Since I was actually a small boy at one time & the fact that I’ve been around many of them as they have grown up, I’ll throw in some of my observations.
I would make sure that you always have clean rags/napkins around to clean them up. But remember, soap is another toxic enemy of young boys. Use sparingly.
Always have a first-aid kit available. Boys tend to get many scrapes, scratches,cuts & boo-boos. And boys don’t *really* feel any pain either, we only cry when we want attention. But the first-aid kit is just so that nothing gets infected & so that a boy can have an assortment of cool-looking band aids to show his friends.
Boys like to get into everything & they like to go places, so you have to watch them so they don’t crawl up the side of the refrigerator or something. You laugh now, but just ask any boy’s mother & she will tell you stories of how he tried sled down the stairwell sitting on her favorite cutting board. Backwards.
Toywise, they can be very creative. Just give them a cardboard box & they’ll be fascinated with crawling in & out of it for days. Or just give him a stick & he’ll spend hours whacking everything in site. It doesn’t sound like fun to most women, but then again, they never tried it. Their loss.
And during some years of their raising, boys will be easier to deal with than others. The ages between 12-15 are not these years. But once they get past those years, they grow out of it (whatever “it” is) & they START to settle down & get focused in life….it seems like that during these years, boys really try to reach out to a “role-model” & they do not want to be around their parents (it changes though after they get through this stage). They usually get very impressionable at this age by whoever they find as being “fascinating”. You can use this to his advantage by getting him to study under a rabbi that he has a fascination with. He can grow very quickly with a rabbi that he is fascinated with, since boys at this stage have a lot of drive & energy. They just lack focus.