Navigating the Challenges of Raising Boys in Today’s World

Welcome to Where Parents Talk. My name is Lianne Castelino. Our guest today is a journalist and an author.

Ruth Whitman is also an essayist, former director and producer at the BBC, and cultural critic based in the United States. Her latest book is called Boy Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity.

Ruth is also the mother of three boys, and she joins us today from Berkeley, California. Thank you so much for making the time.

Thank you so much for having me on the show.

Really interesting topic, because I think we see a lot of the end product these days in the headlines anyways. But I'd like to start by asking you, why do you believe that boyhood needs to be reimagined?

Yeah, it's such a great question and such a big question.

I think we realized that just this volume of male harm and bad behavior and the sort of violence that had been perpetrated by men and boys was just something we couldn't really ignore. It was something systemic in the culture. So it wasn't just a few bad apples or, oh, that's a bad man.

It was something much deeper in the culture that was going wrong. And as a mother of boys and a feminist, I had lots of very conflicted and complicated feelings about it.

But what I did realize is that obviously we're doing something wrong. No mother, no parent wants to raise a sexual predator or a school shooter. Nobody goes in with that intention. Everyone's doing their best.

But obviously there's something invisible in the culture and in the way that we're, you know, treating boys, raising boys that we are unaware of and that we need to tackle.

You talk about being pregnant at the time that you were thinking about all these things with your third son. And I read somewhere that it's a quote from you where you said you were truly scared to be a mother of boys. Why was that?

So I think it was coming from lots of different places.

One was just the very simple fact that every time I turned on my phone and checked my news app, there was another terrible story about, you know, a predator or a school shooter or an incel or, you know, some other, like, violent man or terrible man. And so just the. Just the pileup of this, these kinds of stories made me think, oh, God, you know, is this just inevitable?

Am I going to be able to do anything about this? Are my kids going to be terrible? But then there was also a part of me that kind of felt really defensive.

And, you know, I look at these sweet boys and these, like, lovely baby that I had, and just, like, the negativity of the conversation and this sort of inevitability and talking about boys and men as if they were, like, somehow destined to be harmful. I was pushing back and thinking, well, no, no, look at my sweet baby. He's not going to be that way. What can I do? And I felt defensive.

Like, I wanted to jump to my son's defense. And, you know, it was a lot of very conflicted emotions. And I think what I wanted to do with the book was to really write into the conflict.

Rather than being, like, very certain that this is the way to go and to write this book from this position of expertise. I wanted to write from that position of, I don't know, what can we find out? I'm scared, I'm conflicted, I'm defensive.

And let's be honest about all of those feelings and how messy it all feels.

There's a lot there to process. Right, Notwithstanding the fact that you were also having a baby at the time.

But I'm interested in, like, what was the tipping point for you to take all of those emotions, all of those thoughts, your background as a researcher, as a journalist, as somebody, you know, who seeks to find out why and looks for solutions? What, then was the impetus for you to write this book?

So I think it was a combination of what was going on in the culture more generally and what was going on in our own home because, you know, we'd had a third baby. And it's a chaotic time for anybody having a third baby child, obviously.

And I think I had been raised by a feminist mother, and I think I had it in my mind that, you know, gender is all socialized. You know, we can just socialize the exact child that we want by just doing all the right things.

And then I found when my third son was born, my two oldest boys just went completely wild. You know, our house was chaos. All those stereotypes about boys will be boys.

They're wild, they're aggressive, they're rambunctious, they fight all the time. You know, all of those stereotypes were just kind of coming true in our own home. In my own life, I felt really powerless.

I was like, you know, I don't feel like I'm socializing them into this behavior. I feel Like, I'm socializing them away from this behavior. Why does it keep happening?

And at the same time, this was all in the sort of shadow of this cultural conversation about masculinity and boys.

And, you know, that it felt like every time my kids were like wrestling on the living room manual, like punching each other, that that was like a straight line to something toxic in adulthood. And so I think it was that combination of like the personal and the political that I was just like, I need to find out what's going on here.

It was as much for me as for anyone else. You know, I was on that journey the whole way through the book.

I tried to, you know, whatever research I'm doing, whatever reporting I'm doing, I bring my own voice and my own fears and my own conflicts into it to try and just make sense of it for myself as much as for anyone else.

