What Parents of Boys Should Know

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