Better Boys, Better Men

The New Masculinity That Creates Greater Courage and Emotional Resiliency

Andrew Reiner

• Publisher: HarperOne
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780062854940
• eBook ISBN: 9780062854964
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Education Counseling
• Index: Social Sciences

A thought-provoking and much-needed look at how modern masculinity is harming and holding back men—and all of society—and what we can do to promote a new masculinity that allows men of all ages to thrive. 

In Better Boys, Better Men, cultural critic and New York Times contributor Andrew Reiner argues that men today are working on an outdated model of masculinity, which prevents them in moments of distress and vulnerability from marshalling the courage, strength, and resiliency—the very characteristics we regularly champion in men—they need to thrive in a world vastly different from the ones their fathers and grandfathers grew up in. According to Reiner, this outdated model of manhood can have devastating effects on the entire culture and, especially boys and men, from falling behind in the classroom and rising male unemployment rates to increased levels of depression and disturbing upticks in violence on a mass scale. 

Reiner interviews boys and men of all ages, educators, counselors, therapists, and physicians throughout the United States to better understand what factors are preventing the country's boys and men from developing the emotional resiliency they need. He also introduces readers to the boys and men at the vanguard of a new masculinity that empowers them to find and express the full range of their humanity. 

Urgent and necessary, Better Boys, Better Men will change the way we talk about boys and men in America today. 

Chapter One

How We Talk to Boys

The video was only sixty-eight seconds long, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it all semester.

A student in the masculinity seminar I teach showed it to me, eager to illustrate for me and the rest of the class the discussion we’d been having about gendered behavior. “It [shows] really well what we talked about last class,” she told me, “about the ways adults squelch vulnerability in boys.”

The video was shot on someone’s smartphone. The frame is vertical and tight, focusing the entire time on an African American toddler. His shirt is off, and he is sitting on an examination table. A health-care professional is readying a series of vaccinations.

As the boy waits, unsure about what is happening, his father tries to get him ready. “You’re looking scared,” he says. “You’re a big boy, right?”

After the boy receives the first shot, pain registers on his face. The father urges, “Big boy. Big boy.” Then his attempt to fortify his son takes on a more serious tone.

“Be a man,” the father says.

Over the next few seconds, as the boy’s tears increase, something happens.

The father makes an “Arrgh” noise, which sounds less like a pirate’s call and more like a linebacker charging a quarterback. “Big boy,” the father says, this time with more urgency. “You got it. Don’t cry. Be a ma—big boy.” As the son gets his next vaccination, the father’s hand enters the frame. “High five!” No response. The son lapses deeper into tears, and the father bellows, “Say, ‘You a man. I’m a man.’”

And then the tension ratchets even higher. The camera zooms in on the toddler’s face. Tears are literally streaming off his cheeks. “Say, ‘I’m a man,’” the father demands. Off camera, the health-care worker adds, “Say it loud. Say it loud!” The father continues: “Say, ‘I’m a man!’”

Through streaming tears, the boy looks back and forth between the two adults. He slaps his right arm against his side, and, then, amid whimpering and a furrowed brow, from somewhere deep within he conjures a gruff, embattled voice. “Ima man!” he yells, his hand pounding his chest.

There it is.

This video, barely more than a minute long, captures in rapturous clarity how we teach young boys at a shockingly early age to mask feelings of emotional vulnerability and physical pain beneath responses that are more “acceptable” for males.

To be clear, the father wasn’t doing anything wrong, per se. He was doing what he thought was best for his little boy.

And yet, what lay beneath his words was the same message many of us tell our boys when they encounter their own fear or emotional discomfort: when the going gets tough, disguise your feelings of vulnerability—fear, pain, shame, or confusion—with defiance, stoicism, laughter, or, perhaps most commonly, anger.

What makes this video clip remarkable, however, is that it captures this dissonance so early in a boy’s life. On his contorted, confused face, we see a profound, defining moment in the life of all males—where genuine sadness, pain, and fear are outmuscled by the desire to please a father or respected male with a far more acceptable response.

