don't call me a boy mom

the check in #5

I’m a mom of sons. But please don’t call me a boy mom.

The term has been co-opted by really weird women who indulge their sons’ every whim, laugh things off as “oh, it’s a boy thing,” and eventually make things really weird for their sons’ partners.

No, thank you.

I love my sons. Yes, our home is loud and messy. I hear and talk about poop and farts more than I ever expected to. I’m constantly Googling or texting my Gen Z nephews things like “what does “yes Johnny!” mean?” And I’m constantly doing the mental calculus of “is this harmless and funny and I can let this go” or “we should have a conversation about this.”

I’m so glad that I am my sons’ mother. And as they grow older, I think a lot about the men they’ll grow up to be and how to raise good men in a time where peer pressure, technology, and red pill-ification are becoming the norm and not the exception.

Boys will grow up to be men. The kind of men they become has so much to do with how they’re parented. Fathering sons deserves its own post, but this one is about and for the moms.

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start your week smarter

• We need to talk about Boy Moms (Salon) - this post from Jenny Mollen planted the seed for this Substack over a month ago, and Andi Zeisler unpacked it and the modern day Boy Mom with incredible grace and depth. It’s an excellent read.

• New research on boys and mental health has a message for every mom (Motherly) - the moms I admire most have made this advice a cornerstone of their parenting - they talk to their sons a lot, and they listen just as much. And doing so might just save your sons’ lives.

• How boys get sucked into the manosphere (The Conversation) - this is a must-read for all parents, no matter your kids’ ages or genders. I truly had no idea how seemingly effortless it is for boys to routed into this toxic manosphere content (and it speaks to what Eve Rodsky shared below). Something I plan to do is to sit down with Rho and do a Googling & AI exercise together (on Gemini, which is annoyingly integrated into a Google serarch) to see what would draw him into this corner of the Internet.

• Not familiar with ‘red pill’ content? Teen boys are, whether they want to be or not (CNN) - another necessary read, which only validates the need to do this Googling exercise with him.

• The Love Island USA Ladies Are Performing For Men Who Don’t Deserve Them — & It’s Hard To Watch (Refinery 29)
  The Real Star of Movie Night on ‘Love Island USA’? The Manosphere (Cosmopolitan)
  The Manosphere Is Ruining ‘Love Island USA’ (Marie Claire) - watching Love Island is my annual sociological study (and I’m glad the season’s wrapped - I need to get back to my normal nighttime routine). The show is an uncomfortable and necessary mirror to our current society, and it’s wild that the contestants are closer to my sons’ ages than they are to mine. I watch this show with the perspective of “what kind of men will my sons be, based on cultural and social norms?” I very much want to raise a Carl or Bryce, and one thing that stands out is how these men were raised with strong values by strong women who love them deeply AND establish strong boundaries.

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advice I’m following

I tapped women who I consider to be my motherhood mentors for their advice on raising sons. All of them have adolescent and teenage sons, and their advice is spot on.

If you have younger sons, I highly recommend following Payal on Instagram (and here on Substack at Payal)

• Jo Piazza: I do media literacy constantly. When we watch old eighties movies with boob jokes, I roll my eyes and say out loud “this is so dated and ridiculous. Are boobs even funny? Everyone has them.” I explain how it’s an old sense of humor that isn’t funny any more. Same with other tropes, like a dad being crap at caregiving (still in recent movies) or men not being able to clean up, etc. Mainstream media can be just as crappy as the manosphere in perpetuating this stuff, and I correct it every time I see it.

• Divya Gugnani: The most tactical thing we do is treat Ashvin as capable rather than fragile, especially emotionally. He has daily household chores (like taking out the garbage and putting away his laundry) and also helps take care of his two sisters. I want him to know that caretaking is a man's job too, not something done for him. At dinner, we actually debate. I'll take a position I don't even hold and make him argue the other side, so he learns to disagree with respect and sit with disagreement instead of needing to win. The red pill stuff sells boys certainty and superiority. My antidote is raising a boy who's competent, who serves the people around him, and who can hold a hard conversation without flattening the other person.

• Eve Rodsky: I have two pieces of advice. I call them the two Ts: talk and take care.

  • Talk and talk and talk and talk, even when my sons rolls their eyes or say shut up … even if they don’t seem to hear you what you say is absorbing. This happened last night when I read my son Ben this Snapchat statistic:

    • One Video Every Three Minutes: Hand a thirteen-year-old a fresh Snapchat account and, without searching for anything, the app will start feeding them sextortion, drugs, and strangers. Test accounts run for research collected 244 sexual videos, 256 drug and alcohol videos, 95 violent videos, and 53 self-harm videos in roughly twelve hours, all served up by the recommendation engine. In a survey of real teen users, one in three reported an unsafe experience at least weekly, 36% got unwanted contact from strangers, and 4% were targeted by sextortion, a rate that extrapolates to some 800,000 American teenagers a year. Most kids stay quiet, with only 39% telling a trusted adult while 54% said nothing because they were “used to it.” The reflex is to demand more parental vigilance or tougher kids, but the numbers point at a product built to maximize engagement no matter who gets hurt. (from After Babel)

  • Involve boys in care… like, really involve them in caregiving. My sons have changed Anna’s diaper since she was born, and now that she is 9 they know childcare for Seth and me are part of the deal. I was particularly impressed when my son Zach (who is 17) was asked “what is your biggest accomplishment?” in a meeting. Zach started by saying “well first off, I am a brother and I take care of my sister Anna. I know more about Labubu dolls than any other 17-year-old should.” ❤️

• Alicia McKenzie: My kids do not have smart devices, such as iPads or cell phones, and they have zero access to social media. We give them cell phones in 8th grade and social media access in 9th grade.

