“Girls can be anything but boys will be boys.”

On the gender essentializing of male children- at home and school.

NOTE: (*I stole the title of this post from this fascinating paper by Juliet Williams, Professor of Gender Studies at UCLA- more from my interview with her later in this piece.)

This month’s zoom masculinity discussion group will be held on Tuesday 28th Jan at 11am PT/ 2pm ET/ 7pm UK. We will be talking about Trump’s inauguration, as well as the issues in this post - gender essentializing of boys- helpful/ harmful/ both? This group is open to all paid subscribers-any gender/ parenting status etc who are willing to show up respectfully and judgement free. The discussions so far have been so interesting and generous with such a range of fascinating perspectives. To join, upgrade to a paid subscription- monthly or annual, and cancel at any time.

And now- some thoughts about how limiting stereotypes might be harming boys….

“Boys are like dogs,” says the mom in the park, the preschool teacher, the librarian patrolling quiet story-time with a defeated thousand-yard stare. “Just food and exercise and try your best to wear them out.”

The sentiment is generous, a forgiving nod as I flail after my three sons, hopelessly outrun by their wild physicality, and I appreciate it. The “nature” part of the nature-nurture debate feels deeply validating to me as a mother of boys, something to lean on in dark times when I see friends’ daughters coloring quietly in restaurants.

But all the “boys are like dogs” talk also leaves me conflicted. Not only because, as the mother of only boys, it tweaks a pre-existing fear that the relationship with a son can never quite match the depth and complexity of one with a daughter, more cute naughty pet than fully realized human connection. There is also a more practical unease in the mix. I worry that this kind of casual gender essentializing of boys (especially when they are in earshot) can end up selling them a depressingly limited story about their own capabilities and options.

This kind of casual gender essentializing of boys is surprisingly common, even in liberal spaces. The same scrupulously progressive parents who wouldn’t dream of making any overly deterministic statements about the limited capacities of girls, who would never casually declare that girls were biologically incapable of excelling in math, or temperamentally docile, or hormonally primed for vacuuming, still happily throw around phrases like “boys can’t sit still,” “school doesn’t work for boys” or “boys are immature/aggressive/reluctant readers.” “They’re just wired that way,” we shrug, as we watch our sons run riot in the supermarket or bash each other with Tonka Trucks, or haze their fraternity brothers until someone asphyxiates.

In the face of a tiny marauding male child , all of the tropes of modern American parenting- You can do anything! Reach for the stars! Growth mindset! -crumble into dust and a kind of defeated inertia takes hold. Boys will be boys. Nothing to be done. We just need to work around it.

A similar sense of powerlessness in the face of male biology pervades the current debates about boys and education, and the proposed solutions to the problem of boys’ academic underachievement. (By almost every measure, girls now outperform boys at all levels of education, from kindergarten through college. And perhaps most worryingly, boys are not really going to college much at all. American universities now skew around 60% female.)

When we try to parse out the reasons why this is happening, and look for solutions to the so-called “boy crisis” even progressive voices tend to lean heavily on biological explanations rather than social ones.

For example, Richard Reeves, perhaps the most prominent left-leaning expert on boys’ education, roots his thinking and policy solutions in male brain development. Pointing to research that shows that boys’ brains develop more slowly than same aged girls, particularly in the areas responsible for impulse control and emotional self regulation, his key recommendation to solve the boy crisis in education is to “redshirt” all boys, and raise the starting age for Kindergarten for boys by a year, meaning that boys would always be a year older than girls in their same grade. (Although this sounds on the face of it like an elegant and obvious solution, I do not believe that the research supports the idea, and actually suggests-if anything - that it might do more harm than good. I go into this more in my book, Boymom but may write a separate post about this someday if people are interested. Let me know.)

Reeves does acknowledge that the behavioral differences between boys and girls are a mix of nature and nurture and does also suggest some other solutions that address the nurture aspect- most notably increasing the number of male teachers in classrooms. (You can read his thread on X here where he pushed back on my characterization of his position on all this in Boymom-it’s a surprisingly fair and congenial exchange for that hellscape of a platform. To be clear, although Reeves and I differ on a few points, overall I appreciate his work and admire and am grateful for his advocacy for boys and men. )

It’s not just Reeves. Experts in boys’ education across the board adopt a similar tone. Instead of digging into the ways in which boys are socialized in their early years, or working to give them the social permission to explore a wider range of interest and behaviors; or interrogating the ways in which masculinity norms hold them back in the classroom or telling them a more expansive story about their own possibilities, it’s as though at some level we have written them off.

It’s not that the biologically essentialist narrative is wrong, exactly. There are genuine differences in self-control and behavior and executive function between girls and boys throughout childhood that are rooted in biology. Boys’ brains do develop later than girls’ brains and this difference persists well into adolescence. We do need to take this into account when we talk about the structures and expectations of school and our own parenting expectations.

But the whole ‘biologically hardwired’ narrative is also reductive, leaving little room for a more nuanced and rigorous conversation about the way we socialize boys, the constant invisible messages we send them about who and what they should be in the world, and the growing body of research that looks at the effect this might be having on their behavior and performance.