On this toddler’s face, we see something we rarely get to witness: the earliest stirrings of masculine identity at war with itself.

* * *

The thing is, infant boys aren’t born this way.

Back in the late 1970s and 1980s, Edward Z. Tronick proved this important point. A research associate in the Department of Newborn Medicine at Harvard Medical School at the time, Tronick was interested in levels of emotional and physical stress in infants. To quantify these levels, he and his colleague-collaborators asked mothers to sit directly across from their babies. The mothers were not allowed to express any emotion. Nor were the mothers allowed to talk or coo to their infant children. They had to sit in front of them with a blank, emotionless face for two minutes. This brief interaction triggered high levels of stress in the babies. This approach—known as the Still-Face Paradigm—gauges intimate one-on-one human interaction and is still widely used today.

Tronick employed and refined this technique again many times, particularly during experiments throughout the 1990s while studying stress in infants. In these later experiments, Tronick and his colleagues sequestered mothers from their babies for a brief interval. They then asked the mothers to return and engage with their babies normally, just as they had at the beginning stage of the experiment. This last stage of the experiment was called the reunion.

What Tronick and his team discovered jibed with some of their initial hypotheses: boys had a much harder time dealing with moments of stress than did girls. The boys “displayed more negative affect.” They fussed, their facial expressions revealing anger. They twisted and turned in their infant seats, trying to “escape or get away.” They gestured to be picked up. In other words, the emotional stress was literally too much for many of the infant boys to bear. There’s more. They cried more than the girls and were more likely to look directly at their mothers, express joy, and vocalize throughout the entire experiment, demonstrating, Tronick wrote, that the boys were “more socially oriented than girls.”

The infant boys in this experiment behaved exactly as many of us, if not most, would have expected girls to behave.

Tronick and his team discovered that infant boys needed more help learning emotional regulation, or “scaffolding” as they called it, than infant girls. What’s more, it took longer for boys to “repair” the emotional distance with their mothers during the reunion stage of the experiment. In more recent years, Tronick and his colleagues have examined how infant boys respond to this reunion with mothers suffering from depression, which, as we know, is increasingly common and can manifest apart from postpartum depression, which also is common. The researchers discovered the same struggle in boys. That is, the boys required more time to return to an emotional level of trust with their mothers. At the end of the day, Tronick’s decades-long research has consistently popped the bubble on two commonly held gendered stereotypes: boys, it turns out, start out more socially engaged with their mothers and more alert to their facial expressions than girls. Even more crucial to boys’ long-term development, they also needed much more calming down and help feeling emotionally secure.

Perhaps the most urgent takeaway from Tronick’s research over the decades is this: contrary to the chiseled-in-stone assumptions, boys are not born “tougher,” more emotionally resilient, and more self-sufficient than girls. Tronick and his colleagues proved that from the moment they are born, boys are in greater need of emotional support and emotional regulation than previously believed.

This deficit in boys occurs in part due to neurology. In an exhaustive study, Allan N. Schore, author, neuropsychologist, and faculty member of the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine, said that the stress-regulating circuits in boys mature more slowly, both in and outside of the womb. So does the right hemisphere of the brain, which is the seat of, among other things, self-regulation and control. “Boys are affected more negatively than girls by early environmental stress,” he told me during an interview. “Girls draw on more inner mechanisms for stress resiliency. This is why the attachment with the mother, typically the primary caregiver, is so essential.” In his study, “All Our Sons: The Developmental Neurobiology and Neuroendocrinology of Boys at Risk,” Schore observed that when mothers aren’t attentive enough, infant boys can develop “separation stress,” which can cause “an acute strong increase of cortisol and can therefore be regarded as a severe stressor.” Ongoing stress in these babies can alter “prefrontal-limbic pathways,” which can eventually cause “a variety of mental disorders.” Schore’s findings have been documented and confirmed by other researchers, including a 2004 study conducted by four Italian researchers in the journal Personality and Individual Differences. In the article “Adult Attachment Style and Alexithymia,” researchers observed, “There is strong suggestive evidence that the attachment style developed in childhood remains relatively stable across the life span and may even be transmitted between generations.”

