I have observed that aunts and uncles are critically important to the development of their nieces and nephews into successful family members. Moreover, it is vital to a family's success that the formative roles played by aunts and uncles be acknowledged and supported.

Anthropology reveals that in tribal societies, when a boy or girl is passing through puberty and entering adulthood, often the boy's uncles and the girl's aunts take custody of their repective nephews and nieces to prepare them for their adult roles. These societies, as well as our modern ones, recognize that normal, healthy conflicts exist between parents and children as the children move toward individualization, adulthood, and independence. These conflicts make it unlikely that parents alone can effectively prepare their children to fulfill their adult roles in society. Tribal society intuits that the blood relationships we have with our aunts and uncles—after all, they share equally the original source of our parents' DNA—confer a strong bond that will permit them to successfully mentor us. To take this idea a step further, some biologists and psychologists believe that the impulse and set of behaviors we call altruism is almost as strong between aunts and uncles and their nephews and nieces as between parents and children, because they share a substantial part of one another's gene pools. With this strong biological connection and its assorted psychological realities, it is not surprising that aunts and uncles can be successful mentors to their nieces and nephews.

Looking at the process by which nieces and nephews become adult members of a tribe, we encounter the role of ritual in effecting successful passages from childhood to adulthood. Such rites of passage communicate to the girl or boy the importance of this transformation and ensure that as adults they will be fully ready to assume their duties and responsibilities in tribal life and governance. For the reasons explored above, their mentors through this critical passage to successful adulthood are frequently their aunts and uncles.

In our modern times, it is my experience that rarely are these important changes in the lives of boys and girls recognized as other than purely physical events. To be sure, the women of a family usually give certain advice and some ritual and ceremony to girls as they grow into women. Perhaps it is because women's ways of knowing and teaching serve the female development process better. Girls do seem to become women in the full psychological sense of adulthood more easily and more rapidly than boys become men. What I do know from my own practice, however, and anecdotally from many colleagues, is that I and they have many forty- and fifty-year-old boys as clients. I assure you I am not being jocular about this subject, dismissing it as an amusing quirk, as society does in saying that all men are really little boys inside. Unfortunately, it is my direct experience that our society is producing many males who never become men except in the biological sense.

What, you may ask, is my definition of a man? It is quite simply an adult male who is absolutely prepared to accept accountability for his actions, who is ready to say "I am responsible for my actions no matter what." He is a person who does not blame others for his choices and who does not play the victim. Why, you may ask, should our society, with all we know about the process of human development and its many phases, be failing to produce men and instead be producing eternal boys? I believe much of this problem grows out of our modern society's lack of ritual and even more from the disappearance of the critical roles in maturation that uncles traditionally played.

There is evidence for this view in some of the initiation rituals older societies created. In some cultures, a boy's first ritual kill as a hunter served this process, as did required vision quests. There were also periods of formal segregation from the tribe while being schooled in adult roles and responsibilities by uncles and their equivalents. In certain tribal societies, the boys were buried overnight. The boy's re-entrance and rebirthing the next morning as a man with a new name was an outward sign of his passage to adulthood. In our society, military service, going off to college, sporting activities, and particularly men-only activities under the direction of uncles used to serve a similar purpose. Today, most boys experience none of these events in the way they used to. Going to college and participating in sports are seen not as important rituals meant to carry a boy through the passage to adulthood but rather as opportunities for light play and heavy self-gratification. Even more rarely are such events supervised or conducted by uncles or their equivalents for the purpose of assisting boys through the rights of passage to manhood.

The problem with this trend in our social evolution is that life without ritual does not suit our species. Specifically, it leaves individual members of society without the experiences and tools necessary to understand the process of becoming an adult. I believe many individuals, and boys in particular, would be assisted in moving into adulthood if our society offered, through updated rituals, the exclamation points we need to define the critical passages in the journey.

Johan Huizinga, a noted Dutch historian and philosopher, wrote a book called Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (Beacon Press, 1971). Huizinga's thesis is that the characteristic that most distinguishes our species from all others is our capacity for creative play. Through play, and the consequences of it, we learn and mature. Huizinga's view of play encompasses all activities that engage our curiosity and creativity, activities central, he believes, to how and why we as a species thrive. In many families in earlier times, including mine, some of the best moments of play came with aunts and uncles. I believe I learned more about life in moments of play with my aunts Dorothy, Dorothea, and Margretha than at most other times. Certainly the rewards—the lessons both positive and negative—that I received from these moments remain strongly in my memory. Perhaps it is these special experiences that piqued my curiosity and led to this reflection.

I would be delighted if I could now list the two or three rituals assisted by aunts and uncles that would guarantee all boys and girls a successful passage from childhood to adulthood. As both a caring parent and grandparent and a helping professional, I only wish I knew. Perhaps if girls seem to be achieving greater success in this regard than boys, it will be through studying their process that answers will emerge. I do believe that if aunts and uncles resume their traditional roles, using modern rituals based on Huizinga's remarkable insight on the role of play in our species' success, good results will appear. At a time in our species' history when we must face the extraordinary new questions posed by our exploding global population, we need all members of Homo sapiens to pass successfully to adulthood in order for our species to assume its responsibilities to our planet. These are responsibilities that only initiated adults can undertake.

Whether or not you agree with any of these ideas, I hope you will reacquaint yourself with the significant roles aunts and uncles play in the critical passages of our journeys from childhood to adulthood. I particularly hope you will consider the situation of boys and young men in our society, and in your own way help them to become men. Our society has done extraordinary things in the last thirty years for women, although it has a great deal farther to go. Now let's see if we can do a similar service for men and in the process offer to all members of the human family the opportunity to become individuals capable of the lifelong learning that only mature adults enjoy.

Meanwhile, thanks to each of you who is an aunt or uncle for the rituals you perform, and will perform, in helping your nephews and nieces become adults.