E-mail a friendMalina Saval
airdate July 3, 2009
Malina Saval's work has appeared in numerous publications, including Variety and LA Weekly, where her new book, The Secret Lives of Boys, appeared first as a cover story. A Boston native, Saval attended Cornel University and spent her junior year at Hebrew University in Israel. She also interned with the Jerusalem Post. She's worked as a screenwriter, journalist and teacher and spearheaded creative writing and social action elective classes at several Los Angeles-area community colleges and Hebrew schools.
The Secret Lives of Boys author describes her experience studying an African American teenage father who was trying to be a good dad. (1:50)
Full interview. (13:21)
Malina Saval
Tavis: Malina Saval is a writer whose work has appeared the Los Angeles Times, the Jerusalem Post and Variety. Her critically acclaimed new book is called The Secret Lives of Boys: Inside the Raw Emotional World of Male Teens. Malina, nice to have you on the program.
Malina Saval: Thank you so much for having me.
Tavis: Let me start with the obvious. What is the secret life of boys?
Saval: Well, the secrets range from everything from -- I met boys who had venereal diseases that their parents didn't know about. I met boys who were applying to colleges that their parents didn't know about because their parents had their own plan for these boys that they go to a certain school and, on their own, they were applying to different schools. I had boys who were spending nights at various friend's houses that their parents didn't know about.
Then there were just a lot of secrets that were a lot more nuance. Emotional secrets, passions they might have had about art, favorite films. You know, just resentment that was inside of them that they never really shared with their parents. So it ran the gamut from the shocking to just things that were really close to the chest that the boys just didn't feel comfortable sharing with their parents.
Tavis: Are boys emotional?
Saval: Boys are incredibly emotional. In fact, if you don't think they're emotional, you've never spent any time around boys. Boys are incredibly emotional. I mean, they talk, they emote, they have so much to say and share. They're passionate, they're compassionate, they're interested. You know, they talked for hours and hours to the point where sometimes I had to tell them that, okay, we're running out of time. We'll come back to this.
I mean, that boys aren't emotional is actually what I find fascinating, that idea that boys don't have anything to say and they've got nothing going on inside of them, that they're these paralyzed creatures that have nothing to share. It's absolutely not true. Boys have so much to say and share.
Tavis: To your point now, this book is -- this is my phrase and not yours -- this book is really a push-back on the notion that you suggest now, that the world of boys and ultimately the future of the country is going to hell in a hand-basket because these boys today just can't get it together and particularly if you start talking about boys in particular communities of color, my own included, give me the top line of the argument that does push back on that notion.
Saval: Well, I tried to debunk a lot of the stereotypes across the board. You know, you mentioned minority teens, African American teens. For example, there's one chapter called The Teenage Dad. I went into this book thinking wouldn't it be wonderful to get a white middle-class teen who'd become a father? I couldn't get one not because they don't exist, but because those teens and their parents were more reluctant to go on the record.
What I found, I ended up interviewing and spending a lot of time with a teenage dad who is African American. For him -- these are quote-unquote. I'm paraphrasing, but he said, "It's not as much of a big deal to be a teenager and have a child in my community as it is in other communities."
But how I debunked stereotypes about this particular boy was that, when you think of a teenage dad, you think of an absentee dad, you think of a drug dealer dad, you think of a dad who doesn't want anything to do with his child, who's just out of the picture and doesn't even want to make an effort to be close to the baby's mother.
This particular teen was trying in so many ways to become the dad that he never had. There was so much love that he had for his child and that was something that's not in the statistics about teenage dads.
Just the fact that he was doing everything to get his own life together and work really hard to not make the same mistakes his father had and also mistakes that he had made earlier on in his life. So that's just one example of how I wanted to debunk certain stereotypes about boys of different race and color.
Tavis: Aside from what you've already told us, Malina, which is that, for this particular book, The Secret Life of Boys, you could get a Black teenage father to go on the record, but the families of these white teenage fathers did not want them to go on the record.
Beyond that, what's the difference between how the white teenage fathers handled their responsibility? How they deal with the fact that they'd made some girl pregnant compared to -- again, this over-generalization -- but inside of Black America, what's the difference between the two communities?
Saval: Well, I met a couple of white teenage dads who didn't go on the record, but what I noticed is that their decision to have the child was met with a lot more opposition than it was for this particular teen with his parents.
This teen in the book -- and the chapter is called The Teenage Dad, and his name is Tyrone in the book -- his parents had had him at a young age versus a couple of other kids that I met who were teenage fathers. Their parents were professional and they had waited until they got out of school before they had him. So their frame of reference was completely different.
You know, across the board, getting these parents to cooperate was incredibly difficult regardless of race and a lot of respects regardless of culture or socioeconomics because the parents really wanted to make sure I didn't have a certain agenda and I was gonna box their kid in a particular --
Tavis: -- just nature. They wanted to protect their children.
Saval: Right, exactly. So that was difficult trying to persuade these parents that really I was just a curious journalist and was so interested in what these teens had to say and give them an opportunity to voice what was going on in their worlds.
Tavis: When you say that the white teenage fathers you talked to that, in some instances, their parents were pushing for an alternative, does that mean they were pushing for adoption, they were pushing for the kid to talk the mother into aborting the child, number one? And number two, how did the teenage father deal with what his parents were encouraging him to pursue as an option?
Saval: Yes and yes. They were encouraging them both -- again, with no names -- they were encouraging them in one example to have an abortion and, in another example, to adopt.
Tavis: How did the boys handle that?
