I’m a mom of boys. I’m also a lifelong feminist. As it happens, my third son was born right as the #Metoo movement was exploding online. In my new book, Boymom, Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity, I describe my attempts to square my feminism with my experience as a mother of boys. Along the way, I changed my mind on at least five important points:

1) That all gender differences are “socialized”

I grew up with a version of feminism based on a conviction that boys and girls only behave differently because we raise them differently. I was determined not to fall into that trap.

My boys upended this theory. I was blindsided by how wild and physical they were, their love of wrestling, and inability to sit still for library story time. I felt as though I spent my whole time socializing them away from this behavior, not towards it, and yet nothing I did seemed to make any difference. It felt as though I had walked into my own ideological trap. “It’s all socialized” felt uncomfortably close to “it’s all my fault.”

When I started researching my book, I spent a lot of time digging into the science of gender differences. I found that although socialization does play a significant role, there are also gender differences that are rooted in biology.

Brain scans show that boys’ brains develop more slowly – in particular, the areas of the brain responsible for executive function and impulse control develop up to two years later in boys than in girls. Male fetuses are also bathed in testosterone in the womb, and there are direct links between this fetal hormone bath and higher levels of both rough-and-tumble play in childhood and aggression in adulthood.

But some of the most surprising findings in gender science are not just that boys are more aggressive or rambunctious or anything else particularly “boyish.” They are also, by almost every measure, more sensitive, fragile, and emotionally vulnerable.

At birth, a baby boy’s right brain hemisphere (the part that deals with emotions and emotional regulation) is more than a month behind a newborn girl’s in development and resilience. This relative immaturity means that baby boys are more easily distressed, less independent, cry more often than same-aged girls, and find it harder to calm down. This brain vulnerability also means that boys are more severely affected by almost every environmental stressor or parenting “mistake.”

Understanding the innate traits of boys more as vulnerabilities and sensitivities than any kind of hardwired destructiveness turns the nature versus nurture story on its head. “Boys will be boys” has always been a kind of rationale for doing less parenting. “They’re just wired that way,” we shrug, as we watch our small male humans run riot in the supermarket or bash each other with Tonka trucks or haze their fraternity brothers until someone asphyxiates.

But really, it is the other way round. Because of their innate fragility, boys need more parenting, not less. They need more nurturing support from caregivers than girls, and they need it for longer.

2) That boys are “overindulged”

Despite needing more care, research suggests that boys get significantly less. Far from the stereotypes of overindulged “mama’s boys,” research suggests that boys actually receive less nurturing attention from their parents across the board than same-aged girls.

One wide-scale study on parenting practices in the US and Canada concluded that on average boys receive a “less nurturing, and more aversive home life,” than girls, and are more likely to be the recipients of “hostile or confrontational” parenting.

Another study of over 20,000 parents showed that parents show more emotional warmth towards daughters and feel closer to them than they do with sons. They are more likely to spank boys and to report being too busy to play with them. Other research shows that both mothers and fathers spend significantly less time with boys than girls from babyhood onwards on activities like telling stories, singing songs, drawing, and reading.

Right from birth, mothers respond preferentially to daughters and are more likely to chat back to their sounds. Throughout infancy and beyond, moms continue to interact more frequently with their girls than their boys, and to comfort and hug them more.

And although they do spend more time with boys than girls, at least once they get older, even Dads also tend to be less attentively engaged and emotionally responsive towards their sons than their daughters. Both mothers and fathers talk significantly more to girls about their feelings.

3) That boys suffer less from depression and anxiety.

Our cultural narrative tends to pitch teenage girls as being in the grip of a mental health crisis, whereas the so-called “boy crisis” generally gets reported as a problem of bad behavior and underachievement. We view troubled boys as bad, not sad.

At one level, this makes sense. Recent studies do see teenage girls reporting symptoms of depression and anxiety at almost twice the rate of boys, and boys do display anti-social behavior at far higher rates than girls.

But dig a little deeper and the studies themselves are problematic. Many researchers believe that there is a basic methodological flaw in the research, borne of the same underlying problem that is at the heart of male sadness and loneliness in the first place – the inability to identify and name their own emotions, and to be honest when asked by researchers about how they are feeling. Masculinity norms that tell boys to be tough and stoic and to suppress their feelings mean that the underreporting of mental health problems by boys and men is a well-documented phenomenon.

Because boys are not given social permission to express their emotions, they often end up acting them out in other ways. As a result, depression often manifests differently in boys. Instead of showing straightforward sadness, depression in boys and men can often show up as aggression, behavior problems, and alcohol or substance abuse.

This can turn into a vicious cycle. Because of this difference, parents and teachers are more likely to see boys’ problems as behavioral rather than emotional, and often miss the underlying hurt and sadness. Instead of empathizing with them or providing them with appropriate mental health care, they discipline them for their “bad behavior,” further compounding their sense of alienation.

But this unacknowledged male sadness can be deadly. Boys often fail to recognize or report their own depression until it is so severe that they can no longer cope, with tragic results. Adolescent boys die by suicide nearly 4 times as often as girls.

4) That watching porn will turn your son into a monster or an addict.

In recent years there has been a bit of a moral panic about the effects of porn, from both the religious right and the feminist left.

It is true that some studies suggest that high porn use is linked to increased sexual violence, body image problems and objectifying views of women amongst boys. But other studies show little to no effect on these outcomes. And some research shows that these things are so deeply embedded in the wider culture, and in our systems of masculinity, that watching porn has little more of an impact on these beliefs in boys than, say, watching reality TV, or televised sports.

Everyone has their own value system around pornography of course, but one thing that struck me in my research was that shaming our boys for their porn habits might well be more harmful to them than the porn itself.

When it comes to so-called “porn addiction”, research suggests that one of the key reasons people start to feel as though their porn use is dysregulated and having a negative impact on their life is not so much the actual amount of porn that they consume, but rather a belief that porn itself is shameful. This is known as “moral incongruence”- when people continue to engage in behaviors that don’t align with their own values, they start to feel shame and self-hatred, and in turn then believe that they must have “a problem” or an addiction.

Rather than shaming boys for their porn use, we would do better to have open, non-judgmental conversations with them about sex and porn, and the differences between the two.

5) That advocating for boys is a betrayal of feminism.

Somehow in the culture wars, caring about men and boys has been subtly coded as a right-wing cause, or even a betrayal of feminist principles. Both the progressive left and the men’s rights activists can buy into similar logic – that if boys gain, then girls must lose, and vice versa.

But raising a generation of emotionally healthy, well-adjusted boys benefits everyone. Patriarchy, the system that is hurting women and girls, is harming men and boys too. We are all trapped in it together.

Caring about boys is not a betrayal of feminism, but a crucial part of the feminist project.

Ruth Whippman

Ruth Whippman is the author of Boymom, Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity (2024).