Bringing Up Boys Who Like Themselves on The Morning Show

On The Morning Show talking about:

✅ why boys grow up feeling like they are never good enough

✅ the alternative to raising boys to be tough

✅ boys and body image

✅ sex and porn -- what to say to your boy and when to say it

Transcript

Welcome back. When it comes to parenting boys there are a handful of unspoken social rules

and stereotypes that are proving hard to shake.

Our next guests are out to challenge and change the status quo,

helping the next generation of boys grow into men who actually like themselves.

So we welcome wife and husband research and writing team,

Kasey Edwards and Doctor Christopher Scanlon.

Thank you so much for your time this morning. Such a great book

and a great place to start just opening up this conversation.

The book's called Bringing Up Boys Who Like Themselves.

Why is that so hard for boys to do?

As a society, we're still clinging to old school myths about raising boys that just don't work anymore.

They probably never did. So myths like boys are lazier than girls,

so we need to push them in order for them to achieve,

or that they're naughtier, so they need harsh punishments

in order to grow up to be good people,

and that we need to use shame and intense competition to get our boys to reach that potential.

But the research shows that this approach not only does it rarely work,

it is actually crushing our boys because as a consequence,

they're growing up believing that they are never good enough,

that they're fundamentally flawed

and worse still, that we as their parents will only love them

and be proud of them if they're more than or if they're different from how they are now.

And it is really hard to like yourself under those conditions.

Yeah. A lot of walls to break down here. Let let's talk about

some of the issues facing our young men.

Starting with the, what you call, the “masculine straight jacket”.

Chris, how do we shake the ingrained need to raise boys who are tough?

Yeah. That's a big one.

And when we reach out to fifteen thousand parents and asked them their biggest concern about raising boys,

tough was the big one. And how do I avoid that?

And many parents felt that there were really two options.

“Tough thug” on one end and “weak wimp” on the other.

So we want to present a third choice,

and that's “strength of character”.

And at the core of strength of character is really about emotional bravery,

giving your boy the flexibility, the agility,

to be what he needs to do in whatever situation,

whatever life throws at him, rather than just the default of being tough.

And what we present in the book is an emotion wheel to try and really, get boys to articulate emotions.

Because what the research shows us that we're not very good at articulating

and identifying emotions.

Most of us can do about three.

Happy, sad, angry, and then we sort of scramble around and try and find other ones.

So what research shows is that if you can name and identify those emotions,

then you can start to increase the names that you have for emotions.

Then you can get on top of emotions. You can start to think about how your boy might change

and might react to situations in ways beyond tough.

That's really, really interesting. Can we just talk about body image?

Obviously, there's always a focus on girls growing up and their body types.

But this is a really big issue for males as well,

especially now we're seeing this real rise of a particular very muscly type of body type for boys,

you know, on social media.

What is the best way to sort of raise your boys to be comfortable in their skin?

Yeah. Look, the first thing, Sally, is we need to take the issue seriously.

So like you said, body image used to be a problem that only girl parents needed to worry about.

That is not the case anymore. So make no mistake.

A poor body image can suck the joy out of your boy’s life just as much as it can your girl’s.

And with things like social media, like you said,

and all the six packs everywhere and advertisers now directly targeting our boys.

We have to be really intentional in building our boys' body confidence like we are with girls.

And so just one example of a blind spot that we have with boys and body image is toys.

So as a society, we debate

whether or not it's a good idea to give a girl a doll with a body shape that is unrealistic.

But yet, we rarely think about

whether or not it's a good idea to give a boy Captain America

or Batman or the Hulk whose body type is just as unrealistic and in most cases unattainable.

Mhmm. Okay. Just quickly before we go,

we we have to talk about sex. And there are some reports that boys as young as five

are seeing porn for the first time on the internet,

Chris, how early should we be start talking about the birds and the bees?

It seems like the goalposts are shifting on this.

The simple answer to that one is as young as possible because the porn avalanche is here.

It's not off in the distance.

And the important thing there is to have age appropriate conversations

and to factor it into everyday life.

So for example, at bath time when your boy’s running around the nude,

tell him that that's okay in our house.

It's not okay at other people's place or outside.

And then you might take them a step further and say,

And even at home, we don't really do it it on screen when we're on FaceTime with Granny and Pa.

But, you know, and if you ever see anyone on screen who's in the nude

tell us, I need to know, and you’re not in trouble.

There's no shame about this. We're not trying to get them in trouble.

We just want them to know that we need to know about it.

And so it's really about opening up that conversation.

A lot of parents think that this is about, you know,

depriving children of innocence,

but we really need to make sure that we make a distinction between innocence and ignorance.

We do not want our kids to be ignorant. We want to raise kids for how the world is,

not how we wish it to be.

Wow. It's some really, really incredible information,

and that is just the tip of the iceberg now. Thank you so much for your time,

Kasey and, Chris, your latest book Bringing Up Boys Who Like Themselves is on sale now.

They're are a lot of parents, you know, who can get a lot from that.

Hundred percent, Kasey, Chris, thank you.