Michael Gurian > Quotes

“As Carl Jung once said, 'When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate.' When our boys become adults, we become their inner situation. We become inner voices they often hear in their work, relationships and spiritual practice.”
― Michael Gurian

“The quickest way to create a boy or man who lacks compassion is to judge and shame his feelings.”
― Michael Gurian, The Wonder of Boys: What Parents, Mentors and Educators Can Do to Shape Boys into Exceptional Men

“The boy and the man must be raised to see the possibility of self worth, then meet a few others who provide the vision of a road toward it, then spend a lifetime pursing that worth through action and relationship. One of the great tragedies in human life is to be born a male and not be guided toward the value of a man.”
― Michael Gurian, The Good Son: Shaping the Moral Development of Our Boys and Young Men

“Boys need to learn the value of spiritual solitude. For the soul to grow, it needs those moments of no-stimulation, of wakeful peace. Because we adults don't usually practice enough solitude—because we are always 'doing' things—we often neglect to teach our boys to find solitude”
― Michael Gurian, The Wonder of Boys: What Parents, Mentors and Educators Can Do to Shape Boys into Exceptional Men

“Teacher cannot solve or heal all student stress. The teacher can be vigilant in trying to guide the child toward solutions;but the teacher's job in relation to this stress is ultimately to help the child learn to manage his or her own stress wisely. In accomplishing this, the teacher mentors higher academic learning by removing distracting stress, and teaches valuable life-survival skills.”
― Michael Gurian, Boys and Girls Learn Differently!: A Guide for Teachers and Parents

“A great deal of intellectual intelligence depends on emotional intelligence.”
― Michael Gurian, Boys and Girls Learn Differently!: A Guide for Teachers and Parents

“Adolescent youths cry out for us to help them contextualize their life experiences.”
― Michael Gurian, The Wonder of Boys: What Parents, Mentors and Educators Can Do to Shape Boys into Exceptional Men

“Boys often need us to give them more time than girls need, and they often need us to connect their feelings to objects in the outside world.”
― Michael Gurian, The Wonder of Boys: What Parents, Mentors and Educators Can Do to Shape Boys into Exceptional Men

“Frequently I go to conferences and listen to speakers decry the absent father as somehow a new phenomenon. Though their recriminations against absent or emotionally distant fathers are generally meant to help society, at the same time they are built on a lie that evolution disproves generation after generation. Fathers have often gone to war, or the long hunt on the savannah, or to work in another village or city. But only in the last decade or so have manhood and fathering been trashed completely.”
― Michael Gurian, The Wonder of Boys: What Parents, Mentors and Educators Can Do to Shape Boys into Exceptional Men

“Working outward in concentric circles from the single mother's situation, we can easily draw a picture of what a 'good' mother-son relationship needs in order to flourish. In its ideal form, mom would be experiencing physical, material, social, and emotional support from four interdependent sources: an intimate partner who is also attached to the child; a select group of close friends and family; a wider community that supports mom's values and goals; and a maternity-flexible workplace.”
― Michael Gurian, The Wonder of Boys: What Parents, Mentors and Educators Can Do to Shape Boys into Exceptional Men

“Few things give a human being as much spiritual depth as relationship. If we teach effective communication and conflict-resolution skills to our boys from early on, we lay a foundation for spiritual groundedness. This means we must communicate effectively and resolve conflicts with them as much as possible. By our modeling and teaching, they'll gain the skill to go nearly anywhere and relate effectively, with appropriate boundaries, with good skills, and also with an ability to not take it personally when things go wrong.”
― Michael Gurian

“Boys must find ways to compete and see themselves as performing well. If they do not, if society does not provide them with these opportunities, they'll compete against society itself, abusing their community and themselves.”
― Michael Gurian, The Wonder of Boys: What Parents, Mentors and Educators Can Do to Shape Boys into Exceptional Men

“The culture in which you parent, mentor, or educate boys exhorts them to be individualistic and group-oriented at once, but does not give them a tribal structure in which to accomplish both in balance. It used to be that the tribe formed a boy's character while the peer group existed primarily to test and befriend that character. Nowadays, boys' characters are often formed in the peer group. Mentors and intimate role models rarely exist to show the growing boy in any long-term and consistent way how both to serve a group and flourish as an independent self.”
― Michael Gurian, The Wonder of Boys: What Parents, Mentors and Educators Can Do to Shape Boys into Exceptional Men

“As our lives speed up more and more, so do our children's. We forget and thus they forget that there is nothing more important than the present moment. We forget and thus they forget to relax, to find spiritual solitude, to let go of the past, to quiet ambition, to fully enjoy the eating of a strawberry, the scent of a rose, the touch of a hand on a cheek...”
― Michael Gurian, The Wonder of Boys: What Parents, Mentors and Educators Can Do to Shape Boys into Exceptional Men

“In reality, human nature hardwires gender into our brains in three biological stages. The first stage has been clarified by genetics research, the second by endocrinological research, and the third by psychosocial research .7”
― Michael Gurian, The Minds of Boys: Saving Our Sons From Falling Behind in School and Life

