Editorial Review
Featuring a new preface by the author on how parents can make a difference.
With author appearances on Good Morning America, The Today Show, 20 /20 and NPR's Fresh Air, and featuring articles in Newsweek, Time, and The New York Times, Real Boys is one of the most talked-about and influential books published this year.
Based on William Pollack's groundbreaking research at Harvard Medical School over two decades, Real Boys explores why many boys are sad, lonely, and confused although they may appear tough, cheerful, and confident. Pollack challenges conventional expectations about manhood and masculinity that encourage parents to treat boys as little men, raising them through a toughening process that drives their true emotions underground. Only when we understand what boys are really like, says Pollack, can we help them develop more self-confidence and the emotional savvy they need to deal with issues such as depression, love and sexuality, drugs and alcohol, divorce, and violence.
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Customer Reviews
find another book 
2006-08-04
Makes many accurate observations about boy behavior and its origins,however,the book leans a little too much toward "feminization" of boys in preventing behavioral problems.This may be the politically-correct way to help boys,but not the productive way or the ethical way.
Are you raising boys today? 
2006-07-25
If you are raising boys today I suggest reading this book before they enter the school system! Is he in school and saying things like, "that's gay" or "fag"? Sure he is, we raise them that way and don't even know it.
This book is for both parents but I think mothers will get more out of it. It will also explain to older boys, (adult) how they got messed up emotionally and the difficulties they have with intimacy. May also help to understand why their marriage failed. If you are a wife and want to try and save a marriage, read this book! Real Boys will clear up the myths and explain how NOT to raise real boys if you want them to be real men!!!
You don't have to read the whole thing 
2006-05-03
The author makes some fantastic points in the first hundred or so pages in this book. He then makes those points over and over again until they have lost all meaning.
I just feel that the momentum of the narration in a book like this needs to be backed up by more then example after example that says the same thing.
Overall-If I had to read the term "gender straightjacket" or "boy code" one more time I would have shot myself in the head.
Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths if Boyhood 
2006-03-24
I ordered the audiobook so that I could listen to it while I was driving. It was filled with examples of what my son has had to deal with at school. It was an opportunity for me to have an "insider's" view of what was really going on at school, how prevalent it is for this to happen to our sons, and what I could do to counter-act it with our son. The author narrated the audiobook, and gave a lot of real-world examples that he had compiled in the 20+ years he had served as a child psychologist.
I would recommend this book highly to anyone having to deal with bullying and their sons at school.
Breaking the Boy's Code as we Break the Genetic Code 2006-03-08
To truly be able to break the current "macho" boy code we need to understand what factors lead to its formation. Unfortunately, while cultural peculiarities are important, the underling forces behind the formation of the "boy code" are sociobiological.
While boy are born expressive and sensitive they cease to be so with time, and adapt to the strong, macho image of man under the pressures of sexual selection. Overwhelming majority of women/girls prefer to mate with strong, macho men. Too many women/girls will in fact seek mating with "bad boys" while overlooking nice but "ineffectual in macho display" boys (aka "wussy").
The problem of course is that women's "preference for mates" evolved in Savanna Africa thousands of years ago, when strong, bad (by our current standards), men prospered by assuming the positions of tribal leadership (to become and maintain a position in tribal leadership you had to have a nerve to shed blood) while nice, gentle men were left as subordinates of the tribe. Of course tribal leaders provided much more for their family and wives than subordinates. Thus the reproductive success of the primordial women whose husbands were at times brutal but provided meat home might have been much higher than of those women whose husbands were gentle but brought little meat home. In addition the sons of brutal fathers are likely themselves to be brutes and achieve a greater reproductive success for their genes (and indirectly for their mother genes) than the sons of the gentle fathers. Hence how women's "mate preference" might have evolved.
Of course we no longer live in the Africa Savanna, but many women, even accomplished professional women instinctively look for brutal men. One solution is for the women to reexamine their preference for mates and try mating with nice guys thus increasing the market for nice guys and shifting sexual selection forces. Another solution is for men who feel even a slight attraction for other men, to start gentle gay relationship rather than remain in a brutal straight one. With time perhaps we can identify more genetic (and social) factors that lead boy to be brutal and girls to prefer brutal boys and change them.
Very informative book 2008-04-20
Really made me think about the differences in boys and girls. Very informative. Bought one to be passed around among my teacher friends.
