Reviewed by Julie Ann Moylan

As a pediatrician specializing in the treatment and prevention of family violence, Dr. Eli Newberger has dealt regularly with urgent situations where people have been emotionally and often physically hurt. Most often, the person inflicting this pain has been a man. His interactions with these men have forced Newberger to wrestle with the idea of character—to search for and to find some point of connection with these men, a connection that reveals a part of their better selves. His experience suggests that it is possible to encourage boys to develop in ways that will help them grow into emotionally strong and healthy men.

This is a book about how to understand and influence the character of boys so that they have every opportunity to become admirable men. Through careful explanations and case histories, critical issues such as male connection and emotion, discipline and punishment, honesty, self-control, teasing, bullying, and cheating are presented with depth and clarity. Parents of boys of all ages and anyone interested in male behavior may find this work interesting and useful.

In a discussion of the moral basis of character, the author describes an incident where police officers encountered a man acting suspiciously in a public parking deck. They stopped to question him. The suspect—who happened to be a father, accompanied by his five-year-old son—angrily denied attempting to break into a vehicle. His son piped up with the following statement "Yes, you did, Daddy. Don't lie to the police." Honesty comes naturally to children, it seems.

Newberger is the author of several influential works on child abuse. He teaches at Harvard Medical School and is known for his ability to bring together good sense and science when addressing central issues of family life. He focuses on the strength and resilience of parent-child relationships rather than on blame and punishment. The Men They Will Become offers a comprehensive yet highly readable look at numerous issues affecting boys' lives, from infancy to adulthood. He celebrates the differences in boys and shows us how to understand the roots of their behavior.

As parents, most of us have had the experience of hearing our mother's or father's words escaping mysteriously from our mouths to our own children's ears. Even if we are determined to avoid making the same mistakes our parents made, we find ourselves falling back on the parenting style we first encountered in our own childhood. And so we say the words we swore would never cross our lips… "If I've told you once, I've told you a million times, don't stand with the refrigerator door open," for instance.

The author challenges us to observe ourselves in those moments, to understand how our family histories affect our nurturing behavior with our own children. He suggests that we have a 'default' parenting position based on what we experienced in our own families growing up. Unless we make conscious efforts to change our own behavior, our children will be the recipients of the last generations' methods. Once we know what our own default positions are, we can then decide whether that behavior is truly responsive to our sons' needs and behaviors.

Newberger uses recent statistics to support his position that families have changed too much for old parenting styles to work well for today's boys. Barely half of the boys in this country live with both biological parents, and fully one-third live with a single parent, or with no parent. Most of those living with just one parent live with their mothers.

Newberger argues that just as yesterday's parenting techniques aren't the best ones for today's boys, neither are the methods that seem to work well with girls. He takes the position that biological differences between boys' and girls' brains lead to developmental differences that need to be taken into account when parents and others seek to promote healthy social and emotional development.

He makes a particularly strong case against the use of spanking or other forms of physical punishment, as a way to discipline boys. Based partly on his view of a biological difference between the way boys and girls think and experience the world, Newberger argues that when a parent or other adult strikes a boy, the message the boy takes from that action is that it is okay to hit someone, if you are bigger and stronger than they are. He also reviews some of the recent research linking corporal punishment with depression and other emotional disturbances.

Character development is a hot topic these days, given the intense media coverage of issues such as violence in high schools, murders committed by children as young as 11 and other shocking events. This book, rather than seeking to lay blame, offers some concrete suggestions on how to strengthen boys' characters.

Julie Ann Moylan is a single mother of 5-year-old twins (one girl, one boy) and enjoys life despite its impossibilities.