably more solid in early adulthood than it is at fourteen. When Zach tried to define himself for me, he said:

Yeah. I see myself as someone who is kind of content with being a little bit above average. I don’t have to be the greatest soccer player, the smartest kid in the class. I’ll never be left behind. . . . I don’t want to sacrifice being a good student or a good friend just to be one thing. . . . In school I work hard and that’s been working for me. . . . I try to be respectful to adults, I try to be nice to my friends, I try to be funny.

If identity is the part of the psyche that guides and directs the self, it relies on self-knowledge, self-control, a sense of continuity, and a sense of coherence to maintain direction. There are not many tenth graders who have a firm sense of all four. They are often surprised by their own actions, may lose self-control with some frequency, and may change identity as they move from school to home, from one social group to another, or from home to work. At this stage of adolescence, a boy’s identity is not yet complete. It won’t be until he achieves a measure of independence from his parents.

Excerpted from It's a Boy! by Michael Thompson, Ph.D. and Teresa Barker. Copyright © 2008 by Michael Thompson, Ph.D. and Teresa Barker. Reprinted by arrangement with The Random House Publishing Group.