There’s a Gloria Steinem quote that I think a lot about (and have tried to live by as a mom):
“Though we have the courage to raise our daughters more like our sons, we've rarely had the courage to raise our sons like our daughters.”
I felt like we’ve done a pretty good job of this, from when the kids were born to elementary school age. But as my kids get older (especially my eldest), it’s getting harder.
“Mom - when do boys and girls stop being friends?”
”Why can’t I play Minecraft with everyone else on Fridays?”
”Can I bring the Switch to that playdate?”
”No one else’s mom checks their homework/puts them to bed/ruins their life!”
(more on this, behind the paywall)
We’re at the phase where his friends and social circle is increasingly influential, and socialization is centered around things that I have concerns about. I feel increasingly lost in how to handle this phase, and I’m not alone.
There’s a ton of stellar advice and content around raising younger boys with more compassion (
does a great job of this), and we increasingly have more role models redefining healthy masculinity (like Benny Blanco, Alexis Ohanian, Doug Emhoff).But how do we bridge this gap? More importantly, what aren’t we doing in this phase, spanning from late boyhood to young manhood?
And what can we do about it?
#5SmartReads on Modern Boyhood
Game Over: The Troubling trend of male gaming addiction (WFLA)
‘Unnervingly on-the-nose’: why Adolescence is such powerful TV that it could save lives (The Guardian)
Why Your 8-Year-Old Is Acting Like a Moody Teen—and What to Do About It (WSJ) *gift link
As we’ve focused on empowering girls, I do feel like we dropped the ball on boys.
heartbreakingly said it best:“I spent years teaching girls to be brave, not perfect. But I barely considered how we need to teach boys to be soft, not just stoic. To connect, not control. To imagine a version of manhood where strength requires empathy, vulnerability, and care.
While we were pushing our girls forward, we were leaving our boys behind. And now, they’re struggling.”
I know there’s a faction of folks who roll their eyes when male loneliness is mentioned. SNL’s ‘Man Park’ skit from 3 years ago both pokes fun and highlights that men are lonely, and lack some level of internal motivation to address it.
Let’s stop dismissing loneliness in men, and let’s also look at what’s happening with our boys right now.
“Boys and men are less likely to turn to their communities for social connection and support. Less likely to go to college. More likely to die by suicide or overdose. Too often, instead of being met with care, they’ve been manipulated and handed division. Not just by podcast bros, but by a government that’s actively stoking the divide for their own political gain.”
I want to cultivate a culture where all of our sons feel safe to speak about their feelings, who view supporting and caring for one another as strengths, and who have the skills to proactively connect with each other - and with girls and nonbinary communities with respect.
In order to do so, we need to understand what’s stopping us from doing it.
Boys are increasingly socializing around video games as they’re getting older. I know I need to be more proactive about scheduling in-person play dates, but their decline has seen the rise of gathering online to play video games, sometimes for hours at a time.
There’s a delicate balance here - allowing some of this time to support my son’s friendships and being included with his peers, and enforcing common sense rules (only playing on the Nintendo Switch, a 1 hour limit, a 5 minute breathing break at the half hour mark, a grounding ritual after gaming to mitigate ‘video game brain’).
And yet, it sometimes isn’t enough. But when I study the rise of gaming addiction and see elements of it (particularly the dysregulation that comes after a gaming session), it makes me want to eliminate all video game time and buy him a new Lego set instead (even as our shelves are crammed with finished projects).
This age (the end of elementary school, early middle school) is a particularly vulnerable time for boys’ development, and online gaming can be a key factor in how they grow up. Gaming addiction is now recognized as a behavioral disorder in DSM-5 (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), and there is a bidirectional relationship with gaming addiction and other mental health disorders, like ADHD, anxiety, and depression.
There’s no single solution here, but a careful calculation that each family needs to make for each child. As much as he may challenge our current rules, I know how important they are to support his social development as well as his mental health. We check in regularly about them, and we’ll adjust the rules as he gets older.
And it’s still quite hard, as we feel the impact of other families’ rules carrying as much weight for him as our rules.
One small thing I can do is to schedule more in-person playdates, and have more conversations with my sons’ moms on how we’re navigating this phase.
Adolescence made me deeply uncomfortable.
The Netflix mini-series follows a family in the aftermath of their son being arrested for the killing of his classmate, Katie. While it was inspired by the rise of knife killings in the United Kingdom (which has rose by 240% over the past 10 years), it’s also a searing reflection of what’s happening with adolescent boys everywhere.
We think we’re keeping our sons safe with them staying home. But how many of us actually know what they’re browsing online, or who they’re speaking with, or what they’re playing?
As parents, have we taught them how to navigate the Internet safely? Do they recognize misinformation and disinformation? Where are they spending their time online, and with who?
In the show, Jamie is 13 years old. There’s still a stuffed animal in his bed, and his walls are covered with a space-themed wallpaper that he’d likely had for years. He’s still a boy who fell down an Internet rabbit hole created by - and for - a group of angry, lonely men who feel left behind by society.
