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Ruth Whippman grew up with her sister in the UK, attending an all-girls school. In adulthood, when she pictured parenting, she usually pictured parenting a daughter. “My life was so dominated by girls and women, and I think I just had no idea how to parent a boy,” she tells Tim. “And then I had three boys.”
Ruth is an author and a journalist by trade, so she started to research how gender roles affect the ways we parent our sons. In her book “BoyMom: Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity,” Ruth says that modern boyhood is marked by a mixture of indulgence and neglect. “We have not held boys and men accountable in many important ways, and we've kind of emotionally neglected them,” she says. “And I think it's the combination of those two that leads to this really toxic soup.” Ruth cites research that showed parents giving baby girls roughly twice as much “nurturing touch” than baby boys. “We talk to baby girls more,” Ruth says. “We are more likely to respond to a baby girl's early sounds and cries.”
Those subtle signals convince boys over time that their feelings don’t matter. Through writing her book, she interviewed adolescent boys who told her again and again that the pressure to appear strong and tough ate away at their self esteem. “These messages we give to boys aren't just harmful for other people, they're harmful for boys themselves,” she tells Tim. “It's leaving them lonely, disconnected from their emotions… But what we actually know about resilience and toughness is that it comes from being emotionally healthy.”
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Ruth Whippman is a journalist, cultural critic, and author of “BoyMom: Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity” and “America the Anxious.” You can learn more at her website RuthWhippman.com or on her Substack, “I Blame Society.”
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Our theme music was written by Andy Ogden and produced by Tim Lauer, Andy Ogden and Julian Raymond. All other music that you hear in this episode is courtesy of Epidemic Sound.
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