So take us through a little bit of that process that you went through, Ruth, in terms of writing this book. What was your strategy and then the approach that you deployed to put this book together?

So the book is a combination of memoir and the memoir part just takes. It's this five year period from when my third son was born, right as MeToo was kind of exploding and, you know, Trump was president.

It was this very complex time for men and boys and masculinity. So it starts there and it finishes when that boy Abe, my son, goes off to kindergarten, age five.

So it's this five year period which coincided with this very challenging time. As I said, in our own home, the big boys are wild. We don't know what's going on. I felt very.

It was the most challenging time in my own parenting journey. So there's a memoir piece and then there's also reporting.

So what I wanted to do is get out and just talk to boys, listen to boys, talk to experts, talk to boys who are maybe involved in some of these, like, darker things that are my greatest fate. You know, I talk to boys from the INCEL movement.

I don't know if your listeners know about that, but it's, you know, these, you know, they're kind of associated with school shootings, with acts of mass violence. These guys who are involuntary celibate, they call it, and they hang out in these very toxic communities. Online. I spent some time interviewing them.

I went to boys therapy centers. I talked to people on the left, on the right. I went to schools, I went to sports teams.

I just wanted to listen to what boys were telling me and to go and visit the places where they hang out. So there's that reporting piece of it. And I go to lots of different interesting places and then there's research.

You know, I bring in a lot of the research studies, the psychological studies, the sort of study, the science of gender differences, and I try to synthesize it and find a path through it as best I can.

That sounds like quite a robust and diverse group of interviewees that you, that you sought and that you sat down with.

And I'm curious as to like, what stood out for you when you look back on it in terms of really struck you within those interviewees that you interviews that you did.

So what was really fascinating was that you're right, it was a really diverse group of people, both in terms of their economic backgrounds, their racial backgrounds, their geographic locations and their politics. You know, all these different things were very different about all of these boys that I spoke to.

But actually I was really surprised that there were some really strong common threads that ran through what people were telling me and, you know, what it means to be a boy in this moment. And I think the sort of biggest threads that stood out was one, the first one, the sort of top line one was loneliness.

I think boys are feeling very lonely and isolated in this moment and I think there's lots of causes for that and lots of different kind of cultural things that are contributing to that. But I was really surprised at how lonely and disconnected a lot of them felt.

Another one was the sort of pressures of masculinity, that this idea that masculinity was something that, you know, and in the title of the book, I call it Impossible Masculinity. And I mean that from all sides.

You know, in one sense they were still expected to live up to this old school masculine ideal where they were tough and they were strong and that they couldn't show weakness, that they couldn't talk about their emotions, that, you know, this sort of standard of, you know, bulletproof toughness.

But then on the other, you know, and they were still expected to be kind of dominant and aggressive and all of those old fashioned sort of ideas of masculinity.

But they were also all these new voices coming from the left being like, well, don't be too dominant or aggressive or, you know, you've got a, you know, be very cautious, that there was this fear that you would overstep, that if you were to approach a girl, you know, that you would be seen as sort of overly aggressive, you know, that it could be sexual harassment. And I think boys were just confused. They didn't know how to, how to be in the world. They didn't know what was expected of them.

And so then what, what did you take away from that in terms of. In your own lived experience? Because you've got now all of this new knowledge, presumably some of it was new. And you've got these three boys at home.

So in what ways, if any, did that impact how you went to parent?

Yeah, so one other point that I want to say about, you know, what showed up in the research as opposed to like in my reporting with boys. But there was this phenomenon which in the book I call under nurture and that it's this.

And there's a lot of research that supports this idea that we treat boys and girls slightly differently as parents. And this starts right from birth. And the way we treat boys is slightly less emotional, slightly less tender.

We give them slightly less attention in all these different domains. We give them slightly less of that kind of.

We talk to them less, parents talk to them less in general and talk to them far less about their feelings and their emotions. So there's this sort of different way that people parent boys and girls.

And once I was aware of that and the sort of impact that has long term for boys, I started to really try to correct for that in my own parenting.

I think as a feminist, I sort of, in this moment I had felt like, oh my gosh, my job is to be really harsh with my boys and to like make sure that I really strict and I discipline them so they don't turn into these toxic men that I'm more and more strict. But I think what I realized was that what boys actually need is more empathy and more care that they're lacking in those things.