“We are, in large part, a culture that expects its boys to initiate themselves into manhood. But holistic or even minimal initiation into manhood through relatively unguided self-experimentation is rare. Boys cannot become whole men without men and women making them into men. ”
― Michael Gurian, The Wonder of Boys: What Parents, Mentors and Educators Can Do to Shape Boys into Exceptional Men

“Females tend to spend more time talking in order to bond; for them, language is a way of establishing connections and relationships; men spend more time talking in order to report events, and position themselves within the events.”
― Michael Gurian, The Wonder of Girls: Understanding the Hidden Nature of Our Daughters

“Blame is like ice-it freezes an issue without changing it.”
― Michael Gurian, The Minds of Boys: Saving Our Sons From Falling Behind in School and Life

“we must absolutely deepen our understanding of male development—and alter the limited paradigms we use—right away. To keep saying that “masculinity” causes violence is to specifically not study epidemiological and toxicological causation for violence, and thus, perpetuate a cycle of violence and distress into the next generation.”
― Michael Gurian, Saving Our Sons: A New Path for Raising Healthy and Resilient Boys

“The thing most of them had in common was that a woman could argue she felt uncomfortable as a potential victim of masculinity. Yet feeling uncomfortable is not dangerous. “Feeling discomfort” is not hostile but in most cases, it is a positive challenge to the psyche, a method of self-appraisal, an invitation to civil argument, and a part of the maturation process of human beings.”
― Michael Gurian, Saving Our Sons: A New Path for Raising Healthy and Resilient Boys

“Society has the choice of whether to fight our natural and inherited abilities or channel them effectively. When we use the common sense of nature in our upbringing of boys, we work with boys not against them, and give them the love, structure, discipline, and wisdom they, as boys, need. When we accomplish this, we don’t create more random violence, we ensure less of it; we don’t make boys into men who victimize women, we ensure less victimization of women. In our lives as parents, mentors, and educators, we stop feeling as if we’re fighting against boys and masculinity; we start realizing how to work with boys and maleness. Consequently, our homes, schools, streets, and bedrooms start looking very different.”
― Michael Gurian, Saving Our Sons: A New Path for Raising Healthy and Resilient Boys

“What is intuitive to most parents was clarified by biological research: families matter. In the last two decades, scientists in the area of attachment research have shown just how dependent children are on the parents and close extended family for life success.”
― Michael Gurian, The Minds of Boys: Saving Our Sons From Falling Behind in School and Life

“Popular magazines constantly scold men and try to improve males by telling them that, to become emotionally intelligent, they must “just listen to her, validate her, give her emotional feedback, then talk to her about what you’re feeling.” This is fine advice, up to a point. Everyone can become a better listener and every relationship needs better listening. But the admonishments against problem solving are just like those against painful competition in schools—they push the definition of emotional intelligence almost exclusively towards FEI.”
― Michael Gurian, Saving Our Sons: A New Path for Raising Healthy and Resilient Boys

“we must come to realize that once we have kids, individualism is impractical and self-defeating.”
― Michael Gurian, The Wonder of Boys: What Parents, Mentors and Educators Can Do...

“Boys, dominated by testosterone, often feel compelled to gain independence earlier than girls, but only when they feel safe and confident that they are not losing a parent’s love. If a parent misunderstands this equation—holds onto the boy longer than he wants to be emotionally controlled; or disrupts his sense of safety through a circumstance like divorce—his natural and very testosterone-controlled urge to separate and force himself into the world is disrupted.”
― Michael Gurian, The Wonder of Boys: What Parents, Mentors and Educators Can Do...

“healthy children—both boys and girls—come, with highest statistical probability, from three-family systems:”
― Michael Gurian, The Wonder of Girls: Understanding the Hidden Nature of Our Daughters

“For a man, graceful love is immensely difficult, and nearly impossible, if his relationship with his mother is not fully understood.”
― Michael Gurian, The Invisible Presence: How a Man's Relationship with His Mother Affects All His Relationships with Women

“men’s brains naturally go into a rest state more than women’s brains do. Women’s brains don’t rest or deactivate the way men’s brains do.”
― Michael Gurian, Leadership and the Sexes: Using Gender Science to Create Success in Business

“few things subvert true gender equality in the workplace more than a micro-aggressions mentality that condemns normal male behavior and “rescues” a particular young woman even when she hasn’t been harmed. Resentment follows among most males and even many females, and productivity declines.”
― Michael Gurian, Saving Our Sons: A New Path for Raising Healthy and Resilient Boys

“The three times rule is: let’s direct and correct the child each time he is too impulsive, but don’t punish him until the third time. The exception to this rule is, of course, if he is being violent or dangerous. When people punish boys for their first impulse rather than guiding them into a three times format, they are generally penalizing males unfairly for utilizing MEI to learn who to be and who to become.”
― Michael Gurian, Saving Our Sons: A New Path for Raising Healthy and Resilient Boys