My eldest is closer to this age than he is to his toddler and kid years. I see him on his computer more than I see him playing with Lego or reading. He wants to create YouTube videos and watches a fair amount of them (mostly video game play throughs and his friends’ channels).
After watching Adolescence, all I wanted to do was unplug the computer in our common area and hide it until he turned 18. That’s not an option, but neither is putting my head in the sand and assuming his browsing time is focused on what we deem safe and appropriate.
There’s no single solution to this particular issue. But there are small things we can do to shift them away from the manosphere:
“It’s [Adolescence] a cautionary tale about getting teenagers off screens and engaging with real life again. A reminder that human contact and family time might help save them. A plea to support, talk and listen, not let them fall through the cracks and disappear down the digital rabbit hole. It will open conversations that desperately need to be had.”
We’ve been taking more family walks and playing board games to stay connected. Rho joins me during my morning bed rot sessions instead of logging onto the computer, and we chat before we jump into the day. Sri and I have been skipping our nightly TV time to have lingering conversations with the boys, before they go to sleep.
I dismissed these as the bare minimum and beat myself up on not doing more, but this article reframed them and made me recognize their significance, especially in their consistency.
You may be wondering “well, what the hell do I do next?”
The first step is to understand what middle childhood is, and how to support our kids during this vulnerable age between little kid and adolescence. This phase - spanning between ages 6-12 - sees our little ones grow from the “why? why? why?” phase into adolescents in the midst of puberty.
If you have been personally victimized by your kids inexplicable mood swing, welcome to the later half of middle childhood. There are have been so many moments where I question my parenting skills when one of my kids is having a big emotional moment, seemingly out of the middle of nowhere.
I met Sheryl Gonzalez Ziegler years ago at a conference, and remember thinking “I’ll need to reach back out to here in a few years.”
A few years is now, and her book, The Crucial Years, has been absolutely transformational as I’ve been reading it. Instead of reacting with “dude, where is THIS coming from?”, I can see his brain is undergoing some big changes, and it’s a lot to handle and he needs gentle support instead of berating.
That’s not to say that I’ve become a paragon of gentle parenting. I still feel like I’m losing my shit, but I react with “I need a second to get it together - I’ll be back when I’ve calmed down” or “I can see both of us are having a hard time. I’m going to lie here and take some deep breaths - you can join me, or I understand if you need a second alone.”
I downloaded the book on my phone’s Kindle app to reference it in hard moments, and I’ve been texting passages or reading them aloud to friends who are parenting in this phase. I should really just walk around with copies to hand to people - it’s that good.
If this hasn’t convinced to you pick up the book, I’ll leave you with the quote I sent my husband on Saturday.
“Please read Chapter 3 of The Crucial Years. It’s like a cheat code for Rho.” He did, and he quickly agreed. That one chapter has helped us support him with a deeper understanding what’s happening in his head and body, and what he actually needs from us.
While The Crucial Years has given me a better understanding of this phase and the tools to help my sons grow within it, I still need some extra support on how to raise them to be good men. As they’ve gotten older, I’m realizing the impact that their friends (and how they’re raised) are influencing them just as much as our family’s values.
It’s something I’m struggling a lot with. I’m not alone, as a parent or an auntie (as
writes):“I also can’t imagine figuring out how to parent them in a way that equips them to resist toxic masculinity. You try and teach your kids not to be assholes, and part of how you do that is by leading by example. But what about all the other examples out there? There’s just so much to consider, so little means of control, so many hours of Mr. Beast.”
My toxic trait is that I impulse purchase parenting books, and the small action makes me feel I’ve done something about it. Rarely do I read the books immediately after purchasing, and Ruth Whippman’s Boymom is no exception.
What struck me most about this Substack is not the interview itself, but the comments. Some readers viewed Ruth’s interviews and her NYT op-ed as both-sidesing the issue, and I’ll reserve judgement on that until I’ve read the book.
When I think about how the sons were raised in my family (particularly my cousins and my cousins’ sons, both in India and here in the States), I see how they were raised in nurturing environments where they felt safe to express their feelings and learned how to process them. While we didn’t talk about mental health or neurodivergence until my generation, it was normal for the boys and men in our family to talk about their feelings openly and with no judgement.
I know all families are different, and I find myself generalizing how my sons’ classmates are being raised. I’ll be reading Boyhood to gain a wider and deeper understanding of different families’ parenting values for their sons, and will aim to do so with curiosity and minimal judgement.
Boyhood, and the elements I’ve shared here, have been weighing on my mind for the past two years. And I’m not alone. When I polled my community on Instagram on their own experiences of raising sons, the responses were illuminating:
It’s my goal that this piece (and future ones on this topic) contribute to the larger conversation of how we raise our sons. I realize now that the articles I’ve referenced are primarily written by women (save for the piece about Adolescence), and I know we cannot have this conversation solely among moms and aunts.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic - your experiences, observations, and constructive criticism on how we’re approaching this issue.
On raising my own sons
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