And that is where the kind of roots of some of this toxic stuff start to start to happen. So with my own boys, I.

It was just, it wasn't specific things that I did exactly, but it was more just like real reorientation in my relationship towards them.

Instead of seeing them as these tough, simple little creatures that just needed to run around, I started realizing how much engagement they needed with like emotions, with nurture, you know, how much I need. They needed to feel that I was on their side, that I was advocating for them, that I was treating them with 10 tenderness.

And so that's the kind of thing that was the biggest difference, honestly.

You know, what's really interesting is as you're speaking, one of the things that occurs to me is generational differences that influence how different parents from different generations parent right and so when you talk about the long term effects of, let's say, not talking about emotions and those kinds of things that might not even be on the radar of some parents out there today because that's not how they were raised, et cetera, et cetera. So I'm curious if you could take us through some of those long term impacts that you alluded to earlier with respect to the emotional piece.

Yeah.

So I think that in many, many subtle ways, we don't socialize boys to kind of understand their own emotions and to like, track and understand and take responsibility for the emotions of other people. So that is both in the messages that we do give them culturally and in what we kind of fail to teach them.

So there's, you know, as I said, there's all this research that shows that parents talk to girls much more about their feelings, they listen to their feelings, they give them like books and stories and movies and shows which are all about girls, you know, in groups with friends, talking to their friends about how about their emotions and all the rest of it. So I think sort of several generations of boys and men don't really see it as their responsibility to track other people's feelings.

You know, and I think we see, we all see this, you know, in our own lives as adult women that, you know, the men we know are not the ones taking responsibility for like remembering people's birthdays generally.

Obviously there are exceptions, but writing the thank you letters, noticing that grandma kind of looks a bit awkward and that she needs help bringing into the conversation or worrying about, you know, that we forgot somebody's birthday and this had to happen.

You know, I think women take on all this emotional load and I think, you know, this is like burdensome for women in the sense that, you know, a lot of us are feeling like overloaded with this kind of work and that we're not being supported in it by our male partners. But it's also really harmful for men and boys because those are the things that help build connections.

You know, those are the things that build deep intimacy and relationships and connections with other people. So if you don't learn those skills, then you become increasingly isolated and cut off.

And I think that's what we're seeing downstream of all these boys who really just were never taught these skills and they were never led to believe that it was their responsibility to do that kind of work.

So how do you go about teaching those skills, Ruth? Because as you're talking, I'm shaking my head saying, yes, I've done that. I Keep doing it.

It's happening here because at the end of the day there's certain things you just have to get done, right?

Of course, it's that fine balance between saying, okay, I'm going to reverse engineer, going to use some reverse psychology, I'm going to see who here is going to pick up the baton and run with it. And it's not happening because I haven't asked for it. So how do we, how do we correct for that or, you know, help manifest that in our boys?

Yeah, so I think it's, I think the first part is to show that kind of care and empathy to them. So that's the first piece. So if we, you know, we learn to care for others by being cared for ourselves.

And obviously this is not to say that mothers are not caring for their boys, but you know, we need to engage with them about their emotions and their actual emotions, you know, the ones that they have, even if they're not pretty, even if they don't fit the model, you know, and often boys are sort of taught to express things with anger rather than with sadness or tears. And so, you know, it's sort of easy for then parents to respond with like harsher discipline because it looks like a behavioral problem.

So I think part of it is just engaging with boys emotions. Another piece that's really important is about the stories that we give boys in their lives.

So, you know, and this was a, you know, I had a whole chapter in this.

You know, I realized that it came to me actually when I was in the bookstore with my sons, I have my three boys, and I saw this magazine that was like very clearly aimed at young girls. You know, it had pink cover, sparkles, you know, a little lip gloss giveaway. All of this clearly for girls.

I open it up and the story in that magazine is a story about a young girl who has been invited to two birthday parties at the same time. They're scheduled for the same time. And she doesn't want to disappoint either friend. So she like runs between the parties.

She goes to one, she plays the game, she races down the street to the other one, all the while pretending that she's a full guest at both. And she's exhausting herself. And I realized when I read that my sons will never see a story like that with a boy as the main character.

Girls see that kind of thing all the time. It's in all the books they read, the TV shows they watch. And it's really hard to get those role models for boys.

