Masterminds and Wingmen: Helping Our Boys Cope with Schoolyard Power, Locker-Room Tests, Girlfriends, and the New Rules of Boy World

This book touches on the hot topics, taboo topics and the dialogue that parents, teachers, friends can use to re-direct kids onto the path of being successful, creating healthy boundaries, growing healthy self-esteem, celebrating individuality and most importantly making decisions when the pressure is almost too much. This is an EXCELLENT read for any teacher or parent.

We are in a masculinity mess, a time where boys are failing in their education, social and work lives, faced with an array of social and cultural expectations that as parents we have a duty to be aware of and respond to sensitively. This book is an essential read for those parents who want to know better to do better. No matter how old your son is (or interested parents of girls) this book will help make sense of their world, stripping back the hysteria of suspecting our children are deviants or the naivety of imagining them angels. A book to help us hold our boys hands as they grow into men.

An excellent resource for the elementary counselling office! This is a book I keep in my personal library and often recommend to parents.

gift appreciated

This is a very informative book. Delivered very quickly.

This is one of my MOST HIGHLY RECOMMENDED BOOKS.I purchased this book for two reasons. I had read Rosalind Wiseman's other book, Queen Bees and Wannabees, which was ABSOLUTELY SUPERB; and I had a current student (boy) who was being physically bullied at school, and was looking for some new ideas on how to help him.Masterminds and Wingmen was equally good as her first book, and I did find a very small (but adequate) amount in this book (about two or three pages) which dealt with strategies to use when someone is being physically bullied. They were helpful in that I had not thought of them before. It covered IF you need to fight, the issues you really need to be aware of first. It also gave some suggestions toward solving the problem without fighting that I had not thought of before (and I speak as both a parent and a teacher of 30 years' experience). If you are looking for a book specifically on how to deal with boys' problems of physical bullying, I would have liked a LOT more on this subject, but so far, I haven't found any better book. At least what this book touched on was useful.Aside from the question of physical bullying, this book was FANTASTIC. I am a parent, but not of boys. I would recommend this book to any parent, and to EVERY TEACHER. I learned so many things that I had never even thought about.The most surprising chapters for me dealt with every aspect of video games. As a person with zero interest in video games, I learned all about why they are so important to elementary-school and middle-school boys. Several chapters cover every aspect of how boys relate to each other through video games, and how if one understands the characters and ideas in video games, how one can much better understand boys' thinking and mentality (and even married men's thinking and mentality). I now think I will try out a few video games--not because I'm expecting to love them, but because this experience will help me better relate to my young male pupils as a teacher.This book covers many, many different aspects of boys' culture, thinking, and daily dilemmas. It is the perfect book for girls and women to read in order to understand the culture of boys and men.

I read the book because my preteen was telling me very little about his social life. He began creating excuses not to go to school, all the time. He was crying and begging me not to go. I would ask him why or ask him to tell me what was going on... he's such a private, bottled up, quiet boy, however, he shows his emotions through boxing, throwing darts, being destructive, yelling, gaming.... come to find out; he is being bullied, (and has been, for a few months now. My son told me that anything he tried to do to avoid conflict, it wouldn't help) and he's not the only one in his class that is getting bullied, all by the same child. Immediately, I called my son's father, we are divorced, and told him I was calling a meeting with the principle and or vice principal and our son would not be returning to school until a plan for the bully was in place!A very resourceful book!!Written with sensitivity to the issues that young men are facing today and ways that we can help them to become more confident, well rounded, and find their inner strength.I took so many mental notes, plus handwritten reminders for myself, for the upcoming conversations I will soon have with my son. I also wrote the I PROMISE/ HE PROMISES contract out for both my son and I; to discuss and sign.

I cant say enough about this book. If you have a loved one (child, grandchild, nephew) who is a teen/preteen boy, you absolutely MUST read this. If you are a youth pastor or teacher or scout leader of a teen boy, you absolutely MUST read this. I heard about it from a friend, who heard about it through her son's school (in colorado). the school is doing a series of book club/ discussion groups on this book for parents of boys about to enter middle school. I would love to start a similar parent's discussion group at my son's school! If you think preteen and teen "girls are hard" and that "boys are easy" , it is only because we don't know what is going on inside a boy, but their teen years are JUST AS tumultuous as girls. The author points out that she isn't writing this so that you can confront your boy and make him talk about everything in the book; rather, her intent is that you gain an understanding and awareness of your son's world to better support him. Just read it!!! You won't be sorry.

I'm reading this to my son and as we got to the part of self image he started to cry because he could identify with the moobs torment.These comments have left my mini me very hurt and we were able to open a dialog that needed to be.His father died a year ago so I have to play both rolls. I had to tell him he had moobs too "yeah those were from muscles""no he could fill a nice a or b cup, which I didn't mind being on the opposite side. So it comes naturally" I didn't go into deets on lipo and how many men deal with them that way but you get the gist. Reading this with your child, or listening, is ideal.Like "motherless Daughters" was for me I hope to gain insight into being a great wingman.I'm saddened my video would not uploadCTG

Clearly this author has done her research, and she brings clarity of thought to her presentation. There is a lot of excellent perspective both in the subjects chosen and the suggestions given. I am a father and I could feel that she was writing more to a mother, yet that is not problematic for me, the material is strong in itself. A lot of the strength is in the specificity, looking at a particular behavior or situation, and searching out the motivations and how responses by the parent will be seen by the boy.There are many paragraph-long quotations given by boys in response to specific situational questions. They are good for the most part yet some seem to me to be too literate and conceptual to come directly from boys of that age. Without polishing them up.The one glaring absence for me was the failure to feed the boy what he needs to develop in the best way. As an example, empathy for others may be developed or neglected in childhood. And a failure there is of immense importance. To the contrary, the author seems very attuned to viewing the child as a separate being who has needs and merits guidance. But always from the outside. The parent-child interactions are transactional in nature, not developmental.

The book is helpful but the writing is a bit long winded leading me to find the author's point and then flip forward. The author also falls back on abbreviations throughout the book without reminding the reader what the abbreviation stands for. The book would be greatly improved if the author would restate the meaning of abbreviations at least once in each chapter where used, This is especially problematic on a kindle where you can not easily flip back multiple chapters to find the original meaning (e.g. seal , or almb, etc)

Great book, a must read for anyone with an ADD/ADHD son. It provides a better understanding of how he feels and what bothers him; I have a better understanding of how he views the world & its challenges.

As one who has worked in Middle and High Schools or over 40 years, I thought I knew lots about boys. How wrong I was. This exceptionally well-researched and written book takes you inside what really motivates boys and how their social structure dictates what they do and how they respond to both peers and adults. I strongly recommend this book to anyone who has felt frustration in their relationships with boys or simply asked "Why?" As a male, I also enjoyed the insights into why I was such a teenage toad, and how I somehow managed to arrive at adulthood in one reasonable piece. You will have lots of chuckles along the way, some "ah ha" moments, and a better road map as to how to successfully survive the boys in your life.

You can tell the author is a mom with realistic expectations and experiences. I love that she has enlisted the voices of actual teenage boys. She also includes a section on "outsiders" - kids with disabilities that automatically put them on the outside of teen cliques.

I read some of this with my teenager and it was great. he could identify where he and his friends fit into the ideas and it was a great jumping off point for conversations. well-written informative and funny, too.