Nurturing Boys' Growth in a Complex World

When I was a student, the feedback I got most frequently from my teachers was an admonition to work harder. And I found that, by and large, their guidance helped me.  When I put more effort and more time into my studies, I learned more, my grades improved, and I felt more successful. It was not surprising, then, that in my early days as a teacher, my go-to comment for struggling or underachieving learners was almost always a variant of the “work harder” recommendation. I taught as I was taught.  

But what worked for me as a student did not often help the kids in my classes, because growth is not always a matter of willpower alone. It can involve addressing social contexts, working environments, identity threats and opportunities, and a dozen other structural nuances. (When I finally learned this, I think I became a far better teacher.)  Certainly, responsible individual effort will always be important to student success, but helping children actualize their potential also requires appreciating the complexity of social forces which can constrain, alienate, or discourage that effort.  

Sensitivity to nuance and intricacy is also what characterizes the most sophisticated analyses of contemporary boyhood and manhood. The oft-described “crisis of men and boys”—marked by, among other things, struggles in school, employment, mental health, and relationships—remains an object of media and political conversation. While a worthy subject of inquiry, that inquiry too often carries with it the supposition that boys and men are failing as individuals, struggling merely because they’re lazy or entitled.  Such conclusions are reductive, oversimplified, and dismissive of boys and men, the equivalent of writing “work harder” on a substandard test paper. Even if it has enjoyed societal advantage, signs that a group is, in aggregate, experiencing historically unprecedented levels of confusion, hurt, and forlornness should elicit our curiosity and concern, not our sense of retribution.

Fortunately, we are amidst a period of excellent and deep research about boys’ development and socialization, research which evinces a helpful sensitivity and curiosity, and which resists quick and monocausal conclusions about the causes and effects of contemporary masculinity. When colleagues from peer schools, Browning families, and applicant parents ask me what they might read to get a better understanding of what scholarship informs our approach to boys’ education, I generally recommend books by authors such as Judy Chu, Adam Cox, Andrew Reiner, Michael Reichert, and Niobe Way—none of which are in the facile “work harder” genre, and all of whom Browning has been lucky enough to host as part of our “Today’s Boys, Tomorrow’s Men” speaker series. And to that catalog I enthusiastically add Ruth Whippman, who will visit Browning on Tuesday, December 3 to share key insights from her recent work, Boymom: Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity.

What I find appealing about Boymom—beyond the fact that its author spent some time at Browning as part of her research—is its focus on the entire context in which boyhood is produced, and how (often unseen) cultural and social forces within that context can lead us to view boys in essentialist (“All boys are like X”) and determinist (“All boys will do Y”) ways that serve neither our young men nor those around them. In contrast, as the book illuminates, we can suggest different paths which honor the boys in our charge and which lead us all to places of greater integrity. If we work to give boys a relational social education, if we recognize their needs for nurture, if we see that they must become agents of their own self-control, if we grant them the scope to be reflective and growth-minded as well as active and strong—if we do more than insist that boys simply toughen up and “work harder,” figuratively speaking—we are encouraging a boyhood that leads to a successful, resilient, adaptive maturity that serves both men and the communities in which they live and work and love.   

I hope you will join us for next month’s visit—we believe it will be an exciting addition to Browning’s ongoing conversation about how we can all help boys flourish as compassionate, courageous men of intellect and integrity.