Saving Our Sons: A New Path for Raising Healthy and Resilient Boys

Raising boys today can be a joyful experience at times but immensely difficult at others. Boys, families, schools, and communities are challenged in the new millennium in ways they have not been before. Technology, medication, food, nutrition, schooling, family, peer groups, and broader social and health systems can be part of the solution, or sources of significant male distress. Many boys are becoming lost in listlessness, under-achievement, violence, and self-destruction.

Dr. Michael Gurian has studied and served boys and their families for thirty years. His The Wonder of Boys (1996) is credited with sparking the “boys’ movement.” In Saving Our Sons, he features the latest research in male emotional intelligence, male motivation development, neurotoxicity and the male brain, and the positive effect the burgeoning science of epigenetics can have on the raising of a boy. Science, he shows, can be an amazing ally in setting a new path for raising healthy boys. In looking at everything from under-motivation to electronic use, he covers nearly every question parents of sons are asking today.

The book also provides Gurian’s seven stage road map for raising boys from birth to 25. On this road map is a call to action—for a grass-roots effort to advocate for the survival and thriving of boys. Gurian’s own advocacy spans academics, the media, Congress, the United Nations, and the White House. Linking practical solutions with practical politics, Gurian provides readers with ways to challenge governmental and academic institutions as well as the media to see boys and males fully and fairly.

At stake is the survival and thriving not only of our boys but of girls, women, and men. The unique combination of new research, practical help for parents, and advocacy language makes Saving Our Sons an instant classic, and a very powerful tool for boys’ health across the life-span.

"Michael Gurian's Saving Our Sons is an immensely powerful mirror on the state of boyhood in America. Dr. Gurian's depiction of the problems and issues facing our sons is remarkable in its thoroughness. The book's tone is forceful but not strident, warm and engaging without sentimentality or hyperbole. Gurian provides practical solutions for each issue he explores—economic, social, political, emotional, and personal. This is a must read for everyone in America and indeed the world who cares about and is caring for boys." —Troy Kemp, Executive Director of The National Center for the Development of Boys