This is another layer that deepens the discussion about how we talk to, or don’t talk to, boys and how it has serious long-term consequences.

This literally changes everything we thought we knew about boys and how we should raise them. Our understanding of boys’ emotional lives is entirely wrong. As a result, we aren’t raising boys in a way that anticipates or meets their most immediate needs. The problem, as I soon discovered, is that few working models exist today that invite parents and educators to help infant boys, toddlers, and boys develop the emotional scaffolding and resiliency they so desperately require, even into adolescence.

Instead, just like the father in the video, we are raising our boys in a way that neglects their deepest, most immediate needs. Rather than helping infant boys and toddlers develop their own emotional scaffolding, we tell them in moments of great distress and confusion to ignore these very real feelings and pretend everything is fine. We tell them to act like a man.

I emailed Tronick about his groundbreaking research, and he put into words what, exactly, had troubled me most about the videotape. “The ‘manning-up’ of infant boys begins early on in their typical interactions,” he wrote, “and long before language plays its role.”

From the moment boys come out of the womb, we—their parents, their aunts and uncles, their grandparents, their teachers, their coaches, and, of course, their peers—kick-start a lifelong process of undermining their physical, intellectual, and emotional well-being. Whether directly or indirectly, we are the ones who put certain words in their mouths about their identities as burgeoning men. We are the ones who teach them, from an alarmingly young age, to leave other essential words out of their mouths.

* * *

After Macallah was born, one of the first things I did was read to him. I played with him, of course, and I spoke to him a lot. But I was anxious, really anxious, to start reading with him, because I was all too familiar with the crisis of literacy boys face and how it can hold them back later in life. I knew that the earlier you establish “muscle memory” in a boy’s neural pathways, the easier it is to make reading a second-nature reflex.

A funny thing happened on my way to my very young son’s literacy, however. In almost every book my wife and I read to Macallah, the parent who most often nurtured the young characters was a mother. Almost exclusively, mothers soothed and consoled their young children. Fathers, on the other hand, filled one or more of the familiar roles with sons—doling out admonishments as the starch-collared but fair magistrate; leading the charge on adventures; roughhousing; instigating and indulging goofy behavior and breaking small rules that moms enforced; and, in more contemporary books, playing the part of the cool dude who, although unintentional, hasn’t entirely grown up. These fatherly clichés are so pervasive they play out off the page, too, in unexpected places.

The preschool we found for Macallah seemed perfect. Every week he and his classmates were exposed to art, music, and drama. I hoped that this would provide the sort of enlightened male identity that many children’s books failed to offer. So when I learned that there was a special breakfast for Father’s Day, I was excited. (My wife, Elizabeth, had gone to the Mother’s Day breakfast and had come back glowing.)

The children in preschool and kindergarten sat in a circle, just as they did every morning to start their school day. Earlier that morning, during our drive to school, Macallah had told me how he and his classmates had been practicing songs for Father’s Day. Finally, I would get to hear my preschool-aged son get the message, from adults other than me, that men weren’t limited to the cartoonish stereotypes of fathers. Finally, I told myself, Macallah would hear how fathers were every bit as capable of nurturing their sons with as much sensitivity and compassion as their mothers.

Man, was I naive. I sat in the circle with the other fathers, our children tucked in our laps. The kids serenaded us with a song with the refrain, “Oh, my dad is big and strong.” Together, the kids and their dads, beaming to the last one, sang about a dad who “is lots of fun,” who lets his child have “second treats.” One more thing: “Oh, my dad is really cool.” Now, it was powerful to watch and hear the joy in the children as they sang this and to witness the joy in their fathers. And I’d be a bald-faced liar if I said that I wasn’t deeply, deeply touched at hearing my son belt out this song with more effort and verve than I heard him sing any other song all year long.

