As mothers, it's easy to suggest that we need to transform the aggression of our sons into something else, or just wait it out until it expires, but by taking these routes, we are fostering the kind of self-hatred that causes men to suppress rather than sublimate their aggression. And we all know that suppressed emotions cause trouble because they don't go away - they just build until they explode. The original question was, "How can we love the whole boy and still grow peace?" I have two stories to tell and a lesson to teach. Let's get the lesson out of the way first.

The study of human development will show us that the nervous and endocrine systems are the last to fully develop; in fact, there is good evidence that the development of these two systems begins almost at conception and may never end. These two systems are responsible for what we call emotions.

In the embryonic and early fetal stages, emotional reaction is absent because stimuli are absent. As the fetus matures, stimuli become salient - most obviously those associated with crowding, but also biochemical stimuli. By mid-term, then, we see a distinction between arousal and quiescence. Even before birth, the mother can often tell when arousal becomes differentiated into happiness and anger; this distinction is obvious to all shortly after birth, as is the distinction between contentment and sadness.

Young parents are beginning to understand the importance of helping their prelinguistic and early linguistic toddlers to label emotions, but unfortunately, many never get beyond happy and sad. It's as if they would reject the "negative" emotions such as anger, aggression, terror, grief, fear, confusion, and even the more complex "positive" emotions such as eros and agape. Note that these examples fall into both broad categories of arousal and quiescence. Already, long before puberty, we are challenged to accept "the whole child." How to do that should be the main subject area of parenting training rather than just addressing the physical nurturance and protection of the child. In NVC, we call it empathy, and I'm going to tell the two stories below as if I had already had training in empathy instead of as they actually happened.

I have a "grandson" who is not actually related to me, but he was my surrogate grand before my grands were born. He is called by his middle name, so I'll use his first name here. He is a very aggressive boy; he was a content and quiescent infant, but he's been aggressive since he was a toddler. Even his physical expressions of love are aggressive and often cause pain to the recipient. He has a sister who is five years younger, and an incident occurred when he was eight and his sister was three that provides a good lesson in sublimation.

I was reading in the living room when my contentment was shattered by piercing screams from the three-year-old. I ran into the hallway to see Adrian holding his sister to the floor; he had "captured" her under his favorite blanket and wrapped her up tightly. My first concern was for the little girl, who was obviously terrified. "Adrian! Let your sister go! Help her up!"

The next concern was for the follow-up. In another family, Adrian would have been put in time-out or worse. But I've never believed that punishment results in any benefit other than stopping the immediately occurring behavior, so when the little girl returned to equanimity - amazingly quickly; they have a good relationship - I said to Adrian, "Do you love your sister?" "Yes," he answered. "If someone did that to your sister, would you make them stop if you could?" "Yes," he agreed. "Do you think your sister was enjoying being trapped on the floor under your blanket?" "No," he replied. "How do you think she felt?" "Scared," he guessed - correctly, IMHO. "I've got an idea! Let's put on Rusted Root and dance!"

Now, Adrian's idea of dancing would have looked like a temper tantrum if it hadn't been for the ecstatic look on his face. He leapt and stomped and shadow-boxed, and at that time, he was learning a few break-dance moves, so he would repeatedly throw himself to the floor and thrash in his attempts to flip or spin. Wow! And his sister, an accomplished and graceful dancer even at that young age, was simultaneously enjoying her own self-expression and the show Adrian was putting on.

The second incident comes from thirty years ago, and it represents one of those precious moments when a paradigm shift took place in my child right before my eyes, in this case from his career as a bully to a "gentle giant" mentality. I never allowed guns or bombs in my home (much to my parents' dismay!), but certain more mechanical or improvised weapons made their appearance from time to time such as darts or a spear. One day, my six-year-old son was more pensive than his usual demonstrative self. I didn't question him - I just made myself available to him by not being preoccupied with my important-busy life.

Eventually, he hinted at what was troubling him by asking, "What can a person do when they did something they feel really really bad about?" "Hmm.... Sometimes, it helps to talk to someone you trust about it." "Can I talk to you?" he asked. "Sure," I said, and gave him my full attention. "What's up?" "I killed a bird," he confessed, regret and fear all over his face.

