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Boys To Men

     

   Professor Carlos Santos conducted a study on boys, development, and emotional well-being. He found as they moved through adolescence, most boys favor stereotypically male qualities of emotional stoicism and physical toughness over stereotypically feminine qualities of emotional openness and communication. This shift had a direct correlation with stress, depression, and worsening mental health.

   The research also found that boys who remained close to their mothers did not act as tough and were more emotionally available, and therefore emotionally healthier.

   Niobe Way found something similar when she interviewed hundreds of boys throughout adolescence. She found in childhood and early adolescence boys form intense, close friendships with other boys, but as they grow older, they feel they have to man up by becoming stoic and independent, and loose those connections.

   Way sees it as no coincidence that just as boys reach the age when feel this intense pressure to become stoic and independent, forming a self imposed isolation the rates of suicide among boys in the United States jumps to become four times the rate of girls. She argues that this is a crisis for boys, but rather than calling it a 'boy crisis,' she argues that boys are experiencing a crisis of connection. They live in a culture where human needs and capacities are given a sex (female) and a sexuality (gay), and thus discouraged for those who are neither.

   While neither Way nor Santos say this, it is possible this pressure to be "hypermasculine" is connected to some of the bullying that goes on between boys. Obviously it would be reductionistic to attribute all of bullying to this problem, but it is easy to imagine that the rates of bullying between boys might decrease if love, connection, intimacy, and affection were allowed back into the relationships between males. It might also explain many of the distorted ways that many men end up looking for that connection, including putting too much pressure on their relationships with women.

Way says,



"We have come to view fundamentally human attributes such as empathy, emotional skills and the desire for intimate relationships as being girlish or gay,"



   She goes on to say that these skills and desires are not girlish or gay skills - they are human skills, or, at least they should be." And they are not just desires or skills - they are necessary attributes and experience for males of all ages.



   The more boys (and men) are allowed to access empathy, use emotional skills, and express their desire for intimate relationships, the healthier and happier they will be.

Samantha Smithstein, Psy.D.

Psychology Today