But I think we need to try to find them. There are some examples of movies and books and shows that have elements of that. And I think we need to talk to boys about it, to call it out.

In the same way that if we were seeing a story about, you know, that was about, say, being a scientist or being, you know, an engineer and it was all boys, I think we would call it out and be like, well, this is sexist. Why are the girls missing in this story? And so I think we also need to name that absence with our sons and be like, well, why?

Why are there no boys in this story? You know, why do they think the boys can't be babysitters? Or why can't they be friends? Or why can't, you know?

And I think it's a slow, long process and just talking about all that stuff.

Absolutely. The other part that can be challenging for certain parents in certain households is overcoming stereotypes in the first place. Right.

Like, when you know you're going to have a boy or the boy enters the world. We're all predisposed to how we think. Right.

And so any thought there, based on your research for your book on how parents can navigate that and maybe be more objective about that whole piece and not stereotype from the get go?

Yeah, it's really interesting.

There's research that shows, like, a really classic study from the 70s that shows that when you dress a baby neutrally and you hand it to people and you tell them it's either a boy or a girl, but they don't know which one it really is, then they behave in really different ways to that baby. And they attribute, like, even when the baby's behaving the same way, they attribute their emotions to different.

You know, they describe their emotions differently. So if the baby cries, the adults, if they've been told it's a boy, they say he's angry.

Whereas if the baby cries and they've been told it's a girl, they say that she's sad. And I think we all project this stuff, you know, onto boys and girls all the time. We handle boys more roughly. We think they're more robust.

We roughhouse with them more. We talk them less about their emotions. And so I think the first step is awareness and just being like, okay.

And I think we're doing a quite a good job with girls and doing that.

I think, you know, the women's movement, feminist movement, has done quite a good job in, like, trying to break down stereotypes for girls and being like, when you see that in a story when you see it in yourself, when you're like, underestimating your girl or saying, she can't do this because she's a girl, I think we're more aware of it in ourselves. But I think we've got this awareness gap when it comes to boys. We don't even see it as stereotyping.

We just see it as this, like, innate, natural thing.

And so I think it's just the more we can have these conversations, the more we can become aware of our innate biases, the more we can try to correct for them and notice them in ourselves. And it's a slow process. You know, these things, they're subtle. You know, it's not a huge difference.

It's a subtle difference, but it builds up over time. I mean, one of the examples I give in the book is when my son went off to kindergarten, hits his first. He's really anxious. He's like little.

He's got the giant backpack. He's lining up to go in through the gate. And there's this guy there, like this male teacher or volunteer or somebody.

And there's two little girls in front of my son that go through the gate. And he's like, hi, sweetheart. Hi, sweetheart, to these two girls.

And then my son walks through and his voice goes down an entire octave and he's like, hey, buddy. And like high fives him. And in that tiny little moment and this very well meaning, very lovely man, he's just communicated to.

To him, you know, man up, son.

You know, these girls are worthy of, like, being nurtured, that they are, you know, that it's that he's communicating to them that it's okay to be anxious, that he'll protect them, that he's going to nurture them. And to my son, he's communicated like, you're a man, you're a peer, you're a buddy, like in you come. And it's this very tiny moment. And.

But it's replicated everywhere, all the way through boyhood.

And so, you know, we're all this, like, referring to boys as like, little man and throwing him up in the air and in a way that we just don't really do with girls. And each time we do it, it's fine, it's not a big deal. But together they add up.

You know, it's an interesting segue that you mentioned that to my next question, which is related in the sense that, you know, we can to a large extent control how we behave in our households, but then we send our boys and our Children out into the world and things are happening out there. What do you think, based on the research that you did for this book, do you think that, you know, could be happening, should happen societally?

Let's start with schools, for example, that could continue to nurture and foster, you know, emotionally healthy boys.

Well, so one thing that's really encouraging actually is that like any kind of social, emotional work that they do in schools and those kind of large scale programs, they have a bigger impact on boys than they do on girls. They have really positive results and they're especially positive for boys.

And the likely reason for that is because girls get a lot of that stuff anyway just naturally through the culture. And so boys often don't get it. So when they do get it, they respond really, really well. And there's a lot of data that shows that.

So I think that that's a really positive thing, that these things make a big difference to boys. And there's other data on that in the home as well, that when we act in more loving, nurturing ways towards boys, they do better longer term.