Here was the choice point, and as a mother, I had microseconds to decide whether to shame him and reject whatever aggressive impulse had led him to do what he did or to somehow try to embrace the whole boy without condoning cruelty to animals. "Wow! Really? How did that happen?" There was no sense trying to mask my own shock, and by allowing myself to express it, I could avoid going to that place of judgment.

Then came the tears. "I didn't mean it! I was practicing with my slingshot, and I aimed at the bird on a branch in the tree, and it fell down dead!" It was clear to me that I didn't need to reject the aggression or punish the behavior - he had already done a more than adequate job of that within himself. Rather, my job as a mother was to help him channel his strength and acuity and sublimate his aggression. But to keep it from being a lecture, I first tended to the human connection. I took him in my arms and said, "I'm glad you told me about it, son."

We wept together for a minute, and then I told a "white" lie. I assured him that the bird gave its life willingly so that he could learn that it is the responsibility of those who are bigger and stronger and more clever to look out for the small, the weak, and the simple. He took that very much to heart and became a champion, a protector. Aggression? Yes, but it was sublimated to athletics and scholarly competition, and he became a leader instead of a tyrant. Thank you, little bird!

The moral of the story is that aggression, like anger, or even ecstasy, is an extreme emotion, but emotions just are - they can never be negative or positive or good or bad. Aggression is indeed more pronounced in the male due to its link to testosterone, but it does not preclude nurturance. Mothers, love the whole boy. Don't just tolerate or endure your sons - embrace them in all their boy-ness.

Editor, propeace.net

Let's not be in too much of a hurry to kill the messenger. There is nothing inherent in a genre of music that requires it to be mysogenistic or racist. It's just that the performance of what I loosely term "hate music" gives aggressive instincts both physical and intellectual expression. To the extent that we can separate the two, aggression can be expressed without doing harm. Like so many other forces of nature, when they are combined, the effect is multiplicative rather than additive.

In order to separate the expression of physical aggression from the expression of intellectual aggression, self-awareness techniques must be practiced among boys/men - ideally among boys, but we've got some catching up to do. You make a valid point about the need for society to embrace male aggression, but that will be the result, not the first step. First, males must embrace their own aggression rather than labeling it "bad" and trying to suppress it. Suppressed aggression goes a long way toward explaining the addiction of many men to violence in the media, in art, in sports, and in bed - to the extent that those are separate domains....

What this would look like in sports is much more emphasis on individual competition where a guy can look good without hurting others or making them look bad. Track and field events, swimming, and skating leap immediately to mind. Team sports where cooperation determines excellence might be a good outlet such as rappelling, spelunking, or sailing. Certain of the martial arts also give ample opportunity for physicality within strictly defined or "ritual" guidelines. Save the intellectual aggression - the "killer" mentality - for the chessboard or other such competitions where physicality is absent.

It's more difficult to sort things out in the other three domains mentioned above because they're not as rule-bound or ritualized. It seems to me that it boils down to marketing. But if men can address the expression of aggression on an intrapersonal level, I think there will be a livelier market for performing arts that celebrate rather than denigrate humanity.

A simple outlet that we often overlook is work - goal-directed physical effort. I learned to hang drywall, and I was assured that swearing at it is absolutely required in order to get a satisfying result. My brother has a story to tell about expressing aggression with an axe and a cherry tree that he had wanted to take out anyway. So much of yardwork or gardening can be used in this way. It's the same with housework. I used to knead bread. Cleaning can be seen as aggression toward dirt. It just might be that the increasingly sedentary nature of our work, from labor-saving devices to desk jobs, has robbed us of an outlet for aggression that was so much a part of life that we didn't realize how aggressive our natures are until our society got so disconnected from male aggression.

Editor, propeace.net

Do you really think that "aggressive rock or hip-hop music" are good outlets for young males? Maybe I'm just too old to make distinctions between rap and hip-hop. Aggresive rock? Like Pantera and Dime Bag Darrell? I associate rap/hip-hop with clownish, infantile clothing and violent, mysogynist lyrics. It seems as if not a month goes by without some rap star getting killed or killing someone.

I'm sure not *all* hip-hop is like this, but it still doens;t seem like a "good outlet" to me.