  • We watch YouTube content as a family and it’s with very wholesome creators, such as Nick Digiovanni, Ryan Trehan and Mark Rober. We are very intentional about how they use it. I want them to understand that the world is full of so much good so if/when they see red pill content, they look at it with the mindset of “that’s ridiculous,” not as something interesting.

  • I have 5 children: two older girls, ages 19 and 14, two boys ages 10 and 8, and a little girl, age 4. The birth order plays a large role in their exposure to topics that could be deemed “gross” or “embarrassing”. My 10 year old is at the age where periods are going to start happening. He understands that if he sees blood on a girl’s pants, he is to let her know and offer a sweatshirt. Framing it as, “what if that was your sister,” is incredibly helpful.

  • “Boys will be boys” is not an acceptable turn of phrase in our home but neither is “toxic masculinity.” We acknowledge that boys are different from girls, but there is no excuse for poor or disrespectful behavior, regardless of your sex. Don’t laugh at jokes made at other people’s expense, and reserve adult language for adults. If you want to use adult language in my home, be prepared to write a check for your portion of the mortgage.

  • I recently heard a 12 year old boy cursing in the dugout. His mom was sitting right there and said nothing. So I loudly said, “I’d really appreciate it if you didn’t use that language around my son.” I also made it known that cursing in McLean Little League is strictly prohibited and is grounds for removal from the team. I’m not afraid to be disliked because I have standards for my children.

  • Emotionally speaking, we let our boys have big emotions. They are allowed to have, express, and feel them, but they can’t be mean or disrepectful. Sports and good coaches are really helpful for that.

  • Our oldest boy came home from baseball with a joke that involved the n word. Since he had never heard the word before, we had a conversation about racial slurs, what they mean, why they’re unacceptable and what to do if you hear them. We literally used a large sticky paper and wrote them out.

  • I think previous generations didn’t have the time to fully dive into uncomfortable conversations so they were avoided or just ignored altogether.

    All this to say that combatting the red pill lifestyle is a learning experience and we lean heavily on our community and families who align with similar values. If their foundation is strong, they won’t feel the need to get lost in the online world.

• Farnoosh Torabi: Here are a couple things we’ve been doing with our son who is now 12 (and admittedly it wasn’t to be intentional about working against the red pill content).

  • He’s been going to weekly therapy sessions for the past three or four years. This has helped him have the vocabulary to express his feelings and it’s not a small thing. Can you imagine when you were 8 years old? In our house growing up feelings were not validated and even if they were, expressing them verbally and calmly is not something many of us can do without support and modeling at such a young age.

  • To help with strength and core training, our son’s been doing 1:1 and group workouts with friends with a coach who brings not just the physical skills to the table, but also models leadership, kindness and empathy. Having male adult mentors IN REAL LIFE - outside of our home - is something we see as vital to his development. He’s also very close with his uncle whom he looks up to, and it’s been such a gift.

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things my sons love (and that I love too)

• I have to give more love for the Nex Playground, which I won’t shut up about. We’ve been playing it as a family, and it breaks the verbal ice and invites conversations when we’re playing a game or doing a puzzle in the post-gaming cool down period.

  • We also love family Mario Kart, until a fight escalates over Rho winning and Rhaki feeling sad about it.

• A piece of advice I’ve heeded from Zarna Garg is the value of family walks and board games, which we really prioritize during the summer. When the weather isn’t awful, we’ll go for walks on the trail behind our home. Board games are fun until the inevitable competitive fights kick in (whether it’s chess, Catan Jr, or LIFE). I picked up Cascadia as a more calming option for us (because things get heated and inevitably devolve into a mess)

• If there’s one thing I’m proud of as a mom, it’s that my sons haven’t viewed shows, films, or books as “for boys” or “for girls” (though it’s starting to happen now, and we’ve been doing our best in having conversations about these new opinions).

  • They loved Supergirl and Toy Story 5, and The Marvels is one of our favorite family movies.

  • For books, we read and loved Witchycakes, The Tea Dragon Society, and the Aru Shah series. Dragon Masters has been a longtime favorite, and it is beautifully and naturally inclusive from the get go.

  • The boys love anime shows + games. Pokemon is still their favorite, and they enjoy Dragonball-Z and Sailor Moon (and I love that they believe Usagi would beat Goku every time). I want to introduce them to Studio Ghibli films, which I think would be a be a better option for us to watch at night.

• As the kids get older, we’ve been letting them choose the activities they’d like to stop and start (and try to make their new choices a family thing). Knicks mania hit our home in a big way, and both boys are newly obsessed with basketball. They’re both Knicks fans (though I’m still loyal to my Sixers), and we visit a nearby court and shoot when the weather permits.

• We have a simple rule when they want to stop an activity, and it’s that they see it through the end of the term or session. Fencing was a short-lived venture - it was something Sri and I wanted for them more than they wanted for themselves, and it was an important lesson for all of us to learn.