In all of their well-intended innocence, however, these songs managed to capture nearly all of the one-dimensional expectations about how fathers are supposed to act. What I’ve come to understand, as a father and an educator, is that books and songs—the primary vehicles for communicating values and norms to our young children, in addition to parents and teachers—seep into their consciousness, shaping and defining their perceptions about gendered behavior and, in turn, their expectations about the world and the people in it.

A slow but growing body of research is taking a closer look at the cultural assumptions behind these stories and songs. A 2014 study published in the journal Pediatrics, “Gender Differences in Adult–Infant Communication in the First Months of Life,” one of the first to closely evaluate both infants’ language skills and how caregivers interact with them at birth, revealed some surprising discoveries. Contrary to the prevailing storyline, their research revealed that “infant boys are more vocal [than girls] . . . with a trend for more vocalizations and conversational turns at 7 months [of age].” While the study authors confirmed that mothers speak more and have more vocal interaction with their infants than fathers do, a more surprising and less intuitive finding showed that “mothers spoke more to infant girls than [to] boys in early infancy.” Authors Katharine Johnson, Melinda Caskey, Katherine Rand, Richard Tucker, and Betty Vohr found that “Mothers respond preferentially to infant girls versus boys at birth and 44 weeks.”

Researchers’ response to this discrepancy lies in the projection that girls typically grow into people whose facility with language and emotional intelligence comes more easily, which “may in turn influence greater maternal responsiveness” to them because, hey, it’s less work than with boys. If this is true, then mothers are, as demonstrated in Tronick’s numerous studies, choosing to interact more with their daughters at a crucial developmental stage—at great cost to boys.

But what about fathers? Two researchers at Emory University’s School of Medicine—James K. Rilling and Jennifer S. Mascaro, both of whom work at Emory’s Center for Translational Social Neuroscience—examined the language and behaviors of fathers with their toddlers, ages one through three. Rilling and Mascaro focused on fathers because there is far less research about their roles in parenthood than there is on mothers. As one part of the study, fifty-two fathers wore a small electronically activated recorder (EAR software) clipped to their belts twice during the week, both times for a twenty-four-hour period. Once every nine minutes, the device randomly turned on for fifty seconds to record any ambient sound.

Rilling and Mascaro found that fathers sang to and smiled at daughters more often than they did to their sons. Rather than smiling or singing to their sons, they engaged in more rough-and-tumble play. Fathers also were more likely to use words with daughters that were associated with their bodies (“face,” “cheek,” “belly,” etc.). Rilling and Mascaro speculated that this body-focused language introduced in girls a potentially damaging focus on body image. At the same time, the absence of body-focused language around boys can subconsciously separate boys’ bodies from their own being, their own sense of self, which could encourage a desensitizing of the human body—theirs and other people’s.

One of the findings that deeply unnerved me as a father was what happened when boys called out at night for their fathers. “When a child cried out or asked for Dad,” said Mascaro, “fathers of daughters responded to that more than did fathers of sons.” When it came to language, fathers used these words more often with daughters: “cry,” “tears,” and “lonely.” They also used more analytical language with their daughters—words like “all,” “below,” and “much.” (Given all of this, I wasn’t surprised to learn that a team of British researchers found that Spanish mothers used far more emotional words and emotional topics when speaking with their four-year-old daughters, compared with sons of the same age. Nor was I taken aback to read that fathers used more emotion-laden words with daughters of the same age than they did with their sons.) For boys, fathers used words like “best,” “win,” “super,” and “top.” The Emory study attributes these superlatives to “achievement” for boys, but it’s clear that that’s only part of the dynamic at play. Just look at that...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: The Age of Reckoning
• Chapter One: How We Talk to Boys
• Chapter Two: Boys to Men
• Chapter Three: The Wiring of Masculinity—The Ballsy Truth
• Chapter Four: Toxic Training
• Chapter Five: Men and Vulnerability—A Crying Shame
• Chapter Six: Men and Their Relationships—How to Fight Loneliness
• Chapter Seven: Men and Violence—Shame and the Damage Done
• Epilogue: Our Brothers’ Keepers
• Postscript: Letter to My Son
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• About the Author
• Copyright
• About the Publisher