What Do Boys Need?

Apparently, I cried a lot as a child. I don’t know if I cried a lot compared with other boys. But for whatever reason, my parents nicknamed me Tiny Tears, after the American Character doll that shed faux tears when her stomach was pressed. I hated the label, because the message was clear: Crying was not only a problem but akin to being a baby—worse, a baby girl.

My parents’ labeling, however misguided, perhaps stemmed from a belief, popular at the time, that boys who showed “weakness” were going to get hurt. Today, I’m a psychologist, and I can report that although none of my male friends, clients, or colleagues remembers being referred to as Tiny Tears, virtually all of them recall messages from parents, coaches, and peers to not be a “wuss” and, above all, not be vulnerable. The logic: Toughening up boys to meet the toughness of the world would help them thrive.

That notion is now resurgent—in politics, in popular culture, in content emanating from the “manosphere” and social-media influencers who preach that physical strength and emotional stoicism represent the pinnacle of manliness. But this attitude is in direct conflict with research suggesting that sons need the same nurturing that many parents so naturally bestow on daughters: time, conversation, patience, and affection. In fact, they might need it more.

[Read: What the men of the internet are trying to prove]

And yet, in many homes, boys get less tender nurturing than girls do, or the care that they receive tends to emphasize physical activity over more intimate emotional interactions. A 2016 study, drawing on wide-scale data sets from the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, found that mothers and fathers spent more time telling stories, singing, and reading to young daughters compared with sons, from babyhood leading up to preschool. In 2013, the economists Marianne Bertrand and Jessica Pan published an analysis of longitudinal data that followed more than 20,000 U.S. children who had started kindergarten in 1998; they found that parents of daughters reported feeling closer to their kindergarten-age child than parents of sons, and that parents were more likely to report being too busy to play with sons.

Over the decades, smaller observational studies of parents and their children have also revealed differences in the frequency and style with which mothers and fathers verbally engage with their sons versus their daughters. A 2014 study of 33 infants suggested that starting from birth, mothers may be more likely to chat back to daughters’ early sounds than to those of sons, although the opposite was true for fathers. Another study, from 2006, found that during play sessions with their infants, mothers of daughters interacted more frequently with their child than mothers of sons, and comforted and hugged them more. A 2017 study suggested that dads tended to be less attentively engaged with and responsive toward sons than toward daughters, and that they used subtly different vocabularies: They spoke in more emotion-focused language with girls, whereas with boys, they used terms related to competition and achievement.

As one of three brothers, and as a father of twin sons and a daughter, I wasn’t entirely surprised to learn that many parents spend more time reading and talking with daughters than with sons. My daughter, when she was little, had a calm, introspective temperament, more conducive to reading and conversation. My boys were loud, rowdy, and constantly in motion. More of my parental reserves went to corralling them so they wouldn’t disassemble the house and build a bicycle ramp out of the spare parts. If a conversation was going to end loudly and gracelessly with my declaring “because I said so,” then more likely, I was addressing one of my sons.

When I became a father, I knew that I didn’t want to repeat the mistakes of my parents and shame my kids—my boys, especially—for crying or showing other forms of vulnerability. But I wasn’t great at that. My parental temperament, when my kids were young, had a low boiling point, which meant that I sometimes said things I had sworn I would never say. I didn’t call my sons Tiny Tears when they cried, but (I am not proud to admit) I did call them “sissies” when they complained that it was too cold to take the garbage cans to the curb.

Parents blow it all the time. Getting everything right in every circumstance is impossible. But our messaging to boys matters, as do our responses to their developmental and emotional needs. “The most consistent findings are not just that boys are more aggressive or rambunctious or anything else particularly ‘boyish,’” the journalist Ruth Whippman writes in her book Boymom: Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity. “They are also—by almost every measure—more sensitive, fragile, and emotionally vulnerable.”

Whippman cites research by the UCLA psychology professor Allan N. Schore, whose work explains that the brain circuits regulating stress mature more slowly in the prenatal, perinatal, and postnatal periods for boys compared with girls. Schore’s findings echo observations made by the British child-and-adolescent psychiatrist Sebastian Kraemer, who in 2000 published an article in The British Medical Journal in which he wrote that “even from conception, before social effects come into play, males are more vulnerable than females.” From a physiological perspective, Kraemer wrote, boys are born about a month behind girls developmentally. They also tend to be less proficient at regulating their emotions and more affected when things go wrong—and things go wrong, in part, when parents feel overwhelmed by boys’ behavior, or when they neglect, intentionally or not, sons’ need for affection and attention.

[From the October 2022 issue: Redshirt the boys]

Of course, biology and parents’ nurturing styles are not the only influences affecting outcomes for boys. Social and economic factors play a major role as well.

Research suggests, for instance, that boys raised in poor households, many by single mothers under tremendous stress, tend to fare worse than girls from similar environments in measurements of academic achievement; boys from unstable or single-mother families also have more trouble with emotional regulation. In their 2013 analysis, Bertrand and Pan found that boys raised in single-mother households showed significantly higher rates of behavioral problems and troubles at school than girls from comparable households did. Meanwhile, evidence from England suggests that government programs that offer families adequate support and services—which can increase parents’ capacity to nurture—can be excellent tools for addressing behavioral gaps. Together, these studies indicate that boys may be especially sensitive to the quality of early caregiving—an argument to both increase social support for families and resist dubious assumptions that boys do not require substantial affectionate nurturing.

