Mums urged to take a back seat 

A public servant sacked for speaking her mind is now making waves for giving advice on how to bring up adolescent boys.

Celia Lashlie, a formidable, controversial and consummate story teller with a talent for holding audiences spellbound, has now turned her skills to men's rights.

Lashlie was New Zealand's first female prison officer and spent three and a half years as manager of Christchurch Women's Prison. In May 2000 her contract with Specialist Education Services in Nelson was terminated abruptly when she spoke of a fictitious five-year-old destined to become a killer.

Her latest book, Growing Gorgeous Boys into Good Men, is likely to ruffle feathers again as she describes the challenge of parenting young males.

"About the end of year nine...his eyes lower, and he doesn't look up again. Within a few months every adult he knows has become a loser, a dork or a wanker," says Lashlie.

"Testosterone is moving through his body at the speed of light...blood is flowing down and bugger all of it's coming back up."

Coaxing laughs out of that ultimate parental challenge, the teenage boy, Lashlie uses a mix of tough love and comic timing and she has become a surprise hit with parents up and down the country.

Lashlie understands teenage boys - she has been talking to them for the last two years and she brought up one of her own. Which was going well until "he hit puberty".

"And then an alien invaded his body and my boy went somewhere...I knew he was going to be a good man but was he going to live long enough?  Was he going to wrap himself around a tree in a car and die, or was I going to kill him?"

Now Lashlie is helping other parents get through the experience.

"If you've got a year 10 boy and he looks at you and says 'how come I got the bitch from hell' just give yourself a pat on the back. You're parenting superbly."

Lashlie was motivated by comments about boys being born dumber than girls and by the extra attention they got just for being male. And she is disturbed by the number of young men dying on the roads in their quest for manhood.

In her role as prison governor Lashlie saw what happened when boys went seriously off the rails and it worried her. But she didn't get into the boy business in a serious way until she met Salvi Gargiulo - headmaster of the oldest boys' school in the country, Nelson College.

Gargiulo told Lashlie that what was really needed was a men's revolution and then "he did a really bloke thing. He just looked straight at me and said I don't suppose we could get you to do it for us?"

Over the next 18 months Lashlie interviewed boys, their parents and teachers at 25 boys schools up and down the country and learned about the major differences between girls and boys.

"I'm no educationalist, I'm no teacher...but there is an amazing difference between boys and girls...if they come into this assembly hall at any time, they will be ambling...their bodies follow their necks, and their feet come because they're attached to their ankles... and he's got food in his hand because there's never more than two inches between a teenage boy and food. And he's coming into the hall and he's going to that chair over there and he just keeps walking over whatever's in the way to get to where he's going...right over the top."

It was not a scientific survey but the answers kept coming back the same...women and girls do stuff just because it has to be done...but boys according to Lashlie are pragmatic and driven by a burning question: What's in it for me?

She says boys talk less - they're intuitive and their lingo is a nod, a wink or a shove. She says the difference becomes crucial during the teenage years - what she calls the bridge of adolescence which the boys must cross to reach manhood.

Lashlie says for the boys to cross that bridge they need dad beside them - not mum.

"The hard reality for mothers is, you will delay your son's entrance into manhood if you don't move over on the bridge."

She advises mothers to stop pampering their sons.

"It's mollycoddling, it's making his lunch, it's picking up his clothes off the floor and washing them, it's protecting him against the school rules."

A lot of school principals like Gargiulo report a dramatic increase in parents protesting over what they believe is excessive school discipline.

He says mothers may not enforce the rules that are around and father may just opt out.

Lashlie says she was one of those mothers - constantly ringing the school to tell them what they weren't doing for her boy and that really he was a good boy and they just needed to know that when in reality he "was a little shit a lot of the time".

She says it's not about blame.

"It's about accepting the difference and that is the place we get stuck in."

Lashlie believes women won equality and now they're taking over the world.

"I think that we have not only gone to a place of telling men what to do, but we tell them how to do it and when to do it."

She wants young men to practice decision making before the big issues arise.

"There are some mothers out there who are living with the death of their boys, and part of the reason is that for some of our boys the first serious decision they make is putting their foot on the accelerator as they approach an orange light.

"He will make decisions when he feels it's his decision. You keep making them for him, he is not going to make them. So step back, let him make his lunch, let him feel hunger."

And Lashlie says it's vital to stick with it.

"Pragmatic dads won't step up until they're sure their wives won't interfere. If you let go, and actually just wait and be there for the big stuff we end up with a relationship we were seeking by doing all that stuff anyway. That's the strange thing, we end up with the very thing we started to do this for - he will come to us."