Bad Boys, Bad Boys, Whatcha Gonna Do?

I’ve known many bad boys, and several of them have been my own sons. In fact, I have to admit that most of my boys have been bad boys. Most of my friends’ boys have also been bad boys. And the sons of many of my acquaintances, relatives, and neighbors have been bad boys.

I’ve also taught a number of bad boys.

All these bad boys have taught me to believe that boys are wild and not easily tamed, and that parents and teachers who insist on taming wild, bad boys do so to the chagrin of their future wives, who complain that they’re boring, the marriage tepid, and wish that they had a real man.

My son Reed* had a heart of gold, but he was a strange boy. By the time he could talk, he had an invisible brother named Banjo. Banjo was even more wild and strange than Reed, for in the night time he opened windows, flew out of them, and had adventures that we were told about the following morning. Sometimes Banjo joined us for dinner, but he threw food and ate with his hands.

Though he has an IQ over 180, Reed doesn’t act like it sometimes. He talked about himself (and to himself) in third person for almost two years. Being Christians, we taught our children that stealing was wrong; that they should respect their parents and learn to obey rules. Reed neatly addressed the moral dilemma of wanting ice cream but having it forbidden as a breakfast food by stripping himself naked, getting the ice cream carton out of the freezer, and eating the ice cream straight from the carton. His dialogue went like this one I observed early one morning:

“Can Reed wanna hab some ice cream?”

“Yeah, Reed can wanna hab some ice cream.”

“OK.”

[Ice cream is gotten and eaten.]

“Thanks you, Reed.”

“Youse welcome, Reed.”

“Yeah.”

Reed was a little scientist, always wondering what made things work. He believed that inanimate material was alive, and screamed like a banshee when his hair was cut. He used an Exacto knife to cut open our living room sofas, convinced that a vast and explorable universe lurked inside the cushions, if only he could go there.

Because Reed was home schooled, we looked for ways to socialize our little weirdo, to gentle him and tame him. This did not work, for when enrolled in karate, he persisted in doing all the forms backward, a mirror image of the correct form, and he decried the violence required. My father worried that Reed would be unable to defend himself, he was such a gentle soul, but when Reed was only three and a Wal Mart checker was rude to my mother, Reed piped up and said, “Don’t you talk to my grandma that way! She’s good!“

Reed is all grown up now, but he continues not to fit into the world and to be something of a rolling stone, gathering no moss and able to write prolifically about this. He rejects and loves God, resists every attempt at tethering, but remains powerfully bound to the family.

Another of our sons, Cedar*, was so terrible that in one week he made several elementary school teachers cry and had to be withdrawn from school. This boy would not learn to urinate in the toilet, but reserved the toilet for flushing valuables and, instead, peed into the trashcan. He also was fond of peeing outside, and more than once I went outside to find Reed, Cedar, and a few neighborhood friends balanced precariously on the fence (yes, on the fence) and peeing merrily over it and onto the neighbor’s trumpet vines.

Cedar also had a high IQ and was enrolled in the Gifted and Talented program at school, where he failed because he would not be quiet, would not keep his hands to himself, and persisted in laughing loudly and long over jokes he told himself.

He is loud. He is so loud that he could hire himself out as a bull horn. I have never known anyone so loud, except for Cedar’s birth father, who is also loud and, sadly, rather an unhappy man because nobody cared for his bad boy-ness the way Cedar’s has been cared for and protected.

My other boys were bad boys, too. They never fit in at school or the world, and I’m happy about that. They’re vibrantly alive and they can think. Several might have been labeled, but I didn’t allow that and everyone survived. When the boy without the label became too difficult for the school system, I did something about it rather than risk having my boy disappear into himself.

Among my professional experiences with boys, I have known boys who pooped in their pants until they were six years old, boys who wore their mothers to the bone, boys who cried for hours when they were infants, boys who refused to make eye contact until they were almost adults; boys who obsessively drew on things and on themselves, boys who did death-defying stunts and were repeatedly taken to the hospital; boys who, in adolescence, looked so scary that they made their younger siblings cry; boys who nearly all had invisible friends, most of whom talked funny, many of whom looked funny; all of whom had obsessions and repetetive behaviors and, in this day and age would be diagnosed as being autistic or having some syndrome but were, in fact, simply brilliant and magical and needed to be loved and allowed to simply grow up according to their own timetables and in their own ways.

Nearly every parent of every bad boy I’ve known had to remove that boy from school at some point. No bad boy thrives in public school, and few make it in private schools. These parents had to sacrifice to raise their boys. The few parents I know who wouldn’t or couldn’t make such sacrifices lost their boys in one way or another. All who had bad boys who didn’t fit in, and left them to suffer in whatever system demanded the boys change ended up with grownup bad boys who continued to not fit in. Some spent years in couch-surfing homelessness, searching for their inner lost boys. Some went off into addictions. Others became wanderers. One walked to California from the midwest. Another became an addict and later was born again. Two went into the military and became soldier leaders. A few are still trying to find themselves.

I’m no expert on boys but I do know that many boys do not fit in. Some manage their oddness by becoming leaders; others manage it by being kicked out of school; others are medicated into oblivion. I have friends whose brilliant son reacted to stressors in their family life (stressors created and denied by the parents, but obvious to nearly everyone else) by developing Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). So many times, bright, sensitive boys develop symptoms in response to the environment–a sort of personal early warning system that functions to tell grownups to slow down. Their symptoms are labeled and ignored in the name of Education. Or Medicine. Or Science.

These parents all love their children, but nobody has told them that there are explanations for such behaviors that are not all organic or biological. Not all need drugs and labels. Some might be healed by slowing down, even stopping; others through non-traditional medicines and therapies, such as psychoanalytic work or energy work. What soon becomes clear, though, is that many of the parents of magical, bad boys simply don’t have the time to deal with the garbage. Like the schools and society, they want their boys to stop acting up so that life can be easier and they can get on with doing what they want. Their bad boys are inconvenient and demand energies the parents do not want to invest in them.

I think this is, in fact, one of the central problems for bad boys: the nature of the boy and the nature of the parents, the actual parents and society-as-parent.

It is the problem of parents who set out to have pets but had children instead, of a society that is not in the business of producing or accommodating individuals, for it can do next to nothing to help us individuate. And the priests and artists who might have helped us to individuate have been kicked out of our schools and replaced by mental health professionals who do anything but promote real, lasting mental health.

Art by Wassily Kandinsky.

*Names have been changed to protect the culpable.