And so I think, yes, we don't have control over everything that happens in the culture, but I believe that cultural change is possible. You know, only last night I was with some friends and we were talking about how homophobic like the culture used to be.

Just generally it was really okay to just say extremely homophobic things in casual conversation. And now it's not really. Maybe in some circles it is, but you know, that cultural change has happened.

You know, sexism towards girls, you know, we just things that we used to just take as completely standard when I was a girl now wouldn't be acceptable. And I think the same thing is possible with boys.

But the way we change the culture is by doing it, by having a million conversations about it like the one we're having right now, by calling out our blind spots, by noticing things, by talking about it, by drawing our own attention to it, by drawing boys attention to it, by drawing everyone's attention to it. And then the more we talk about it, the more we're like, oh, yeah, because like, for instance, the buddy sweetheart thing, it's so minor.

You know, it's. That guy was so well intentioned, such a good person, but. And he's probably never given it a moment's thought.

And I would never have given it a moment's thought if I hadn't been writing this whole book about it, you know, And I think the more we can call these small things out, the better.

The other thing that you Tackle in Boy mom is the whole idea of neurological differences between boys and girls. I wonder, and you alluded to it a little bit earlier, if you could take us through some of the top line pieces that you.

That struck you why and what parents really need to be mindful of within that space.

Yeah, this was really interesting to me. I didn't know this.

So when a baby boy is born, his brain, so we're talking about the right hemisphere of the brain, which is the part that deals with emotions, emotional self regulation. So like being able to calm down, being able to sort of regulate your emotions, attachment relationships, those kinds of social, emotional things.

A baby boy's brain is born about a month behind or slightly more than a month behind a baby girl's on average. And you know, we all know that a month is a lot when it comes to a fetus and a newborn.

You know, the difference between being born a month premature and at term is, is really big. So the fact that baby boys are born, you know, with these like immature brains means that their brains are very vulnerable to disruption.

So a baby girl can be more independent and has slightly less need for their caregiver and the boys need slightly more in terms of support from a caregiver.

And it becomes this kind of double whammy because the boys actually, so they need more, but they get less, you know, because of all the things we've talked about, because of this like masculine thing that we project onto them, because of the ways we interact with them. So it just kind of compounds. And baby boys brains, or boys brains mature more slowly all the way through childhood.

So they're more emotionally vulnerable, they're more emotionally fragile, they need more from their caregivers and they tend to get less and over, you know, that combination compounds and compounds.

And that was shocking to me because I think when we think about sex differences, it's more like the way I always thought about it was like boys are more aggressive or boys are more rough or boys are more. But actually we're talking about boys being more fragile, being more emotionally sensitive and needing more of that kind of stuff.

It's such a large topic and you know, in many households there may not be even a cursory awareness of what we're talking about because we're just all trying to get through the day to day and, you know, hoping that we're making the right choices and decisions as parents. Ruth, what do you want readers of Boy mom to really take away from your book?

Yeah, so for the first, to your point that absolutely, I relate to this so much, you know, not more parenting advice of guardian. I can barely, like, shower, let alone, you know, to change my entire parenting approach. I think it's just the main thing that I want. Want parents to.

To take away is that boys are vulnerable. They need tender nurture and support. They don't need to be manned up.

You know, they don't need this, like, toughening up that we tend to give them, that the culture provides.

We need to be able to see them as vulnerable and creatures that are emotional, vulnerable and complex, that need our support with that stuff rather than this kind of, you know, I had a lot of, like, boys are like dogs, you know. I don't know if you've ever heard that expression. That was when I had boys.

It was a lot of, like, all they need is food and exercise and just wear them out. Not like girls who are these complex emotional creatures.

I want parents to be able to see their boys that way too, and to have to give them that same level of tender nurture, to be on their side, to advocate for them in, you know, all those ways. And I think almost all parents are doing their best. You know, it's not that they're not, you know, that parents are just like, oh, I don't care.

You know, they'd often do this sort of thing out of love, you know, the toughening up, the masculinization. And maybe we just need to think about who boys are and what they need in a slightly new way.

The book is called Boy Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity. Ruth Whitman is the author. Thank you so much for taking the time to share your perspective with us today.

It's been such a pleasure. Thank you.