Not Just About Boys 2007-08-20
As the sister of six brothers and the mother of two boys, I found myself agreeing with the author on many fronts.
What the author calls "The Boy Code" is what Steven Covey would probably call using efficiency rather than effectiveness as a goal in raising males. The problem is that efficiency leaves the boy with a limited arsenal when it comes to understanding and taking responsibility for his own emotional life. It certainly leaves the boy with limited resources when it comes to understanding or helping others who are wrestling with problems in their own inner life. The lie of "The Boy Code" is that recognizing one's own "negative" emotions is a self-indulgence that simply makes a person weak, a weakness that is permissible in famales, but not in males. Nothing could be further from the truth.
We don't do our boys any favors by teaching them to ignore their own emotions. We also do them a disservice if we let the expectations learned from females dictate what kind of emotional life we expect of males. I know men who live by what this book is espousing. They aren't "wimps", as some reviewers have implied that boys raised in this way will be. They are adults who understand their own emotions well enough to not be unknowingly ruled by them. They know when they are angry, they can admit when they feel fear, and they know how to choose to act under those circumstances, rather than simply reacting, which is what people who refuse to acknowledge their own inner life tend to do. They are certainly not men who expect themselves to experience emotion in the same way as their wives or other women in their lives do, nor do they feel some authority to dictate emotional taboos to other men. They process their emotions in their own ways, they let others do the same, and they don't apologize for it.
I wouldn't, however, limit the observations in this book to boys. There are women and girls who, for whatever reason, have learned to live by what the author calls "The Boy Code." There are men who don't process their emotions as this book implies that men raised in earlier decades will. For that reason, I would caution that the reader not presume after reading this book that he or she now "understands men." The book gives tools for understanding others and helping them to understand themselves, and points out some ineffective but "efficient" ways that people often use in dealing with strong emotion. Knowing these common human patterns isn't a substitute for paying attention to the actions and emotional style of the person you're actually dealing with.
The reviewers who complain that the book takes a great many pages to repeat the same story over and over have a point. A reader who does not want or need so many examples to get the author's point won't lose much by simply skimming the book after the first 100-200 pages or so.
Author wants boys to be "nurtured" to be wimps and sissies ! 
2007-08-12
In a nutshell,(which is where this book belongs), the "author" wants boys to be wimps and sissies. The fact that a major New York publisher would print such nonsense pretty well proves that Communism is not dead, but like a snake has simply changed it's skin; AKA Social Marxism. Had William S. Pollack been around in 1776, his advise to Patrick Henry would no doubt have been to "let it all out" and cry about it, and counselling for the depression.
The fact that you can buy this book for a mear penny pretty much says it all.
Few people who have actually owned and read the book feel any need to keep it on their bookshelves. Mine is now going in the trash. As an antdote to this nonsense, I recomend "THE WAR AGAINST BOYS" by Christina Sommers, also sold bt Amazon.
this book is boring 2007-06-19
It took so much effort to get through this book, and I'm not even sure why I read the whole thing--I must have been really bored. If you want to read a book full of stories about wealthy teenage boys who can't decide which ivy league school to attend written by a man who clearly thinks academic achievement is the single most important thing in life, this is the book for you. And most of the stories sound fictional; maybe that's just because Pollack isn't a talented writer.
I gained nothing from this book and I want my money back.
Great balanced account with concrete and practical suggestions 2006-12-07
William Pollack certainly has impressive credentials with respect to writing on this topic. This is apparent from the editorial reviews above. More importantly, he is a good writer who brings the inner life of boys and the challenges they face in our society to life. He provides both an inside view and a worthwhile outside perspective.
One of the repeating themes in the books is that we have contradictory expectations of men (boys) in our contemporary society. For example, on one level we expect men to be strong, tough, etc. At the same time, there is also a tacit expectation that contemporary men embrace the "New Age" ideal of being tender and vulnerable. Dr. Pollack points out that this causes many men to feel conflicted and often reduces them to painful silence and often isolation.
While Dr. Pollack covers the inside life of boys, he also does an admirable job of citing relevant statistics on how boys performance is slipping academically and other useful objective sociological data. He covers this issue from every angle and goes beyond diagnosing the problems to making concrete suggestions for parents, schools and society at large.
This book is a valuable addition to the literature on boys and the challenges they face. It is definitely a must own book for anyone who is raising a boy along with "Parenting from the Inside Out" by Daniel Siegel which is great for any parent.
