Some notes from the ABEN Conference: Boys and Learning: Developing Emotional Intelligence and Engagement through and understanding of Behaviour
Andrew Fuller
The long, winding road to manhood
- Importance of resilience over the whole life span, but education system and parenting designed to reduce resilience or prevent its development
- Harsh inconsistent parenting is a key determinant of poor development
- Importance of play
- Can’t learn to walk unless you learn to fall
- CF Feng Shui Detective
- Loss of knowledge of excitement and ability to form a large enough life.
- Problems of lack of experiences during childhood and experience of play and other adults
- Epigenetics: genes demand triggers for development
- School is the only environment which retains ‘normal’ developmental experiences
- Challenge of electronic parenting and verbal messages: families are word poor but schools are word rich and boys have no idea how to receive the messages
- Lowest resting heart rate: kids with the lrhr are at most risk of violence because of adrenalin brain
- Think about re-reading favourite stories from childhood and reflect on messages (e.g., We Didn’t Mean to Go To Sea, To the Wild Sky)
- Adolescence is a time of grief and loss stemming from the loss of the relationships with childhood
- Loss in adolescence is expressed through anger
- Often accompanied by a depressed mother
- Importance of bombarding boys with positive messages (love, regard, appreciation)
- Roll of significant adults
- Successful work with girls and boys is a work of spiritual transformation
- Children need our love most when they deserve it least
- Aspiring Adulthood (21–28)
- Delayed identity formation (Moratorium)
- Some become achievement-obsessed (climbing the ladder when it is placed against the wrong wall
- Importance of relationships and work
- Fatherhood
- Sartre’s quote: good dads die young because they force their sons to find out for themselves
- Father Son days are important
- Don’t get put off by the electronics: get them to show you.
- Living in a Father-absent society (and have been doing it for years, cf the war)
- Create discussions around fatherhood (what would the ideal father be like?)
