Michael Gurian Quotes

#1. 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

#2. I don't think anyone disagrees that male and female brains work differently.

Michael Gurian

#3. 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

#4. 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

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

Michael Gurian

#6. The quickest way to create a boy or man who lacks compassion is to judge and shame his feelings.

Michael Gurian

#7. 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

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

Michael Gurian

#9. 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

#10. A great deal of intellectual intelligence depends on emotional intelligence.

Michael Gurian

#11. Adolescent youths cry out for us to help them contextualize their life experiences.

Michael Gurian

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. Without fathers you would have no civilization.

Michael Gurian

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. There is no single way to educate.

Michael Gurian

#20. A mother's job ... is very much to hold back the coming of manhood.

Michael Gurian

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

Michael Gurian

#22. 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

#23. 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

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

Michael Gurian

#25. Most teachers are not trained in how boys and girls learn differently.

Michael Gurian

#26. 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

#27. 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

#28. 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