Michael Gurian Quotes & Sayings

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

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

Neuroligacally, human beings haven't caught up with today's overstimulating environment. Getting kids out in nature can make a difference. — Michael Gurian

If we create a generation of men who aren't getting an education, that's bad for women. — Michael Gurian

Classrooms keep getting set up more and more around the verbal and less around the kinesthetic and active. They are increasingly becoming environments that favour the girls' brain. — Michael Gurian

A lot of women will be sort of 'competitive like a guy' in the workplace, but then when they go home, they realize that's not fully authentic for them. They would like to have a more expansive or more authentic relationship in the workplace around competition. — Michael Gurian

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

If Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer were alive today, we'd say they had ADD or a conduct disorder. They [boys] are who they are, and we need to love them for who they are. Let's not try to rewire them. — Michael Gurian

Most teachers are not trained in how boys and girls learn differently. — Michael Gurian

Making fun of guys to get them to perform and prove themselves, that's always going to exist. But we have to equally celebrate them and empower them. — Michael Gurian

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

Our youth want less adult contact if that co ntacttreats them like boys. They want more adult contact that treats them like young men. Tired as they are of the former, they are hungry for the latter — Michael Gurian

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

There is a great suspicion of saying that anyone, especially a child, is 'the product of destiny,' or 'formed by fate,' or 'predestined for a certain life.' I am suspicious, too, of efforts to cage children or adults in preconceived ideas of who they are or should be. — Michael Gurian

I don't think anyone disagrees that male and female brains work differently. — Michael Gurian

If we want boys to succeed, we need to bring them back to education by making education relevant to them and bring in more service learning and vocational education. — Michael Gurian

A mother's job ... is very much to hold back the coming of manhood. — Michael Gurian

The quickest way to create a boy or man who lacks compassion is to judge and shame his feelings. — Michael Gurian

Our contemporary society is experimenting with the diminishment of caregivers for children. Some children are raised through crucial stages of life by only one person. This one person, who strives to give the best, may be overwhelmed, busy, trying to raise many children. And even in homes with two parents, many children are essentially alone. — Michael Gurian

There is no single way to educate. — Michael Gurian

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

Jed Diamond is, quite simply, one of the wisest men writing today on the topic of male emotional and physical health. — Michael Gurian

A great deal of intellectual intelligence depends on emotional intelligence. — 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

Father's Day is hopefully a time when the culture says, 'This is our moment to look at who our men and boys are.' — Michael Gurian

Boys get unfairly labeled as morally defective, hyperactive, undisciplined, or 'problem children,' when quite often the problem is not with the boys but with the families, extended families, or social environments, which do not understand their specific needs as human beings and as boys — Michael Gurian

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

All over the world when you test men and women for facial cue recognition, women test ... better. It's a negotiation tool. — Michael Gurian

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

Without fathers you would have no civilization. — Michael Gurian

We expect him to take up a lot of space in his gangly experiments with life, and we teach him, through task, work, game, activity, and experience how to use that space. Above all, we give him mentoring and supervision that respects and teaches his gifts, his visions, even his shadowy inner demons — Michael Gurian

Soul development depends on attachment and bonding. Every brain and body is genetically wired to develop itself, but the full soul development of brain and body depends on each child receiving the care of between two and five completely bonded caregivers. — Michael Gurian

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

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 human community and individual people are more likely to hurt or undernourish children they think of as 'bodies' to be used. Cultures and people are more likely to raise children to be mere economic interns rather than fully developed humans if they see children as 'bodies' to be forced into certain economic and social molds. — Michael Gurian

Adolescent youths cry out for us to help them contextualize their life experiences. — Michael Gurian

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