What do boys need? According to the bloggers and podcasters in the “manosphere” — the often misogynistic, conspiracy minded, and sometimes bigoted men who have attracted millions of readers and listeners in recent years — boys need to be tougher. They must learn how to be physically fit, more domineering over women and less emotionally vulnerable.
Boys are attracted to these messages, according to a recent article in The Wall Street Journal by a high school student, because they help cut through the “mixed messages” he and his classmates receive.
“In history class, we’re taught about equality and the importance of respecting women as peers, often through lessons on past struggles for civil rights and suffrage. In English class, we dive into texts that unpack our privilege as white men; we are urged to feel some guilt for the inequities of the world, even if we didn’t create them ourselves. But in the locker room, it’s all about being tough and ‘manly’ and never backing down,” Eli Thompson wrote.
The online “manosphere” offers a message similar to the locker room, but is this what boys need to be happy and successful in life? In a recent article in The Atlantic, psychologist Joshua Coleman suggests a different approach. He writes that boys need more affection and more nurturing from their parents. Unfortunately, they get less of it than their female peers.
Coleman cites studies showing “that mothers and fathers spent more time telling stories, singing, and reading to young daughters compared with sons, from babyhood leading up to preschool.” Another study showed 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.”
It is this lack of nurturing, Coleman suggests, that is fueling our crisis of masculinity. He notes that “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.”
Maybe, but it depends on what we mean by nurturing. Reading and playing and talking to children of both sexes is very important, but those things can look different for different children. Young boys may want different kinds of stories or songs and they may have less patience to sit still for either. They may not be as inclined to relax and cuddle with a book and their play may be more physical.
Coleman rightly observes that some of the emotional and behavioral problems occur in boys raised by single mothers. Rather than offer the same kind of nurturing they give to girls, single mothers may be more likely to experience stress as a result of boys’ raucous behavior and become less nurturing. It also may be that single mothers are overcompensating, trying to toughen up their sons, make them “the man of the house” prematurely.
While Coleman recommends social supports to navigate these problems in single-parent households, the truth is that a different level or style of nurturing is not going to fix what may be at the heart of so much of this masculinity crisis — the absence of fathers.
There are fathers who offer boys more nurturing than others, fathers who read more or sing more to their sons. But these are not the most important factors in determining how a boy is going to become a man, how he is going to navigate the “mixed messages.”
I’ve been listening to the actor Rob Lowe’s 2011 memoir, “Stories I Only Tell My Friends,” and his assessment of what happened to his life as a result of his mother first leaving his father and then his stepfather is devastating. He still had a strong relationship with his father but, having moved across the country, saw him considerably less. Raising his own sons years later, he realizes what he missed.
He writes about the “lessons that teenage boys need to learn” which “can’t be taught over pizza at midnight or on the tennis court.” They don’t learn through speeches. “They absorb incrementally through hours and hours of observation. The sad truth about divorce is that it’s hard to teach your kids about life unless you are living life with them.” Not only eating and doing homework and driving them to activities, but also, Lowe writes, “letting them listen while you do business, while you negotiate love and the frustrations and complications and rewards of living day in and out with your wife.”
Specifically, Lowe notes that through watching the men in their lives, boys “see how adults handle responsibility, honesty, commitment, jealousy, anger, professional pressures and social interactions.”
If we want to understand why so many young men are so at sea trying to figure out their place in the world and how they should relate to the opposite sex, it is worth understanding what they miss when they grow up separated from their fathers.