The other day at my son’s hockey game, I watched Tom jockey for position in front of the goal with an opposing defensemen. After rapping each other’s sticks, both were called for penalties. Immediately after the game, while the kids mingled near the stands talking to their parents, Tom’s nemesis approached him, grabbed his helmet’s wire-cage face protector, shook it along with Tom’s head, then walked away. Exercising great restraint, Tom looked at me and shrugged. “You shouldn’t have let him do that to you,” I told Tom as we headed to the locker room. So sue me.

WAS I suggesting Tom retaliate in kind? Yes. He’s a boy with a generous and sensitive heart — hardly a loose cannon that needs constant muzzling. Eager to accept the challenge, he immediately turned to go find the kid, but I called him back. “You should have dealt with it when it happened, done the same thing back,” I said. “No more, no less.”

Was this the right advice? It’s the kind of thing every father worries about, particularly those of us who are actively involved in our kids’ sporting life, where coaches routinely exhort their charges to “be aggressive.” In a world in which political correctness has demonized any displays of aggression, my view is considered hopelessly retrograde and perhaps dangerous. After all, it’s beyond dispute that boys demonstrate far more confrontational behavior than girls and, as adults, are responsible for almost all violent crime. With school shootings on the rise, say the PC police, any kind of aggression must be discouraged.

But is there a relationship between a boy standing up for himself and psychopathology later in life? As most developmental experts point out, violence is not a natural or even common endpoint of aggression. In fact, Jerome Kagan, a developmental psychologist at Harvard, has repeatedly demonstrated in 40 years of research on children that aggressiveness in a young child, properly modulated and socialized, leads to what he calls assertive competence — success — as an adult.

The late Robert Cairns, a Duke University psychologist who conducted intergenerational studies on aggression until his death last fall, would have agreed. “We wouldn’t have so much of the behavior if it didn’t work not only for the individual — as a means of maintaining one’s autonomy and the integrity of one’s life — but for the species,” Cairns told me in interviews conducted not long before he died. “It’s not just a virus that’s been inserted into our behavior.”

PITFALLS OF PASSIVE AGGRESSION

In Cairns’ view, girls can be meaner — agents of a sometimes more destructive form of aggression. Around age 10, they develop a sophisticated social weaponry that, although not physically assertive, uses alienation, rumor-mongering and ostracization to vanquish a rival.

This style of passive aggression can emotionally devastate the victim, who often has no idea why, or by whom, she’s being attacked.

In a famous study of kids’ games, researchers found that girls played less competitively in smaller groups and their games were shorter, partly because they were unskilled at resolving disputes. When a quarrel began, the game typically broke up because no one made an effort, or even knew how, to resolve the problem. Boys, on the other hand, quarreled all the time, but not once was a game terminated because of a dispute, and no game was interrupted for more than seven minutes. They had learned to negotiate their differences quickly, often by physical means, and to get back to the business at hand, which usually involved competing with each other.

SECRETS TO SUCCESS?

In fact, the confrontational style that boys learn early in life serves them well later. That’s one of the conclusions of one of the most distinguished and comprehensive long-term studies of men ever conducted, the Grant Study of Adult Development. Since 1937, researchers have tracked the psychological and physical health of several classes of Harvard graduates, many of whom are still alive. Among this elite group, which includes college presidents, politicians, partners of Wall Street law firms, foundation presidents and society surgeons, psychiatrist George Vaillant, the study’s director for the past 30 years, identified a special group of “Best Outcomes” — men who enjoyed not only material success but stable relationships and mental tranquility, and sought fulfillment by helping others.

As a group, the Best Outcomes felt a compelling need to be in charge. Interestingly, their view of the world as competitive and hierarchical was directly linked to their concern for and involvement with the commonweal: The Best Outcomes gave six times as much money to charity as the Worst Outcomes, yet as a group exhibited six times as many displays of aggressive behavior as their less exalted and stingier classmates. As they grew older, they became even more active in competitive sports than they’d been in college, whereas the less successful participants avoided competition altogether.

What to make of this? Aggression, competition, hierarchy, confrontation — all are hot-button words these days, and all occupy prominent positions in a male view of the world that is at least in part biologically determined. Particularly among the best men.