Recent research suggests that women may know better than men what is good for them: emotional openness and connection to others. While this may not be surprising for many women, it may come as a shock for many fathers trying to raise sons.
Carlos Santos, a professor at Arizona State University, conducted
a study on boys, development, and emotional well-being. What he found was that a
s they moved through adolescence, most boys began to favor "stereotypically male qualities such as emotional stoicism and physical toughness over stereotypically feminine qualities such as emotional openness and communication, and 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 heathier. Closeness to fathers did not have the same effect, and he surmised this was due to fathers' typical reinforcement of stereotypically male ways of relating.
Niobe Way, author of Deep Secrets: Boys, Friendships and the Crisis of Connection, found something similar when she interviewed hundreds of boys throughout adolescence. She found that 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, 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" because 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, as they were in every century prior to our current one. 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.
"We have come to view fundamentally human attributes such as empathy, emotional skills and the desire for intimate relationships as being girlish or gay," says Way. 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.
photo: Thos Robinson/Getty Images for USO of Metropolitan New York
