A One-Day Event for Parents and Professionals Who Are Raising, Educating, and Working with Boys and Young Men.
Helping Boys Thrive Summit®
Parents and professionals today can sense the hunger in boys for innovative parenting and effective education. In nearly every academic and behavioral marker, boys and young men are struggling. While some males get to the top of corporations and government quite well, millions of males are not thriving. In your own community, you may have felt a need to study and positively affect the developmental journey of our boys. In every community, we are seeing more and more boys who need our help, and want us to engage with them in successful ways.
The Helping Boys Thrive Summit® is a one day event that brings together professionals, parents, educators, and community stakeholders in just this task. The summit is a positive, life-affirming, science-based, and practically focused professional development and networking event. This may be the first of its kind in your community, one that brings together a national pioneer in the field of boys’ development with local pioneers in helping boys, young men, and families.
Questions the Summit Can Answer
If these kinds of questions are being asked in your community, this summit might be just the right vehicle for growth and social change:
- What do boys need and how are boys needed in their world?
- Why are boys falling behind in so many aspects of life, including school?
- What is normal development of a boy from infancy to college age?
- How can we best protect the emotional lives of boys and young men?
- What do boys specifically need from moms and dads as they develop?
- What do boys need from grandparents and other mentors?
- What do boys need from their faith communities?
- How do screen time, Smart Phones, and video games affect the male brain?
- How do we best deal with bullying and most effectively end male violence?
- What are the best ways for counselors and therapists to work with males?
- What rites of passage are needed for boys?
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At the Summit, we also look carefully at what masculinity is and needs to be, including the dual contemporary needs for our culture to expand its understanding of individual masculinity while protecting the essential masculine for boys. Both the expansion and protection needs a balanced society between women and men.
Jim Ellis, of Legacy Productions, sums up this concept in a longer piece we have paraphrased here. “There is a place within boys and men where they can embrace their solid, confident, steady-rock nature of the masculine. It’s a fact of nature: primal, unnerving, unbending, resilient. It is a gift that family, friends and cohorts can trust, one in which they can find solace and strength themselves.
In this context, ‘toughening up’ and ‘manning up’ make sense. Masculinity is good, it is rich and important, it is survival and thriving for all of us.
However, to reach this level of inner strength, boys and men also need a place they can go to surrender into need, vulnerability, and depth of expression. They need their own safe rock that they can approach and rely on in the world. Today, many men attempt to have the solid masculinity without humbling themselves to the place and time of vulnerability. They feel safe to assert the former but not the latter.”
At the Helping Boys Thrive Summit, we take an expanded and balanced view of masculinity, respecting it and the need for empowered manhood, but understanding its dance inside boys. During this learning day, we help adults help boys to become men of purpose, character, love, and service–the four goals of the masculine journey–with an understanding of humility and the need for emotional safety in our boys and men.
Who Could Attend Your Summit
This summit is for parents, teachers, counselors, therapists, medical professionals, grandparents, law enforcement and corrections workers, youth service providers, early childhood providers, mentors, ministers and other faith professionals, and policy makers. Some breakout sessions are targeted toward professionals and some to parents. All sessions provide evidence-based practical strategies that can be used tomorrow in homes, offices, schools, and other environments.
Celebrating Boys
While the need for the summit grows, the founders believe, from disturbing trends in the social development of boys today, the summit itself can also be a celebration of the vitality and uniqueness of boys and young men. This is a day to focus on boys’ development and enjoy boy energy and the resilience and vision of our boys and young men.
The founders of the Helping Boys Thrive Summit® are asking you to focus the program on boys, but we believe this work is not just about boys—it is also about girls. We we are now in an era in which girls’ and women’s rights will not move to their next level of social success until we solve the issues boys face. Michael Gurian, the father of two daughters, recently noted, “Our genders are utterly interdependent and the disturbing loss of our males is beginning to significantly harm our females as well.”
If you can organize a Summit, or know an agency or group that can, please contact the Gurian Institute via Dr. Michael Gurian (michaelgurian@comcast.net) or Gail Reid-Gurian (gail@gurianinstitute.com). Our GI team can work out details with you. The Institute has the organizational plans, press releases, flyers, other needed materials, and mentoring structure available to you for a successful summit.
Dr. Michael Gurian
Co-founder of Helping Boys Thrive Summit®
Michael Gurian is the New York Times bestselling author of thirty two books published in twenty three languages. The Gurian Institute, which he co-founded, conducts research internationally, launches pilot programs and trains professionals. As a social philosopher and family counselor, Gurian has pioneered efforts to bring neuro-biology and brain research into homes, schools, corporations, and public policy. A number of his books have sparked national debate, including THE MINDS OF BOYS, THE WONDER OF GIRLS, SAVING OUR SONS, BOYS AND GIRLS LEARN DIFFERENTLY, and LEADERSHIP AND THE SEXES. His book THE WONDER OF BOYS is credited with sparking the Boys Movement (USA Today).
One of the world’s foremost gender experts, Gurian provides keynotes and consulting, and his work has been featured in professional journals and major media, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Forbes Magazine, Time, Educational Leadership, Newsweek, the Today Show, Good Morning America, CNN, PBS, and National Public Radio. He has been called “the people’s philosopher” for his ability to bring together scientific principles and people’s everyday lives.
Gurian is one of the lead authors of a meta-study you can access on the worldwide web (click www.whitehouseboysmen.org then “Proposal”). Gurian and a number of thought leaders in male development wrote the study in order to celebrate boys and alert policymakers to issues they face today.
“Michael Gurian is America’s most passionate advocate for boys.”
–Michael Thompson, Ph.D., author of It’s a Boy!, and co-author of Raising Cain
“There is no one who understands the development of boys better than Michael Gurian.”
–William Damon, Ph.D., professor of Education, Stanford University, and author of The Moral Child
“Michael Gurian’s work in gender is at the leading edge of our profession and can significantly affect the field of psychology.”
–Tracey J. Shors, Ph.D., Department of Psychology, Center for Collaborative Neuroscience, Rutger’s University
“Michael Gurian provides invaluable insight into how understanding our children’s unique core natures can help us raise happy, successful, and emotionally fulfilled children.”
–Harold S. Koplewicz, M.D., Former Chair, Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, New York University School of Medicine, and founder/director of the Child Mind Institute
Books
Helping Boys Thrive | Helping Boys Thrive Summit®