This is all crucial to consider given that boys’ challenges with emotional regulation can persist into adulthood, and can lead to repercussions not only for the men in question but also for people around them. Kraemer wrote in his 2000 paper that men are more at risk than women for “conduct” disorders—characterized by lying, destruction of property, stealing, and physical aggression—and that boys might be better-inoculated against such behaviors if parents were “more aware of male sensitivity” and guided to “change the way they treat their sons.” In 2019, in a submission to the U.K. Parliament’s Women and Equalities Committee, Kraemer wrote that when he first published his article, “the press said I was suggesting that boys should be treated more like girls.” Not so, he argued. “I said that boys should be treated more like human beings.”

The idea that boys are weakened by a more nurturing approach from parents still weaves its way through American culture, and is perpetuated by men and women. It affects not only how we perceive boys but also how we respond to them. As the sociologist Alicia M. Walker, the author of Chasing Masculinity: Men, Validation, and Infidelity, observed to me in an email, “The enduring belief that boys are somehow diminished or emasculated by tenderness, compassion, or emotional nurturance is rooted in traditional gender expectations that demand stoicism from men.”

How did these beliefs become so common? Historians and other researchers trace disparities in parental conduct to evolving cultural narratives starting in the 19th century. Stephanie Coontz, a historian of marriage and family life, told me that through the early 1800s, American boys got “reinforcement for being loving and kind” and had “really tight bonds” with their mothers, and with other male figures: “Men were affectionate in public, open about their tender feelings for each other.” But in the late 19th century came Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders, and an embrace of competitive capitalism—at which point, cultural expectations began to shift. Steven Mintz, a historian and the author of Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood, told me that “when Darwinian notions about life as a struggle began to spread through the culture, fathers, in particular, began to emphasize instilling toughness in boys.”

A new kind of matrophobia also set in, in which men were believed to be made weak or effeminate by the love and affection shown to them by their mothers. Women were warned that “they were turning their sons into sissies,” Coontz told me, “a word that was once affectionate slang for little sister.” Amid all this, a notion took hold that being male meant being the opposite of female. Before that, according to Coontz, people were more likely to say that “the opposite of a man was a child.”

Today, for any parent seeking guidance on raising sons, the competing narratives coming from the public sphere couldn’t be more contradictory and confusing. Some influencers and political leaders on the right seem to endorse what the journalist Susan Faludi termed “ornamental,” or performative, masculinity—the projection of physical strength and machismo—and a wish to return to a time when men’s pride and identity rested on women’s and children’s dependence on men. Some on the left have been more likely to assert that any whiff of traditional masculinity is toxic, effectively shaming boys and men without expressing empathy for the ways in which they may be confused or hurting. “From the right, you’ve got ‘Man up. Squash your emotions. Don’t speak out. Don’t talk about your pain,’” Whippman told me. “And from the left, you’ve got ‘Be quiet. Time for somebody else to have a turn.’”

[Read: The problem with a fight against toxic masculinity]

Although the policing of boys’ emotions is often associated with fathers, mothers also engage in demarcating the acceptable and unacceptable when it comes to male expressions of vulnerability. “In our research helping couples become parents, we found that as men began to show more tenderness as fathers, they weren’t always supported by their wives in doing so,” Philip Cowan, a UC Berkeley professor emeritus of psychology, told me. These days, “men are encouraged to be more vulnerable and open but not always treated well by their partners when they are”—and if boys witness that dynamic, it can send a strong message.

How masculinity is defined and enforced within households is a concern for families. But even the most sensitive parenting can’t fully insulate boys from the cultural forces that equate masculinity with stoicism, dominance, and economic power—pressures that can shape male identity across class lines, and that can have societal reverberations. The many boys and young men Whippman interviewed for Boymom, some of whom belonged to misogynist online incel forums that glorify violence against women, spoke repeatedly about the torment of trying to achieve a certain type of masculinity. “A wide body of research shows that it is not masculinity itself that makes men violent, but the sense of shame that they are not masculine enough,” Whippman wrote. “Men who score high on measures for what researchers call masculine discrepancy stress—meaning, stress derived from a belief that they fall short of society’s standards for manhood—are significantly more likely to be violent in a variety of ways, including intimate partner violence, sexual violence, and gun violence.” All of this underscores the importance of challenging society’s broader narratives about what it means to be a man.

What with the cultural, economic, and political privileges that many men have traditionally enjoyed, some people might object to the idea that it is anyone’s responsibility besides boys and men themselves to be accountable for their behavior. People might also object to any preoccupation with boys’ welfare, or any suggestion that boys should be given more attention than girls. But just as, in more recent generations, a movement grew to support and empower girls, boys also need a revolution, Barbara Risman, a University of Illinois at Chicago sociology professor who studies gender, told me. And that kind of revolution demands the participation of men and women. “The kinds of traits that we used to call ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’—that is, empathy, nurturance, warmth, intuitiveness, efficacy, and agency,” Risman said, are all “parts of humanity.” Some people want to construct a new masculinity, she noted. “Others, like me, think we should focus on raising good people and de-emphasizing masculinity and femininity.” We should try, she said, to holistically integrate “the best of both stereotypes.”

It took several decades to begin to reverse American stereotypes about what was possible for girls. It may likewise take decades to reverse current attitudes and perceptions, in our politics and culture, about what boys should be. But if Americans truly want to improve the outcomes for boys—and, by extension, for society—the place to begin is at home, with fathers’ and mothers’ first attempts at nurturing.

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