Saval: Well, one of the boys absolutely said no because I want to take responsibility. I think probably the gut reaction of someone hearing about a teenager who gets a girl pregnant, the first response would be no, I don't want to have it, you know, get rid of it. But actually this teen said no. I'm gonna take responsibility. This is something that I did and I want to be there for my child.
The parents, of course, you know, swept down with a heavy dose of reality and said you don't know how difficult this is going to be. But also when you're a teenager, you know, I don't think it's uncommon for people to know that teenagers can be stubborn and they can be, you know, very steadfast and resolute and really want to show their parents that they can do it and they want to prove it to other people. So they had a determination, I think, that really trumped any sort of reality that they had not yet come to discover.
Tavis: For the last few minutes, we've been talking about what fascinated me about, you know, these teenage boys where this particular issue is concerned about fatherhood. But the book is about so much more than just, you know, teenage boys getting girls pregnant.
Saval: Yeah.
Tavis: There are three categories that you put boys in and I want to let you top-line at least three I pulled out.
Saval: There's three of ten, yeah.
Tavis: There's three of ten. I want to pull out three of ten that you talk about. In no particular order, the mini adult.
Saval: Mini adult. He's fantastic.
Tavis: Yeah, explain that.
Saval: The mini adult is a kid who is just old before his time. He has an old soul. He has trouble fitting in with kids his own age and he has trouble fitting in with adults because physically he's very much a child. This particular boy was bullied in school which is a big problem among teens at school and he never quite fit in. He was struggling to get a 4.0 and just wouldn't stop at anything less than perfection.
It really weighed on him and even he admitted that, at some point, it was gonna wear down on him and he was gonna feel the results of never really having had a childhood. He just pushed himself far more and far -- he pushed himself harder than even his parents. He put all the pressure on himself which I thought was really interesting because you hear so much in our culture about parents pushing their kids.
This was an example of a kid who really just -- unless he was perfect in school grade-wise and GPA and he was already focused on career at an age -- you know, he was 13 when we first started speaking. He was always focused on a career where he would make a lot of money and he could support a family.
He had all these heavy issues weighing on him that, at an age where he, you know, maybe should be focusing more on just playing Little League baseball or just relaxing. He had a really difficult time just unwinding and being a kid, so he fancied himself an adult in a very emotional capacity.
Tavis: Another one of these three of ten categories of boys, the troublemaker.
Saval: The troublemaker. He was one of my favorites because he was challenging. He called himself a troublemaker. I want to point out that the chapter had - the boys devised them on their own. They were not anything that --
Tavis: -- you made up.
Saval: I came up with because I wanted to give them a chance to define themselves. In some respects, they're ironic and self-reflective or reflective of how society views them.
The troublemaker is a kid who everyone assumed was a troublemaker because he had a lot of issues where you could point to and say, oh, he must be doing drugs; oh, he must be a bad kid. He actually had a lot of undiagnosed psychological and psychiatric problems. He was later diagnosed with oppositional defiant disorder with signs of bipolar disorder.
He'd been so misunderstood and people kept slapping these labels on him of being a troublemaker and saying, oh, you're doing drugs, that after a while, he would just play into their game and say, okay, you want me to be a drug addict? Fine, I'm a drug addict. He would spin all these tales, you know, lies essentially because he couldn't beat them at their own game. So he said, you know what? I'll just play along. Yeah, fine, I've done coke.
He really wasn't a troublemaker, but just actually a really misunderstood kid who was going through a lot and it took a long time before even his parents and the school would really come to terms with what was going on and, you know, give him a second chance, which is very rare.
Tavis: The last of these three for the time we have here now, the sheltered one.
Saval: The sheltered one. He's an interesting character because he is, again, an African American teen and he isn't the quintessential African American teen. I mean, he says that a lot of times he feels like an outcast because, when people conjure up the image of an African American teen in our culture, they think of hot tubs and hip-hop and all these different things.
He was a straight-laced kind of preppy kid. Sometimes he would wear a suit to school. His parents, he was bizarrely sheltered. This is a good kid, you know, "a good kid." He had a lot of aspirations in the way of music and he wanted to be a doctor.
His parents were actually immigrants from the Caribbean. They really were scared of American culture so much that they would not let him out of the house when they were not there. He was on veritable house arrest for a lot of times when they weren't at home. He couldn't leave the house. They were scared something might happen or he might get AIDS or, you know, something crazy would come and derail his entire chances for having a successful career when he grew up.
They were choosing his college where he went. They would not let him go to a district competition for singing. They were depriving him of a lot of the things that normal teenagers really need in order to grow. He couldn't meet his friends outside, you know, after school just to go even a diner to get, you know, a milkshake or anything.
He was bizarrely sheltered. His parents drove him to and from school. They wouldn't let him get a license. They wouldn't let him get an ATM card. I mean, he really was going through a lot. His whole identity was being squelched essentially. Because of that, he had to sneak around a little bit because, in his words, "It's just not fair." He has to have a little bit of freedom.
So it was an instance of the bizarrely sheltering parent who wasn't letting their child even breath. So when we spoke, he was talking to me and telling me things that he never had a chance to express to his parents because, if he did, they would clamp down even harder on his sense of freedom. He was an interesting person.
Tavis: Her name is Malina Saval. The book is called The Secret Life of Boys: Inside the Raw Emotional World of Male Teens, ten different categories. If you got boys or about to have boys as is highly, you might want to get this and see what category your boy's gonna fall into. Again, Malina, nice to have you on the program. All the best.
Saval: Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it. Thank you.
Back to July 3, 2009